ECHO

PS4, PC Echo is one of those games you have to play to truly understand. That’s going to be difficult here, so we’ll have a go at explaining it. Ready?

You play as En, who finds herself in a sentient environment called the Palace, populated with enemy clones of her called Echoes. At first they’re blank canvases, but as you progress through the Palace they’ll learn from your behaviour and start to mimic your approach. Go in all guns blazing and you’ll be met with equal force; go in all stealthy and they’ll try to catch you off guard.

Change your approach and after a while the Palace will reset everything in order to deploy its newly learned behaviour. Each reset causes a blackout, during which you can act without the Palace seeing, so that’s your chance to do anything you don’t want the Echoes picking up on.

It’s this mind-bending premise that makes Echo such an intriguing game, plus its ornate mansion setting is a welcome change from the usual grimy dystopias of sci-fi games. It also means that the only person you need to outsmart is yourself. And that can’t be too hard, can it?