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 ECHO is a Third-Person Science Fiction Adventure for PS4, PS4 Pro and Steam, created by Ultra Ultra, using the Unreal 4 Engine. ECHO puts you in the sci-fi shoes of a young woman named En, who has made quite a journey across space to a planet that seems almost non-existent – in the words of London (the ships AI and your companion for the game): “Even with the exact coordinates, I nearly missed it”. Her goal? To locate a mysterious macguffin upon the planet and bring a lost friend back to life. To do this, she needs to navigate The Palace – an almost endless, impossibly decadent array of flawless ivory and gold trim, furnished with all manner of luxurious goodies. Then it gets weird.  The Palace is more than a structure. It’s aware. And En’s presence isn’t welcome. Firstly, the Palace has started creating copies of you (named Echoes, strangely enough) and secondly, at regular intervals, you will be plunged into darkness. Echoes will wander about, and if they spot you, they will grab you and murder you. They are named Echoes because that is what they are – echoes of you, the player. This means that the actions you perform in the game, they will inherit and be able to perform against you. Each time the Palace is plunged into darkness, the Echoes are rebooted and will inherit any actions that you took in the previous period of lights-on. Did you sprint? Did you open a door? Did you fire your weapon? Enjoy as you face off with sprinting echoes, that open doors and who attempt to shoot you in the face.  Game clocks in at a little over 6 hours length, and is an Indie title from new development house 'Ultra Ultra', a team of 8 people with history developing other separate titles, with ECHO being their first joint effort. The gameplay is intensely cerebral, as you start to analyse every situation you find yourself in. At any given moment you are unsure of what kind of safety might be available to you and the way you handle any particular task may well be perfectly suited to bite you in the arse. ECHO has nailed the premise of lying in the bed you made, as any horrible experience is likely your own stupid fault. Official website: http://www.echo-game.com/ Gallery of random screenshots:        Gameplay Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i51x6-8GqkA Steam Page http://store.steampowered.com/app/551770/ECHO/
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Sep 19, 2017 04:15
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 09:04 |
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 Edit: Game is now out. a cock shaped fruit fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Sep 20, 2017 |
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Sep 19, 2017 07:35
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Been enjoying the intro so far. The dialogue is pretty enjoyable and the voice acting is top notch, and the game has a very tense atmosphere to it. Just wondering why the intro has to take like 40 minutes to get through. Not that it's really bad and it does setup a lot of unease...it just seems a bit excessive.
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Sep 20, 2017 07:34
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discworld is all I read posted:Been enjoying the intro so far. The dialogue is pretty enjoyable and the voice acting is top notch, and the game has a very tense atmosphere to it. Just wondering why the intro has to take like 40 minutes to get through. Not that it's really bad and it does setup a lot of unease...it just seems a bit excessive. You are not wrong. I have footage of the first 30 minutes of the game and it involved nothing but ...walking? And you shoot your gun at a lever?
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Sep 20, 2017 07:37
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Still, I think the overall aesthetic of the planet (or whatever it is) works. The featureless, uniform surface leading down into the decomposing remains of what lies beneath the surface and then finally breaking through into some sort of opulence...but it almost comes across as an architectural uncanny valley. It's a familiar type of structure, but it seems to stretch on unnecessarily and without a real purpose other than trying to pretend to be a normal building. Rows of chairs for no one, mirrors reflecting only yourself and the corridors just unusually stretching on and on. And then you find out that you're from some weird techno-cult that smashes people down into cubes and you're touting around your mentor on your back?
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Sep 20, 2017 07:58
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discworld is all I read posted:Still, I think the overall aesthetic of the planet (or whatever it is) works. The featureless, uniform surface leading down into the decomposing remains of what lies beneath the surface and then finally breaking through into some sort of opulence...but it almost comes across as an architectural uncanny valley. It's a familiar type of structure, but it seems to stretch on unnecessarily and without a real purpose other than trying to pretend to be a normal building. Rows of chairs for no one, mirrors reflecting only yourself and the corridors just unusually stretching on and on. And then you find out that you're from some weird techno-cult that smashes people down into cubes and you're touting around your mentor on your back? Its a genuinely unique premise - especially the oddity of having 'translated' your friend into a glowing red cube.
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Sep 20, 2017 08:31
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a cock shaped fruit posted:Its a genuinely unique premise - especially the oddity of having 'translated' your friend into a glowing red cube. Finished it this evening. I'd say a solid meh by the end. The intro is, as you covered, about a solid 30-40 minutes of walking before anything happens from a gameplay perspective. An interesting way to set the tone, I guess, but holy gently caress is it unforgivable given what comes next. It is set up as a story based game, from the enormous intro, but once you get into the actual gameplay, the story takes a backseat to hours long stealth sections that honestly? Are not that interesting. The core mechanic of learning and unlearning simply isn't used all that well, when 95% of what you do consists of crouching behind poo poo for two minutes until a clone turns it's back, breaking its neck, pushing people and occasionally walking away from them. You have a whole suite of nifty powers that never really come up (I don't think I ever once used the riot blaster, for example) and there simply aren't that many things you are actually afraid for them to learn. Don't shoot a gun when the power is on unless you plan to get hosed up and try not to jump over rails unless you are being chased were the only two I ever kept track of. In the introductory segment, you have a lot of back and forth between your character and the ship AI thing, but it pretty much drops to zero as soon as the stealth sections last (which again, go on way too long without adequate breaks for pacing). Then you hit an airlock and have mandatory slow walking story time. Then more stealth stuff! It really feels like the two could have been integrated better, and all things considered I probably should have just gone on youtube, watched the story cutscenes and called it a day, because the gameplay in the first 30 minutes (of actual gameplay) is the same as the gameplay in the remaining 4-5 hours. Ending is also dreary, hackneyed poo poo, which is sad because their sci-fi writing was actually decent up to that point. Edit: Visuals are good. There is a fun 'palace goes on forever' moment in the intro that is remarkably eyecatching so long as you don't run past the first exit and realize that it is just an endless loop of the entrance and exit.
