ECHO Review: The Abyss Stares Back

Deep in the heart of open space there is a palace not made by human hands. It is cold, but contains all kinds of beautiful furniture and every kind of luxury-craft you can imagine. It is barren, but not decrepit; dark, but beautiful. The palace is still, and empty... Until it wakes up.

In ECHO you assume the role of a mysterious young woman named En, who endeavors to explore this mysterious palace and bring an important person back from the dead. She is joined by a sentient AI known as "London," who assists her remotely from their ship.

Throughout their eight-hour journey you'll explore various themes: The nature of life and death, the meaning of enlightenment, the separation of body and soul, altruism and attachment... ECHO will have more pensive players waxing existential by the time the credits roll, while those of you looking for less talk and more action may find yourselves craving something faster paced.

ECHO demands patience and evokes reverence. This is a game worth taking your time with, and it's more stealth than action. As long as you approach ECHO knowing and accepting these things, I think you're in for one of the most memorable and hauntingly beautiful experiences of the generation.

ECHO's unique gameplay twist is in how you interact with, avoid, and combat the enemy AI. The palace you explore is soon populated with "echoes" of En; replicas that look exactly like her and learn to mimic her actions. The echoes are a part of the palace, and both the palace and the echoes operate in short cycles.

When the palace is powered on, the echoes will patrol its kingly halls searching for you. If spotted, the echoes will pursue you and try to kill you. As you sprint, open doors, vault over obstacles, or fire your weapon, the palace will study you, and the echoes will be fed your behavioral information. Periodically the palace will shut down, and a blackout phase begins. During a blackout you can still navigate with your suit-mounted lights and perform any action, and echoes will still roam and pursue you, but the palace will no longer study you -- it's busy rebooting.

After a short time, everything goes black as the palace reboots, and for a few moments you cannot act or see at all. When the reboot is complete, the lights come back on, the echoes are all resurrected and reset in their original positions, and they can now do everything that they learned from you in the previous phase. When the lights were on last time, you may have gunned down multiple unarmed echoes. After the blackout and reboot, you'll notice that the echoes now carry weapons and will fire at you when spotted. If you sprinted during the last phase, echoes will now be able to sprint as they chase you.

The thing that you have to keep in mind is that the palace will cycle continually, and with each blackout and reboot, echoes will only retain the information you fed them during the most recent lights-on phase of play.

Continuing from the above example, let's assume that you manage to crouch and sneak your way around all of these newly armed, fast-sprinting echoes without getting noticed. A blackout and reboot will come and go, and during the next phase, echoes will no longer carry weapons or sprint, since you did neither of those things. They will, however, be crouching and sneaking behind barriers, making them much harder to spot as you explore. They are always learning from you, and unlearning from you, and soon you must learn to use that fact to your advantage.

It's a brilliant mechanic that never wears out its welcome, and it makes you look at every single room, hall, and chamber as a kind of dynamic, living puzzle. It can also add to the game's ambience in unique ways. As I was exploring one night I came across a fantastic, intricately-designed piano. I stepped up to it and played a sad, lonely melody before moving on. I didn't think twice about it until the palace rebooted.

Minutes later I found myself creeping into a foreboding darkness down the hall, surrounded by long, lurching shadows cast by my flashlight beaming into the surrounding pillars, when suddenly I heard that same melancholy melody faintly trickle out into the halls behind me -- an echo had stepped up the piano to play it just as I had. A shiver ran down my spine, and I hurried along. It was an unsettling yet beautiful warning that I was in danger.

ECHO's story left me feeling pensive and longing for more. The game starts telling a much larger tale than it finishes, and leaves you with more questions than answers. Rose Leslie and Nick Boulton both give performances worthy of applause, but neither of their respective characters is fully realized. While there is a definite 'end' to the main events of the game, the curtain closes with such ambiguity that you'll be left doubting that you know the main character or her true purpose at all.

In my opinion, though, the story always took a back seat to the true star of the game, which is the aesthetic and level design. The palaces you get to explore are so astoundingly beautiful, filled from corner to corner with slate, and marble, and precious metals; everything abiding by laws of beauty and the golden ratio; endless expressions of architectural decadence and godhood on the physical plane. The structures took my breath away, and light is used very cleverly. At times I literally had to squint and turn away from the white light of the screen, as if from some heavenly being surrounded in burning glory.

If you've been craving something more cerebral or provocative lately, ECHO is a very brave debut effort from Ultra Ultra. The team was able to focus in on a few core ideas and execute on them adeptly. The end result is an utterly captivating exploration of consciousness and beauty that moved me like few games have this generation, despite its heavily-veiled narrative. For the price, you have no excuse not to pick this up.

WWG's Score: 4 / 5