I've played hundreds of games and dozens of visual novels, but Echo stands out as the best written piece of media I've ever had the pleasure of coming across
Solid game! pretty joyous. Goes on in some places but it got some really nice scenes and overall it's a fun experience
Hard to recommend people because of the furry say gex and large cw list but this game completely changed who I am as a person it’s incredible
it's been a month and a half after finishing this and i never wrote anything down here, mostly because i've been idly ruminating over this for the last 6 weeks
i joked with my boyfriend about writing an Echo Essay because this game really affected me, it hit very close to home and was, all at once, a stressful, anxiety-inducing, cathartic and overwhelmingly relieving piece of media that is going to stay with me for the foreseeable future, if not the rest of my life.
Look, if a fucking furry visual novel can make you rethink aspects of your life and your aspirations, you're gonna be thinking about it forever lol
The Echo Essay might come around on a replay of this, but for now I'm good with just saying this: this shit is good.
i joked with my boyfriend about writing an Echo Essay because this game really affected me, it hit very close to home and was, all at once, a stressful, anxiety-inducing, cathartic and overwhelmingly relieving piece of media that is going to stay with me for the foreseeable future, if not the rest of my life.
Look, if a fucking furry visual novel can make you rethink aspects of your life and your aspirations, you're gonna be thinking about it forever lol
The Echo Essay might come around on a replay of this, but for now I'm good with just saying this: this shit is good.
I am willing to pay for therapy sessions for the writers of this game because jesus fucking christ they are not okay.
wow. just wow. talk about a wonderful surprise. here, when i thought furries had become morally and creatively bankrupt, a game like this challenges me and proves me wrong. i cannot think of enough good things to say about this VN. it's deconstructive, it's subversive, it's challenging, it's impactful, it's subtle, and it sticks with you. it's most certainly not for the squeamish or anyone easily triggered by depictions of sexual assault, abuse, etc. but it's so worth your time if you can stomach that. i cannot remember the last time i played a game with such a legitimately well-written story and attention to detail for literary devices. just. wow. play this game if you're even remotely curious about it. do yourself that favor.
Echo is so dark, so poignant, so emotionally enthralling and draining that a casual recommendation feels like reckless endangerment. I have no idea how anyone is “supposed” to react to this story. I don’t know that I want anyone to experience some of what it has to offer. I investigated Echo on a lark, then lost a week of my waking hours playing it. Echo is so profound and fresh and real that it changed my perspective on the nature of games, and where good games can come from. I respect it so much to say I love it feels wrong.
I’ll start by saying this is the first visual novel to demonstrate to me why “visual novel” is a legitimate gaming genre. I’ve played some Phoenix Wright games, and they’re great! They have a lot of reading, but also enough interactivity with that reading to feel like games. However, that interactivity is merely elongation of a linear narrative. The distance between when the player understands how to solve a puzzle vs when the game will allow the player to solve it can be agonizing. The similar Danganronpa series is filled with blatant insecurity regarding the fun of advancing a linear narrative, to the point of introducing a hoverboard minigame for answering a basic multiple choice question.
But surprise, those are both series closer to classic point and click adventure games than visual novels. They certainly have enough text to fill a novel or more, but so does every modern Animal Crossing and Fire Emblem. I thought about this while playing a SRPG with fully voiced story segments that can last hours between its levels of gameplay. It is considered a visual novel due to the sheer volume of its story segments, but the story is not the gameplay. The two are separate and distinct such that you could have a complete experience by skipping either. Echo feels like a visual novel because it makes reading the game mechanic.
Echo makes “reading” feel like a gameplay verb by carefully focusing its narrative, game structure, and writing style on the feeling of experiencing a mystery. Not the lock-and-key puzzle of solving a mystery, like a Phoenix Wright murder trial; the aura of mystery that emanates from existential horror.
You play as a college student visiting your middle-of-nowhere small town over Spring Break, reuniting with five childhood friends after three years apart. You choose early on with which of the five friends you want to spend the week, a choice that dictates which of five stories you experience. As the week progresses, things take a turn for the spooky and the supernatural. Alone, each of Echo’s five routes are engaging, but their mysteries are not self-contained. Clues, context, and answers are sprinkled throughout every route, and all five are necessary for the full Echo experience.
It may sound simple on paper, but the craft is in the execution. The text of Echo would not work as a traditional novel separate from the trappings of being a game. Prose is expertly honed to the medium of its text box size. Descriptions are condensed so every idea is introduced, transitioned, or concluded one screen at time. Visual indications of who’s talking, who’s listening, who’s left the scene cut the need of so much “he said”-type structural grammar. Background images communicate changes in scenery, and the music punctuates changes in tone. The experience of reading is focused on the characters and their reactions at all times.
Interactivity arises from how much the game expects you to pay attention. It does not describe to you why a character acts a certain way. It expects you to infer the cast’s emotions based on your knowledge of what they should know and how they think. Functionally, this writing style allows the game to remain cryptic about context you would only glean from other routes. You are constantly evaluating whether your gaps in understanding are from not paying attention as a reader, or from context found in a different route. Although distended by hours, this task of continual inference arises from choices the player made. As such, gaps in your understanding feel like consequences of your actions as a player.
Echo offers few choices that matter, but their presence is always below the surface. New revelations make your mind wander to choices you’ve made in the past and anticipate choices you might have to make in the future. Continually feeling the friction of your player action’s consequences motivates you to keep reading. Wanting to alleviate that friction creates anticipation for which route you want to tackle next. This tension, of recontextualizing what you have done, what you have read, and why you want to read more in the future, is what elevates Echo as a visual novel. Echo justifies and excels within its classification as a game - it could not have existed in another medium.