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Sep 21, 2017 07:17
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I wasn't going to buy it until I saw some ex-Hitman devs were involved, which explains why the Palace bits feel so architecturally satisfying. I can't put my finger on it, but there's something surreal in a wrong/bad sort of way not unlike the hotel in The Shining. I'm probably 100% overthinking this and or OCD but I was paying attention to the way the 3d illusion of the cubes in the tile pattern on the floor was oriented hoping it would eventually reveal something but now I'm just not sure if they were lazy in aligning the textures (this is relatively easy to do) or have them hosed up intentionally The UI is neat, I get the impression they wanted to go beyond simply yellow/oj/red. The use of sound does not feel right. My inner snake (heh) wants to knock on walls, peek around corners, and toss poo poo. I'm actually terrified at the thought of these clones being able to copy the way I would play a typical MGS2:VR mission. Distracted by uh, magazines as they sneak up behind me to prank on me with all their pals So, if it only takes one grape to recharge her stamina, why doesn't she carry some with her? Maybe just shove like 5 or 10 in her mouth and chew them while she runs forever and ever? Half expecting to find out this part was some sort of VR-Dream and she eventually figures out that is not really air she is breathing and goes full Neo Not sold on visuals, something about all the glass and especially the lighting/chandeliers when it's dark just isn't doing it for me, I was noticing some weird pop in on the models based on distance that seems about 1/8th it should be. Everything else is still really pretty, though. Getting between 80-180 FPS @ 1080p w/ 1800X & Vega 64. The use of actual movies as cutscenes is kind of insulting when the game already looks like this (I take compression artifacts personally) E: It's like they forgot refraction or something? Random pics:    
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Sep 21, 2017 09:15
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New Zealand can eat me posted:the 3d illusion of the cubes in the tile pattern on the floor I actually did something similar. In one section with a seemingly 'endless' hallway I looked to the floor tiling as a method to see if it would clue me in on something special. Turns out nope, you can just walk on forever and if you ever choose to turn right you will end up on the right track. Still nifty though.
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Oct 2, 2017 05:50
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This game loving rocks. Easily one of the freshest premises I've seen this year, and this has been a year full of robot dinosaurs and androids in mini-skirts. The world building is cleverly done (though the "let's walk outside and exposit" sections felt slightly expected by the last one) and the main characters are really really great. I'm disappointed by the ending only in that it's predictable, but I like that there's still a lot of mystery left over regarding what the Palace is. They toss out a possible explanation for it, but I don't think it's very likely that some rich aristocrats built this place as a hidden pleasure palace/bloodsport arena. There's not a lot to say who or what made the Palace, but it appears to serve as some highly sophisticated cloning facility. The Echos are likely malfunctioning, but perhaps if this place was actually operating correctly they would serve to help educate and acclimate adult clones to human behavior in some sort of complex education system. That's just my spitball theory. Otherwise, it doesn't seem like a very useful structure at all -- it's ability to restore the dead appears to be a rather limited one, after all. Gameplay wise, I loved this. It has this great blend of stealth mechanics meshed in with Another World and Pac-Man. It has amazing atmosphere, the light shifts kept making my heart race even unto the end. The final challenge felt kind of...I don't want to say cheap, but I feel it tested me on skills the game did not really instruct me in up until that point. I liked the escalation of challenge but I want a sequel that goes so much further. I initially thought that the enemy A.I. would emulate player behavior overall -- so if I walked slowly and clung to the corners, enemies would too, and I'd have to influence enemy patterns to make them as favorable to my route as possible. This ultimately isn't the case, but I'd love to see a next level upgrade to what this game suggests. Have enemies become more aggressive and violent if you play aggressive and violent. If you look around and explore every nook and cranny, enemies would too. There's a lot of potential for this system, even if I think they execute really, really well here. They end the game right as they need to, and the whole story is so rich and engaging that I'd happily have paid full AAA price for the experience.
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Nov 20, 2017 00:05
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8-Bit Scholar posted:This game loving rocks. Easily one of the freshest premises I've seen this year, and this has been a year full of robot dinosaurs and androids in mini-skirts. The world building is cleverly done (though the "let's walk outside and exposit" sections felt slightly expected by the last one) and the main characters are really really great. I'm curious to see if the developers have any inclination to revisit the world. As they are such a new studio, it's a rather big time for them to choose what their next steps might be. Part of me likes having so many questions unanswered, but curiousity also demands some stuff be explained. I also really liked London. A grumpy AI who is genuinely annoyed that he is often wrong and quite obsolete.
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Nov 21, 2017 02:38
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