Echo is one of the most interesting stealth games for PlayStation and PC. Should this stealth game sneak into your library? Watch my review to find out.
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Imagine you’re stuck in a room, and with you are half a dozen clones of yourself. You know for a fact that each and every one wants to kill you, but while some try, you soon notice that others are just standing there. They could shoot you from a distance or run in for a melee attack, but they’re just…staring. This is a situation you find yourself in during the opening hours of ECHO, a clever hidden gem I recently discovered on PlayStation. Why are some clones attacking you, and others just looking? The answer to that question - which I’ll get to - reveals a clever gameplay hook that makes for - if nothing else - a stealth action game unlike any I’ve ever played. If that piques your interest, then well, let’s get into it.
First off, Echo is not a new game. It was released in 2017 for PlayStation and PC. But don’t let that deter you. It plays well and it's gorgeous, particularly for an indie game. Things get started when you, a woman named En, wake up after a 100 year stasis aboard a ship hurtling through outer space. Your mission now is to explore a planet, but not just any planet. Once you land, you discover that every inch of its interior, from the surface all the way down to its core, is one sprawling, ostentatious, and very pristine palace. Yep, It’s weird, but such a creative and strange setting only fueled my curiosity. I needed to know what this place was and what En hoped to find here.
And that’s a good thing because as much as I liked Echo, it does get off to a slow start. The first 30 minutes feel more like a walking sim than a stealth action game, but after finishing the opening chapter, the pace picks up as you soon discover that the palace is not empty. Rather, it’s populating itself with what appear to be humans. And those humans are you. As an apparent defense mechanism the palace spawns clones of you.
Now, as I mentioned earlier, all of these clones want to kill you, but not all of them can, and this is where Echo gets really interesting. The reason for this is that they don’t know how. When they spawn to life, they’re only able to walk and attack you with a lethal strangling maneuver if they’re within striking distance. But they don’t know how to shoot their gun, sprint, hurtle over obstacles, ride elevators, tread through shallow water, or even open doors. But if you do any of those things, like say, step into the pools of water that we see here, then every clone in that level will be able to do that as well. In other words, they Echo your behavior.
However, your clones, also known in the game as Echoes, don’t learn right away. As if things weren’t mysterious enough, every few minutes within the palace, the lights go out completely, creating an environment that’s nearly pitch black. When the lights cycle back on about 30 seconds later, that’s when your clones will be able to do everything you did before things went dark. So, if all you did was say, open a door and shoot your gun in the previous cycle. Well then, once the light returns, your clones will be able to do that as well, which means they’ll be more capable than before of finding you and killing you. This mechanic does two things. First, it forces you to find ways to reach your objectives without using certain actions, and two, it means you’ll be consistently deciding which actions were worth taking now at the cost of making things more dangerous later. Do you want to sneak up behind that ECHO and strangle her at the cost of teaching every other ECHO in the level how to do the same to you? Thankfully, you do have one big advantage. That is, clones won’t remember what you do while it’s dark. That means that between power cycles, when the lights are off, you can sprint wherever you want, open whatever doors you want, and kill as many echos as you are able, you can do all this and they won’t mimic you. But when the lights come back on, it’s back to being conscious of what you’ve taught them, and what you want to keep them from learning. And one more thing. Any time the lights come back on? Any clones you killed in the previous cycle spawn back to life, which means you can’t ever permanently clear any single level. This might sound like a bad thing, but it actually creates an added layer of depth. That’s because it’s not just the clones you’ve killed that respawn. It’s every clone in a level, including the ones that are still left alive.
1 ноя 2022