Narrative tension can only exist when you’re invested in the characters, and I have to exclaim that the character writing is meticulous. Every character has a place and a history that exists separate from their plot relevance. Some routes will see you spend hours with characters that are only name-dropped or absent from others. I have met approximations of many of these people in real life with more specificity than an archetype. The naive young Christian man who gasps at swears, takes an hour in the shower, and makes a face when too much mayonnaise gets on his chicken sandwich. The witty girl with a bad home life who majored in psychology and can’t stop herself from correcting and analyzing every person and situation to hide from her own emotional reality. The writing is magnanimous enough to find the human dignity in meth addicts and honest enough to find the cruelty that blooms in the most vulnerable of friendships. Sometimes funny, often tragic, the character interactions alone were engaging enough for me to extend what was planned to be a cursory investigation into a complete route play-through.
The first route I finished truly shocked me. I was incoherent for hours afterwards trying to process it. Its multiple twists within its devastating climax retroactively reverberated through every assumption I had made about what kind of game I was playing, and how the game was presenting itself. Echo had weaponized my prejudices and assumptions as an outsider, (that I was playing some sort of cringey gay furry dating simulator), against me so subtly, so flawlessly, that I had been lead to focus on the wrong details about the player character and his relationships. Events and details I had passed off as perhaps careless usage of unfamiliar tropes were, in fact, completely accounted for by the narrative. The game knew exactly the moral weight and repercussions of the player character’s thoughts and actions, and I felt the fool for assuming they were handled lightly.
I do not fault myself for having low expectations, because it is so rare to find a work that understands the nature of evil. The limitations of evil, its narrative uses, the difference between the impartial evils of the universe and the unique flavors invented by human ingenuity. How Echo navigates the darkness it explores with deft and grace is impressive once you see the full list of taboo topics this game juggles. We have:
- Straight sex - Gay sex - Orgies - Rape - Murder - Dismemberment - Torture - Lynching - Homophobic violence - Racism - Suicide - Drowning - Gun violence - Domestic abuse - Child abuse - Minor endangerment - Drug abuse - Claustrophobic nightmare fuel - Arachnaphobic nightmare fuel - Suffocation nightmare fuel - Night terrors and sleep paralysis - Supernatural existential horror
I would not fault anyone for turning away at even one of these subjects; the potential for irresponsible mishandling is so high. Thankfully every heavy scenario is text-based, with no explicit drawings of nudity or violence. Although many, many terrible things happen, Echo is not interested in being misery or torture porn. It is a horror game with purpose.
For the different types of horror in Echo to work, it invests heavily in presenting the realities of its setting and cast. Fear comes both with familiarity of your neighbors and doubt in that same familiarity. Being lost alone on a road at night can be scary, but sometimes recognizing the trailer of the local crack dealer is scarier. Discrimination exists for gay characters, Mormons, immigrants, indiginous peoples, differing levels of wealth and education (and species, too, but not in a way that directly correlates to any of the other prejudices. I like that!Get owned, Zootopia). There’s an awareness of psychology and sociology in the writing more than saying a character “has anxiety” or a certain ancestry, with authentic dramatization given to its characters’ intersectionality.
Echo understands monsters are not made in a vacuum. It understands the lack of economic prospects, the lack of law enforcement, the lack of community that lead people to destructive tendencies. Stupidity, ignorance, curiosity, fear, trauma - these combine to make forms of evil that are real and palpable. The most heinous actions in Echo are committed by people. They’re unaware or uncaring of the trauma they cause to others, compartmentalizing or justifying what they do. The real horror is how, left undetected, without a goal, and without avarice, vices can continue and escalate. Just doing what comes naturally, when unchecked, warps someone’s sense of reality to reach equilibrium with the environment around them, striking the balance of perpetuating evils without attracting attention. Not out of shame or fear, but the base desire to be left well enough alone.
(Please don’t misunderstand, Echo is not so quaint as to say “what if people were the real monsters all along?” We have genuine spooks. I’m too old and dead inside to be scared of ghosts, but for a week after I finished the game, every night after I was in bed and turned off the lights, I saw one of the spooks from this game. My brain associated it with darkness that strongly. So, uh, take that as my spoiler free review of the supernatural horrors this game contains. If I were a teen I would 100% have not finished this game nor slept for a month.)
I also don’t want to misrepresent Echo as being all horror all the time. Echo’s horror works because its characters feel real. They’re funny. They’re lame. They have sex for bad reasons and have instant regret. There are no paragons of virtue. Their relationships suck.
I don’t like these characters. I don’t love these characters. I would not want to be friends with any of them. But I know these characters. I understand them. For some of them, my familiarity borders on contempt or disgust.
But after finishing the game, I miss them. I miss them in the way all good fiction makes you miss watching people make life-defining decisions and fight for lasting change. I miss the constant revelations both mundane and profound. I miss the feeling you are witnessing the most important moments of someone’s life, regardless if it ends in tragedy.
I felt something different after each of the five stories. One sent me into the limbo of wanting to cry. Not as in, I felt close to crying. Far from it. It was that rare feeling where your emotions are intense and inscrutable, and you long for the simplicity of emotional understanding, the catharsis that comes from crying. But what you feel is complex and hidden, making you feel a stranger to yourself. It was only after ruminating on everything from all five stories that I distilled what Echo is about.
Echo grasps at the face of evil because it posits an asymmetry of our imperfect world: that the opposite of evil isn’t goodness, or happiness, but meaning. That moving away from evil looks like becoming a slightly less broken version of ourselves, even if the process makes us sadder. Echo captures that sense of longing and sorrow for thinking about what could have been. Not in a rosy sense, centered around nostalgia, but the pain that comes from recognizing too late how an environment has been suffocating you. Or tasting what it feels like to be properly nurtured after years of ignorance of your own neglect. And the fear that comes from realizing you have outgrown all your comforts, and everyone you ever loved in your life, leaving you stranded and clueless on how to rely on yourself.
The horrors in Echo, while effective, are background to framing the concept that even if everything you see is fake, the emotions you have are real. It doesn’t matter if the danger was imagined. It doesn’t matter if the monsters we fear in the dark are real. The shared experiences with others, and what you learn about each other in times of crisis, what you learn about yourself, is the reality that matters. As such, the endings all felt satisfying even if, on paper, so much was left unexplained. Because knowing what went bump in the night does not matter as much as the friends who came to your aid, the regret you feel over your inactions, or the resolve cultivated within yourself. After a certain threshold of loss and pain, you don’t care about knowing why they happened. You have to deal with the logistics of those wounds, regardless of whether they scar or heal.
