Fight against yourself

Echo short period of time, the lights go back up, En discovers flowers on the tables around her. The lights then go back off and the palace’s systems fall into a pattern of crashing and rebooting.

As En descends further into the labyrinth, she encounters strange piles of goo that evolve over a few light dark cycles into hostile replicas of herself. Each time a blackout occurs these “Echoes” reboot and adapt or disperse based on En’s actions from the previous cycle. Although the Echoes will try to choke her on sight, En discovers that they are limited in their movements. They won’t vault over a balustrade, cross through a pool of water, or pull out a gun and shoot unless En performed those actions during a previous light cycle. It’s been awhile since I played a game where the ability to shoot an opponent felt so alternatingly risky and exhilarating.

Echo is a game where your behaviour comes back to haunt you. It’s designed to make you think twice about using the range of your capabilities. It constricts you in a way that feels familiar to other stealth action games, eg it’s important to study enemy patrol patterns before scampering about, but the mind game it leads you into playing against yourself is what’s most remarkable. At the end of the journey you’ll find, as Raskolnikov did in Crime and Punishment, that it’s not killing someone that’s difficult, it’s getting away with it.