It’s really frustrating to play a game that has so much potential, but is so bogged down by poor decisions it becomes literally unplayable. Echoes is one of those games.
Echoes is described as a ” film noir, comic book style adventure game,” yet aside from the basic story has no real connection to the genre. This muddled description is a running theme throughout the entire playable duration of the game.
**Either someone had searching for something or Arthur is a big messy pants.**
Gameplay
The first indicator that a game is in trouble is when you can’t easily define the objective. The game kind of plops you into this town and says, “Hey. Your best friend committed suicide but you think he was murdered. Also everyone in town is weird and they’re all hiding something. Enjoy.” There is really no more clarification than that.
You’re essentially given lists of which characters in town you can go talk to. Touching one of these options brings you to either a character or a static image that you can look at and poke for “evidence.”
One truly significant problem is how much time it takes for the options to slide onto the screen. When you only have two or three options from which to choose this is not such a headache – but further into the game you can have nine or ten options and it can take too much time to get to the next screen. This doesn’t sound like a problem until you are smack dab in the middle of it – especially when many of the options lead you dead ends. It would have been a bit more tolerable had the dead ends been eliminated from the list, rather than forcing me to do the trial and error of visiting them over and over with no fruits for my labor.
As for the static images: Things like this have been done in games for ages in seek-and-find games and old school point and click adventures. Here, however, they make almost no sense. In any given image you may find two things to click on, but I found in my playthroughs that the objects had no impact on conversations directly after picking them up.
The biggest issue though, is that the experience is completely bogged down with game breaking bugs. This is a hindrance to the point of me not even being able to complete the game. The first time I played for about two hours only to be lead into an ambush in the form of a game breaking glitch of it repeatedly crashing and bringing me to the home screen. I started over, only to be left with an even more frustrating bug that had me repeat the same in-game day on repeat like some sinister Groundhogs Day but devoid of Bill Murray, happiness and laughter.
**There is never an explanation for character shifts like this.**
Story
Echoes follows a New York City detective named Ricky Fox as he attempts to solve the alleged murder of his best friend, Arthur Petrovski. The wrinkle here being that Petrovski’s death was deemed a suicide and the townspeople of Greenhearth are clearly trying to cover up something more sinister.
This is a classic story that automatically lends itself a tremendous amount of potential given the wiggle room that is implied by the basic premise. Even with its self-destructive gameplay flaws Echoes is pretty well written and at times I really wanted to get into the meat of the story.
Unfortunately the progression of the story didn’t make all that much sense. A lot of the time the next step seemed random – like there was no impact to the decisions I was making. Again, this can be attributed to the generally poor design, but some fault may also lie on the shoulders of the poor localization as it was designed and written in France.
**Such a promising opening screen. Dude deffinitely needs a shower though.**
Presentation
The first frame of Echoes looks awesome. The creeping shadows surrounding the madman scribbling on a page in the dank room got me really excited for what was about to come. Then it gets weird.
First and foremost he settings don’t seem to fit in the game. There’s a diner, a homeless man’s hideout, a police station, an apartment and a hotel. But places like the diner and the hotel don’t at all seem to belong in this kind of story. If a bar had been used instead of a diner, or a motel as opposed to the hotel it would have fit into the context of the story with a little more finesse. Also, it’s unbelievable to me that nearly every suspect would continue patronizing to the same diner every day knowing that they are being investigated for murder – but that’s neither here nor there.
I understand that Nova-Box was trying to elicit the edgy tones of noir from the black and white visuals – and honestly they were so close. Some of the environments were legitimately cool, such as the homeless man’s hideout – I just wish the mood carried through to the visuals of the characters, which have a vague anime feel to them that make me feel like they may have been in a Nickelodeon show.
Speaking of characters – you meet several, but they’re all sequences of stationary images laying over the aforementioned settings. The character representations will have (seemingly) random variations as the game progresses, but they all just seem like hyperbolic representations of how Nova-Box may interpret an archetype within the noir genre.
The visuals drew me in at first, but after the intro they were inconsistent with the established mood.
Sound
The piano accompaniment actually sounds really great for a while. Unfortunately at a certain point the only thing to focus on for reprieve from the endlessly repeating conversation options is the piano score.
This forces the player to notice the abrupt changes in tune and the endlessly repeating tones belched out relentlessly. Had the gameplay been more polished the score probably would have been a perfectly serviceable accompaniment – unfortunately the repeating conversation options and lack of variety seeped into the piano accompaniment.
Value
It’s $2.99 for something that more or less doesn’t work. Let me ask you this: Would you pay for a stick of deodorant that allows you to continue to smell like a middle school locker room? No? Then if you purchase this game in its current state I’d certainly give you a weird look.
**This is the game’s logo. I have no idea what it is.**
The Bottom Line
As a big fan of the noir genre I was hoping for some cool things from this game. The prospect of it being a little different every time you start a new game is really appealing to me – unfortunately the game was not able to deliver on the tones of noir or the promise of a good story due to the fact that it is literally unplayable after a certain point.
To anyone that says this can be remedied with patches I have some choice words: Games should be released in as close to perfect condition as possible. There are always unforeseen bugs in games that can, and should be patched in the future. But in the case of Echoes, it would be almost impossible for Nova-Box not to notice what is wrong with their game. It is completely unacceptable and it kills me as a gamer to see it.
Have you played Echoes? If so, am I being too harsh, or were you just as frusturated as I was? Sound off in the comments down below and I’ll send you a personal invite to my ‘People that Have Played Echoes Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’ seminar I’m hosting this weekend!