I miraculously got all the “good” endings in every route with good and bad endings. Going back to replay some of the choices that lead to “bad” endings solidified for me how the game was enforcing its messages. The choices that tempt you away from the “good” endings are ones that let you cheat yourself, where you seek happiness or convenience over doing what is right. The “good” endings are often still filled with tragedy. But the characters might have truth, self-knowledge, or fewer regrets than if you chose differently.
In my rating system, I reserve 5/5 stars for the pinnacle of the medium. At the time of this review, it is the 13th game I’ve awarded this honor. It is not flawless, but for a game released for free, why even bother saying so. It took me many agonizing days writing this review, and I felt very much like Anton Ego in my internal struggle to admit I could not give this game less than full marks.Which I also internally found very funny since I have like 5 followers and am not the most respected critic in France lmao
For me, Echo is a new type of game, and as said by Anton, it needs defenders and friends. I went in expecting to bounce at some weird gay furry cringe, and instead cringed because it was more human and relatable than most games I’ve played. I had no idea furry-ness had reached such organization in creative endeavors as to create entire games, much less that this is one of among an entire “furry visual novel” sub-genre. (There are hundreds of projects like this one! Who knew?) I’m truly fascinated by the concept of games being funded on patreon over the course of years, released for free after they’re completed. Art completely unbeholden to any form of external review, profit motive, or timetable. Games that are built with and influenced by their supportive community. It’s a model that feels so radical as to be non-functional, yet this single proof of concept is enough to rekindle my imagination for the future of the medium.
I’ll start by saying this is the first visual novel to demonstrate to me why “visual novel” is a legitimate gaming genre. I’ve played some Phoenix Wright games, and they’re great! They have a lot of reading, but also enough interactivity with that reading to feel like games. However, that interactivity is merely elongation of a linear narrative. The distance between when the player understands how to solve a puzzle vs when the game will allow the player to solve it can be agonizing. The similar Danganronpa series is filled with blatant insecurity regarding the fun of advancing a linear narrative, to the point of introducing a hoverboard minigame for answering a basic multiple choice question.
But surprise, those are both series closer to classic point and click adventure games than visual novels. They certainly have enough text to fill a novel or more, but so does every modern Animal Crossing and Fire Emblem. I thought about this while playing a SRPG with fully voiced story segments that can last hours between its levels of gameplay. It is considered a visual novel due to the sheer volume of its story segments, but the story is not the gameplay. The two are separate and distinct such that you could have a complete experience by skipping either. Echo feels like a visual novel because it makes reading the game mechanic.
Echo makes “reading” feel like a gameplay verb by carefully focusing its narrative, game structure, and writing style on the feeling of experiencing a mystery. Not the lock-and-key puzzle of solving a mystery, like a Phoenix Wright murder trial; the aura of mystery that emanates from existential horror.
You play as a college student visiting your middle-of-nowhere small town over Spring Break, reuniting with five childhood friends after three years apart. You choose early on with which of the five friends you want to spend the week, a choice that dictates which of five stories you experience. As the week progresses, things take a turn for the spooky and the supernatural. Alone, each of Echo’s five routes are engaging, but their mysteries are not self-contained. Clues, context, and answers are sprinkled throughout every route, and all five are necessary for the full Echo experience.
It may sound simple on paper, but the craft is in the execution. The text of Echo would not work as a traditional novel separate from the trappings of being a game. Prose is expertly honed to the medium of its text box size. Descriptions are condensed so every idea is introduced, transitioned, or concluded one screen at time. Visual indications of who’s talking, who’s listening, who’s left the scene cut the need of so much “he said”-type structural grammar. Background images communicate changes in scenery, and the music punctuates changes in tone. The experience of reading is focused on the characters and their reactions at all times.
Interactivity arises from how much the game expects you to pay attention. It does not describe to you why a character acts a certain way. It expects you to infer the cast’s emotions based on your knowledge of what they should know and how they think. Functionally, this writing style allows the game to remain cryptic about context you would only glean from other routes. You are constantly evaluating whether your gaps in understanding are from not paying attention as a reader, or from context found in a different route. Although distended by hours, this task of continual inference arises from choices the player made. As such, gaps in your understanding feel like consequences of your actions as a player.
Echo offers few choices that matter, but their presence is always below the surface. New revelations make your mind wander to choices you’ve made in the past and anticipate choices you might have to make in the future. Continually feeling the friction of your player action’s consequences motivates you to keep reading. Wanting to alleviate that friction creates anticipation for which route you want to tackle next. This tension, of recontextualizing what you have done, what you have read, and why you want to read more in the future, is what elevates Echo as a visual novel. Echo justifies and excels within its classification as a game - it could not have existed in another medium.
Narrative tension can only exist when you’re invested in the characters, and I have to exclaim that the character writing is meticulous. Every character has a place and a history that exists separate from their plot relevance. Some routes will see you spend hours with characters that are only name-dropped or absent from others. I have met approximations of many of these people in real life with more specificity than an archetype. The naive young Christian man who gasps at swears, takes an hour in the shower, and makes a face when too much mayonnaise gets on his chicken sandwich. The witty girl with a bad home life who majored in psychology and can’t stop herself from correcting and analyzing every person and situation to hide from her own emotional reality. The writing is magnanimous enough to find the human dignity in meth addicts and honest enough to find the cruelty that blooms in the most vulnerable of friendships. Sometimes funny, often tragic, the character interactions alone were engaging enough for me to extend what was planned to be a cursory investigation into a complete route play-through.
The first route I finished truly shocked me. I was incoherent for hours afterwards trying to process it. Its multiple twists within its devastating climax retroactively reverberated through every assumption I had made about what kind of game I was playing, and how the game was presenting itself. Echo had weaponized my prejudices and assumptions as an outsider, (that I was playing some sort of cringey gay furry dating simulator), against me so subtly, so flawlessly, that I had been lead to focus on the wrong details about the player character and his relationships. Events and details I had passed off as perhaps careless usage of unfamiliar tropes were, in fact, completely accounted for by the narrative. The game knew exactly the moral weight and repercussions of the player character’s thoughts and actions, and I felt the fool for assuming they were handled lightly.
I do not fault myself for having low expectations, because it is so rare to find a work that understands the nature of evil. The limitations of evil, its narrative uses, the difference between the impartial evils of the universe and the unique flavors invented by human ingenuity. How Echo navigates the darkness it explores with deft and grace is impressive once you see the full list of taboo topics this game juggles. We have:
- Straight sex - Gay sex - Orgies - Rape - Murder - Dismemberment - Torture - Lynching - Homophobic violence - Racism - Suicide - Drowning - Gun violence - Domestic abuse - Child abuse - Minor endangerment - Drug abuse - Claustrophobic nightmare fuel - Arachnaphobic nightmare fuel - Suffocation nightmare fuel - Night terrors and sleep paralysis - Supernatural existential horror
I would not fault anyone for turning away at even one of these subjects; the potential for irresponsible mishandling is so high. Thankfully every heavy scenario is text-based, with no explicit drawings of nudity or violence. Although many, many terrible things happen, Echo is not interested in being misery or torture porn. It is a horror game with purpose.
For the different types of horror in Echo to work, it invests heavily in presenting the realities of its setting and cast. Fear comes both with familiarity of your neighbors and doubt in that same familiarity. Being lost alone on a road at night can be scary, but sometimes recognizing the trailer of the local crack dealer is scarier. Discrimination exists for gay characters, Mormons, immigrants, indiginous peoples, differing levels of wealth and education (and species, too, but not in a way that directly correlates to any of the other prejudices. I like that!
Echo understands monsters are not made in a vacuum. It understands the lack of economic prospects, the lack of law enforcement, the lack of community that lead people to destructive tendencies. Stupidity, ignorance, curiosity, fear, trauma - these combine to make forms of evil that are real and palpable. The most heinous actions in Echo are committed by people. They’re unaware or uncaring of the trauma they cause to others, compartmentalizing or justifying what they do. The real horror is how, left undetected, without a goal, and without avarice, vices can continue and escalate. Just doing what comes naturally, when unchecked, warps someone’s sense of reality to reach equilibrium with the environment around them, striking the balance of perpetuating evils without attracting attention. Not out of shame or fear, but the base desire to be left well enough alone.
(Please don’t misunderstand, Echo is not so quaint as to say “what if people were the real monsters all along?” We have genuine spooks. I’m too old and dead inside to be scared of ghosts, but for a week after I finished the game, every night after I was in bed and turned off the lights, I saw one of the spooks from this game. My brain associated it with darkness that strongly. So, uh, take that as my spoiler free review of the supernatural horrors this game contains. If I were a teen I would 100% have not finished this game nor slept for a month.)
I also don’t want to misrepresent Echo as being all horror all the time. Echo’s horror works because its characters feel real. They’re funny. They’re lame. They have sex for bad reasons and have instant regret. There are no paragons of virtue. Their relationships suck.
I don’t like these characters. I don’t love these characters. I would not want to be friends with any of them. But I know these characters. I understand them. For some of them, my familiarity borders on contempt or disgust.
But after finishing the game, I miss them. I miss them in the way all good fiction makes you miss watching people make life-defining decisions and fight for lasting change. I miss the constant revelations both mundane and profound. I miss the feeling you are witnessing the most important moments of someone’s life, regardless if it ends in tragedy.
I felt something different after each of the five stories. One sent me into the limbo of wanting to cry. Not as in, I felt close to crying. Far from it. It was that rare feeling where your emotions are intense and inscrutable, and you long for the simplicity of emotional understanding, the catharsis that comes from crying. But what you feel is complex and hidden, making you feel a stranger to yourself. It was only after ruminating on everything from all five stories that I distilled what Echo is about.
Echo grasps at the face of evil because it posits an asymmetry of our imperfect world: that the opposite of evil isn’t goodness, or happiness, but meaning. That moving away from evil looks like becoming a slightly less broken version of ourselves, even if the process makes us sadder. Echo captures that sense of longing and sorrow for thinking about what could have been. Not in a rosy sense, centered around nostalgia, but the pain that comes from recognizing too late how an environment has been suffocating you. Or tasting what it feels like to be properly nurtured after years of ignorance of your own neglect. And the fear that comes from realizing you have outgrown all your comforts, and everyone you ever loved in your life, leaving you stranded and clueless on how to rely on yourself.
The horrors in Echo, while effective, are background to framing the concept that even if everything you see is fake, the emotions you have are real. It doesn’t matter if the danger was imagined. It doesn’t matter if the monsters we fear in the dark are real. The shared experiences with others, and what you learn about each other in times of crisis, what you learn about yourself, is the reality that matters. As such, the endings all felt satisfying even if, on paper, so much was left unexplained. Because knowing what went bump in the night does not matter as much as the friends who came to your aid, the regret you feel over your inactions, or the resolve cultivated within yourself. After a certain threshold of loss and pain, you don’t care about knowing why they happened. You have to deal with the logistics of those wounds, regardless of whether they scar or heal.
I miraculously got all the “good” endings in every route with good and bad endings. Going back to replay some of the choices that lead to “bad” endings solidified for me how the game was enforcing its messages. The choices that tempt you away from the “good” endings are ones that let you cheat yourself, where you seek happiness or convenience over doing what is right. The “good” endings are often still filled with tragedy. But the characters might have truth, self-knowledge, or fewer regrets than if you chose differently.
In my rating system, I reserve 5/5 stars for the pinnacle of the medium. At the time of this review, it is the 13th game I’ve awarded this honor. It is not flawless, but for a game released for free, why even bother saying so. It took me many agonizing days writing this review, and I felt very much like Anton Ego in my internal struggle to admit I could not give this game less than full marks.
For me, Echo is a new type of game, and as said by Anton, it needs defenders and friends. I went in expecting to bounce at some weird gay furry cringe, and instead cringed because it was more human and relatable than most games I’ve played. I had no idea furry-ness had reached such organization in creative endeavors as to create entire games, much less that this is one of among an entire “furry visual novel” sub-genre. (There are hundreds of projects like this one! Who knew?) I’m truly fascinated by the concept of games being funded on patreon over the course of years, released for free after they’re completed. Art completely unbeholden to any form of external review, profit motive, or timetable. Games that are built with and influenced by their supportive community. It’s a model that feels so radical as to be non-functional, yet this single proof of concept is enough to rekindle my imagination for the future of the medium.
I had an anxiety attack for 5 minutes after reading something past an hour and a half down what i imagine is a multi-route story idk.
There's too much to it that's disturbingly close, I was reminded of the relationships I've personally left behind and the estrangement and my own mental well being. The poisonous toxic nature of the clear asshole in the group revealing all of the pent up frustrations and completely strung relationships, their inability to really let their feelings known to each other due to the way their lives has moved coming to an emotional head that I imagine, is going to whittle down on all of the barriers I have left that keeps me coolheaded.
This is not a condemning of the novel, but it needs to be understood that the content warning on the itch.io page does not lie. Or at least, it certainly wasn't lying to me. These people all have living fractures and the text is glass, whether or not you have good feet for it doesn't matter.
I do hope to return to it when I'm of better self control. Who knows I may end up reading it again soon in almost perfunctory self-flagellation either from stubbornness or in the hopes that there is a light at the end of that that brings peace to those anxieties for me.
There's too much to it that's disturbingly close, I was reminded of the relationships I've personally left behind and the estrangement and my own mental well being. The poisonous toxic nature of the clear asshole in the group revealing all of the pent up frustrations and completely strung relationships, their inability to really let their feelings known to each other due to the way their lives has moved coming to an emotional head that I imagine, is going to whittle down on all of the barriers I have left that keeps me coolheaded.
This is not a condemning of the novel, but it needs to be understood that the content warning on the itch.io page does not lie. Or at least, it certainly wasn't lying to me. These people all have living fractures and the text is glass, whether or not you have good feet for it doesn't matter.
I do hope to return to it when I'm of better self control. Who knows I may end up reading it again soon in almost perfunctory self-flagellation either from stubbornness or in the hopes that there is a light at the end of that that brings peace to those anxieties for me.
Something special.
Easily the best writing I've encountered in a game.
It is, in no uncertain terms, a Furry romance visual novel, so if you're not into that, you're going to play it anyway, it's that good.
Easily the best writing I've encountered in a game.
It is, in no uncertain terms, a Furry romance visual novel, so if you're not into that, you're going to play it anyway, it's that good.
This review contains spoilers
Well, folks, let the truth be known, the niche furry visual novel is actually great! Taking note of the very positive attention this was receiving, my curiosity was sparked. I'm not a furry, and based on my admittedly narrow pre-conceived notions of the fringe subculture, I was going into this a bit skeptical. I believed I was pretty far removed from the game's target audience (I'll be referring to this as a "game" for simplicity's sake). This definitely surpassed my expectations, however, and I ended up loving it and was surprised by how much I connected with it.
We follow Chase, an otter who comes back to his hometown to do a project on the history of his hometown while simultaneously connecting with old friends. A fun vacation soon takes a nosedive into madness that only goes down further and further, each route the player chooses contributing to the larger story that is Echo. The content of these routes is largely intense, emotionally compelling, and genuinely well-written. The content focuses particularly on the strange events that occur in Echo as well as a death of an old friend, Sydney, that haunts Chase and his friends. The game is thematically very solid, consistently finding fresh and interesting directions to fully expand upon its themes.
I was initially unsure of how I'd feel about this from the prologue. The very beginning of this game is arguably my least favorite part, the writers deciding to ease the player in. There's a lot of foreshadowing being laid out which I appreciate in retrospect, but the character interactions in this section come across as disingenuous. I can see where the writers were coming from, but I felt myself already losing interest. Regardless, the rest of the prologue was keeping my interest and the game fully sank its teeth into me by the time we got to the lake and the route split occurs. The order in which I played the routes was:
Carl -> Leo -> Jenna -> TJ -> Flynn. I'll go over each.
Carl - It's generally accepted that Carl's route is the worst, and I guess I agree with that statement. I still quite liked it though and thought there was a certain kind of novelty to this one that the others didn't have. See, all the routes coalesce to form a bigger picture, and while Carl's does this as well, it arguably does it the least. Even though this makes for what is arguably the least redundant of all the routes, it feels rather... unessential? Raven was also probably my least favorite secondary character. Again, I definitely still enjoyed it, especially when Chase enters the crawlspace in the basement and the route turns into this wacky surrealist haunted house bonanza. The unknown horrors behind every door keep the reader on edge, making for a very fun, though also scary, and at times emotionally stirring experience. When Jenna tags along, we see what seems to be some kind of possession that overtakes her and Carl. It's their ancestors, whose personal conflict signifies that of a larger conflict that results from colonialism. In many of the routes in Echo, the game makes a point of things occurring in a cyclical nature and of how the past doesn't define you (among other things). The presentation of these ideas in Carl's route was done very well and, depending on whether Carl allows himself to be possessed by his ancestor in hopes they can get out of the surrealist hellscape, both endings succinctly wrap up his route. The bad ending though could use some work. See, his house ends up in flames and Carl and Chase are left to escape before succumbing to the flames. There is a clear opportunity to make an intense scene here. Maybe they could try to use a fire extinguisher but it's no use, and they run out of the house as quickly as they can as the flames rise, maybe someone trips, anything. But instead once Carl and Chase have escaped whatever hellish reality they were thrown into, it immediately cuts to them outside watching the house burn up. It's a sublime moment, don't get me wrong, it just feels like a waste of opportunity and honestly, the flow felt kind of off.
Leo - Arguably the most disturbing route. About half of the route is mostly a romance arch, one that I was initially not very interested in. But alas, when Chase and Leo get back together at the high school, it's a very sweet moment, even if I'm not fully on board with that choice. Kudzu also gets introduced, his part in the game taking some fairly interesting directions. The second half takes quite a jarring turn, however, as Chase becomes kidnapped and is put through the torturous methods of Brian, one of the many characters part of Duke's crew thing. They are somewhat of an antithesis of the group we follow - the good guys vs. the bad guys. Unfortunate individuals who become stuck in the harmful environments they've ended up in. Regardless, being held hostage by Brian made for a truly uncomfortable read. The route climaxes with Chase and the gang leaving Echo on the train, and depending on whether you choose to end things off with Leo or not gives way to good and bad endings. Both endings are brilliant, the good shows an emotional, vulnerable moment from Leo that stuck with me and the bad end takes a disturbing tone just as it was in Brian's. The bad ending also parallels a previous story of Echo's history where a man trying to get on the train fails to do so, losing his legs and unable to walk just as Chase loses his feet and also loses the ability to walk. Leo has become stuck in Echo, and while it's painful to see, there's a perfect bittersweetness that comes with ending things. The latter would certainly be undesirable for Chase.
Jenna - Also a pretty disturbing route. Looking over the redundancies with Leo's route, I really loved this. While Jenna may not be my favorite character per se, her dialogue has really phenomenal moments. See, Jenna is a psych major, and we see her intellect and self-awareness shine through in many of her lines. Every direction the route goes down seems to naturally enhance because of this. The ending is noticeably a bit more subdued compared to the other routes, but it really does feel appropriate considering the previous events.
TJ - I almost cried during his route. TJ has one of the more focused routes in the game (also the shortest). The group follows a newfound treasure hunt that Syd apparently had made before his death (this was apparently a common thing he did). This is when I first saw a truly more insidious side of Chase. The other routes hinted at Chase's involvement with Syd's death but never got into the details of how. This gets into those details and man... I mean wow. The flow and presentation of everything is nearly perfect. The little epilogue that follows somewhat spoils the moment though, even if it was a bit spooky. This very well might have been my favorite route had it ended with Chase and TJ driving out of Echo for what is likely the last time.
Flynn - I seemed to have saved the best for last, as this ended up being my favorite route. Flynn is also my favorite character. Yes, he's an insufferable asshole, but there is something so appealing about him that had me looking forward to his route and being able to explore the nuances of his character. I was given everything I was expecting and more. The themes of the cyclical nature of violence, the unknown, the truth, the socio-economic struggles of rural America, the lack of support for marginalized youth. It all comes together so perfectly, that even if the visual novel wasn't very subtle at times of what it was getting at, I almost cried (again) at just how full-circle everything seemed to become. The writers are smart though in allowing some of the questions to be left unanswered and rather inferred by the reader. I don't even wanna get into the details, just read the goddamn thing.
So, yeah. I had a blast reading this. If the quality of the writing wasn't enough, the art is pretty good too. The backgrounds are nice, the character designs are good, and at certain important moments, a visual depiction of the scene appears. I found myself captivated by the beauty and level of detail many of these depictions had.
It is not without its issues though. To add to the negative critiques I've previously mentioned there are a couple of mostly minor issues I had. The game typically shifts between humor that is either awkward or clever and witty. The latter typically proves to be much better, much of the awkward humor simply not landing.
There's also the fact that a lot of the routes are somewhat redundant although I wonder if this is essential to the story. See, in Flynn's route when they see Duke and Chase's car on the side of the road with the monster that keeps them in Echo, it's the same event that happened in Leo's route. Although this time, it doesn't make sense. Duke wouldn't be able to steal Chase's car and drive to that point in the cliff before them like he was able to in Leo's route. However, the writers are very much aware of this, with the characters just as confused as I am about how this is possible. The actual reason is kept a mystery - it allows the game to linger - though it made me wonder if there are some kind of alternative universe situations happening. Going back to Flynn's route, in the end, he's essentially free of the confines of time and space thanks to "Sam", this otherworldly entity, symbolic of... well, many things, but let's say he's that which can not be known. Who's to say that "Sam" and others like him can't also travel through different realities? The implications this has on the other routes become massive, and partly what made Flynn's route hit so hard for me. Whatever the case, there were still many redundant moments that occasionally diminished the experience.
One last thing, and this is such a minor issue but I cringe a little every time I see it, grammatical mistakes. It wasn't like, constant, but ever so often something will be misspelled, a name uncapitalized, a letter needlessly bolded. It's something that, again, is really not a big deal, but I'm hoping in future updates this can be corrected...
If I had to sell this to someone, I would say it's like a mix of Twin Peaks and a SIGNIFICANTLY better-written Riverdale but with young adults instead of high schoolers. Trying to convince people to read this may be difficult to do though because those who read visual novels are already a niche group of people along with the fact that the target audience being furries narrows the demographic even smaller. Many people will probably take one look at the cover and say "Nope," and even if they do get past that barrier, they may be turned away from the beginning since it's frustratingly the worst section. Whatever the case, I was very touched by this and hope great things continue to come from the people behind The Echo Project.
We follow Chase, an otter who comes back to his hometown to do a project on the history of his hometown while simultaneously connecting with old friends. A fun vacation soon takes a nosedive into madness that only goes down further and further, each route the player chooses contributing to the larger story that is Echo. The content of these routes is largely intense, emotionally compelling, and genuinely well-written. The content focuses particularly on the strange events that occur in Echo as well as a death of an old friend, Sydney, that haunts Chase and his friends. The game is thematically very solid, consistently finding fresh and interesting directions to fully expand upon its themes.
I was initially unsure of how I'd feel about this from the prologue. The very beginning of this game is arguably my least favorite part, the writers deciding to ease the player in. There's a lot of foreshadowing being laid out which I appreciate in retrospect, but the character interactions in this section come across as disingenuous. I can see where the writers were coming from, but I felt myself already losing interest. Regardless, the rest of the prologue was keeping my interest and the game fully sank its teeth into me by the time we got to the lake and the route split occurs. The order in which I played the routes was:
Carl -> Leo -> Jenna -> TJ -> Flynn. I'll go over each.
Carl - It's generally accepted that Carl's route is the worst, and I guess I agree with that statement. I still quite liked it though and thought there was a certain kind of novelty to this one that the others didn't have. See, all the routes coalesce to form a bigger picture, and while Carl's does this as well, it arguably does it the least. Even though this makes for what is arguably the least redundant of all the routes, it feels rather... unessential? Raven was also probably my least favorite secondary character. Again, I definitely still enjoyed it, especially when Chase enters the crawlspace in the basement and the route turns into this wacky surrealist haunted house bonanza. The unknown horrors behind every door keep the reader on edge, making for a very fun, though also scary, and at times emotionally stirring experience. When Jenna tags along, we see what seems to be some kind of possession that overtakes her and Carl. It's their ancestors, whose personal conflict signifies that of a larger conflict that results from colonialism. In many of the routes in Echo, the game makes a point of things occurring in a cyclical nature and of how the past doesn't define you (among other things). The presentation of these ideas in Carl's route was done very well and, depending on whether Carl allows himself to be possessed by his ancestor in hopes they can get out of the surrealist hellscape, both endings succinctly wrap up his route. The bad ending though could use some work. See, his house ends up in flames and Carl and Chase are left to escape before succumbing to the flames. There is a clear opportunity to make an intense scene here. Maybe they could try to use a fire extinguisher but it's no use, and they run out of the house as quickly as they can as the flames rise, maybe someone trips, anything. But instead once Carl and Chase have escaped whatever hellish reality they were thrown into, it immediately cuts to them outside watching the house burn up. It's a sublime moment, don't get me wrong, it just feels like a waste of opportunity and honestly, the flow felt kind of off.
Leo - Arguably the most disturbing route. About half of the route is mostly a romance arch, one that I was initially not very interested in. But alas, when Chase and Leo get back together at the high school, it's a very sweet moment, even if I'm not fully on board with that choice. Kudzu also gets introduced, his part in the game taking some fairly interesting directions. The second half takes quite a jarring turn, however, as Chase becomes kidnapped and is put through the torturous methods of Brian, one of the many characters part of Duke's crew thing. They are somewhat of an antithesis of the group we follow - the good guys vs. the bad guys. Unfortunate individuals who become stuck in the harmful environments they've ended up in. Regardless, being held hostage by Brian made for a truly uncomfortable read. The route climaxes with Chase and the gang leaving Echo on the train, and depending on whether you choose to end things off with Leo or not gives way to good and bad endings. Both endings are brilliant, the good shows an emotional, vulnerable moment from Leo that stuck with me and the bad end takes a disturbing tone just as it was in Brian's. The bad ending also parallels a previous story of Echo's history where a man trying to get on the train fails to do so, losing his legs and unable to walk just as Chase loses his feet and also loses the ability to walk. Leo has become stuck in Echo, and while it's painful to see, there's a perfect bittersweetness that comes with ending things. The latter would certainly be undesirable for Chase.
Jenna - Also a pretty disturbing route. Looking over the redundancies with Leo's route, I really loved this. While Jenna may not be my favorite character per se, her dialogue has really phenomenal moments. See, Jenna is a psych major, and we see her intellect and self-awareness shine through in many of her lines. Every direction the route goes down seems to naturally enhance because of this. The ending is noticeably a bit more subdued compared to the other routes, but it really does feel appropriate considering the previous events.
TJ - I almost cried during his route. TJ has one of the more focused routes in the game (also the shortest). The group follows a newfound treasure hunt that Syd apparently had made before his death (this was apparently a common thing he did). This is when I first saw a truly more insidious side of Chase. The other routes hinted at Chase's involvement with Syd's death but never got into the details of how. This gets into those details and man... I mean wow. The flow and presentation of everything is nearly perfect. The little epilogue that follows somewhat spoils the moment though, even if it was a bit spooky. This very well might have been my favorite route had it ended with Chase and TJ driving out of Echo for what is likely the last time.
Flynn - I seemed to have saved the best for last, as this ended up being my favorite route. Flynn is also my favorite character. Yes, he's an insufferable asshole, but there is something so appealing about him that had me looking forward to his route and being able to explore the nuances of his character. I was given everything I was expecting and more. The themes of the cyclical nature of violence, the unknown, the truth, the socio-economic struggles of rural America, the lack of support for marginalized youth. It all comes together so perfectly, that even if the visual novel wasn't very subtle at times of what it was getting at, I almost cried (again) at just how full-circle everything seemed to become. The writers are smart though in allowing some of the questions to be left unanswered and rather inferred by the reader. I don't even wanna get into the details, just read the goddamn thing.
So, yeah. I had a blast reading this. If the quality of the writing wasn't enough, the art is pretty good too. The backgrounds are nice, the character designs are good, and at certain important moments, a visual depiction of the scene appears. I found myself captivated by the beauty and level of detail many of these depictions had.
It is not without its issues though. To add to the negative critiques I've previously mentioned there are a couple of mostly minor issues I had. The game typically shifts between humor that is either awkward or clever and witty. The latter typically proves to be much better, much of the awkward humor simply not landing.
There's also the fact that a lot of the routes are somewhat redundant although I wonder if this is essential to the story. See, in Flynn's route when they see Duke and Chase's car on the side of the road with the monster that keeps them in Echo, it's the same event that happened in Leo's route. Although this time, it doesn't make sense. Duke wouldn't be able to steal Chase's car and drive to that point in the cliff before them like he was able to in Leo's route. However, the writers are very much aware of this, with the characters just as confused as I am about how this is possible. The actual reason is kept a mystery - it allows the game to linger - though it made me wonder if there are some kind of alternative universe situations happening. Going back to Flynn's route, in the end, he's essentially free of the confines of time and space thanks to "Sam", this otherworldly entity, symbolic of... well, many things, but let's say he's that which can not be known. Who's to say that "Sam" and others like him can't also travel through different realities? The implications this has on the other routes become massive, and partly what made Flynn's route hit so hard for me. Whatever the case, there were still many redundant moments that occasionally diminished the experience.
One last thing, and this is such a minor issue but I cringe a little every time I see it, grammatical mistakes. It wasn't like, constant, but ever so often something will be misspelled, a name uncapitalized, a letter needlessly bolded. It's something that, again, is really not a big deal, but I'm hoping in future updates this can be corrected...
If I had to sell this to someone, I would say it's like a mix of Twin Peaks and a SIGNIFICANTLY better-written Riverdale but with young adults instead of high schoolers. Trying to convince people to read this may be difficult to do though because those who read visual novels are already a niche group of people along with the fact that the target audience being furries narrows the demographic even smaller. Many people will probably take one look at the cover and say "Nope," and even if they do get past that barrier, they may be turned away from the beginning since it's frustratingly the worst section. Whatever the case, I was very touched by this and hope great things continue to come from the people behind The Echo Project.
This is a homosexual, furry game with psychological horror elements. None of this is targeted at me, and, on paper, I probably should not like this game. But It is really good, and I like it a lot. The writing of this game is tantalizing, eerie, gutwrenching, and breathtaking and holds the kind of symbolism you can get lost thinking about. However, nothing about the experience seemed above me in that way, in fact, it feels rather relatable at times despite the insanity of it all. These characters simultaneously represent the worst and best of humanity, and at some point or the other, I found all of them irredeemable while continuing to relate to their best and even their worst qualities. Chase’s character is a masterclass in this. I fucking hate Chase, and yet route after route, I also find myself loving Chase. He is incredibly dynamic for a character that is controlled by so many outside factors. That brings me to the town of Echo, a town that lives off of secrets in order to bring the worst out of whoever inhabits it. No one really knows how it got this bad, and no one really knows how to fix it. It’s a town of desperation, and mitigation is no longer an option. They can only really “accept, and move on.” A fitting line from Carl's route, the last one I played. Echo wears on you to the point that, like Chase, you start to feel powerless to stop it from ripping the lives of these characters apart.
Jenna’s Route
Jenna’s route was my first, and, in hindsight, probably the weakest. However, it really is hard to say because I felt the routes continued to get better as I went likely as a result of learning more about the world and characters. I decided to go with her because I felt she was the most reasonable and relatable for me. She by far has moved on the most since Sydney’s death. She goes to college, has friends outside the group, and has a clear plan for her future. She’s not perfect, but she probably thinks she is which is one of many factors that is preventing the echo reunion from being a fruitful one. Ironically, despite being in psychology, she has what feels like little to no empathy for anyone but TJ for most of the routes in this game. She is shrouded by her closeness to the events and fails to see things from a perspective outside of her own. Her route is kind of boring for the most part. You learn a lot more about the junkies of Echo and how the town has affected them. There is also a really nice scene about Jenna’s grandmother, and Jenna and Chase's banter is pretty fun. Outside of that though. It is sort of forgettable and I am not really a huge fan of the diverting endings of the route. Echo taking the forgiving god of the junkies was too far though these guys are LOST without my man.
Flynn’s Route
After playing Jenna’s route and having her talk and talk about how Flynn was the devil, I wanted a chance to see things from his perspective, and I am glad I did. In stark contrast to Jenna, he is hurting the most due to the loss of Sydney, and it is not in his nature to just let that be like it might be for Carl or TJ. He lost his best friend. He buried a man for Sydney. He wants the truth, but his friends repress it, and those that don’t know the truth support those that do. He is alone, and he has felt that way ever since he lost Sydney. This route explores that desperation and depravity with some of the most disturbing imagery Echo has to offer. This route also offers the most depressing ending of the game which has me feeling really bad for the lizard. I also like Daxton a lot in this route. Unapologetically and uncompromisingly a dweeb.
TJ’s Route
No route highlights the powerlessness of living in the Echo area code like TJ’s route. I hate everyone in this route. I hate Chase, I hate Janice, I kinda hate Julian but he really hasn’t done anything wrong, and I despise TJ. By the end of it, they are all consumed by the grief and guilt of Echo and its secrets, and to say you hate them is to basically say you hate what the town has brought out of them. With that being said though, I really did not like TJ beforehand, and being with him an entire route only made that more agonizing. I struggled alongside Chase as TJ refused to say no. He has a blatant disregard for his own well-being that is downright insane, and I am starting to understand why I decided to do Jenna as my first route. TJ is the opposite of Jenna despite their closeness. He literally agrees to dig a grave for an insane woman because he fears letting her down, and I have to just go along with that. And then he strings you along the most cursed scavenger hunt of all time only for Chase to pull the slimeball move of the century and gaslight the entire group into Flynn hate. Chase in this route is an absolute trainwreck that you have to watch unfold full well knowing this infatuation with TJ mixed with the underlying truth will not end well. It’s a really entertaining trainwreck though as the cycle of echo repeats.
Leo’s Route
This one is the best and I don’t think it's particularly close. The Leo and Chase relationship is the most fleshed out in the game and there is so much baggage with it that unpacking it would take me way too long. The line between a healthy productive relationship and an abusive harmful couple has been blurred and blotched. One thing is for sure though, Leo feels like he needs Chase and there is no way around that for him. When he lost him with the opposite of closure, he had to spawn an echo body double to cope with it that ends up terrorizing the entire town into thinking that Chase caused the mass hysteria which has huge repercussions on almost all the routes(and they’d be right) (but not because of the body double) (I find this funny but also sick). Suffice to say Leo is not over it, but Chase mostly is, but Chase also doesn’t know when to stop leading everyone in his life on which results in the worst possible thing for Leo: more of Chase. However, I can kind of understand it. These two really do love each other and their moments of connection were probably the happiest to watch early in the route. It feels so genuine and there's a lot to like about the couple despite how unhealthy it is for the two of them. The real hero of this route is Kudzu. This raccoon is an absolute chad and helps pull Chase away from Leo in a way slow, accepting, and unassuming way that allows both parties to move on in a healthy fashion. He also is a goddamn hero who doesn’t know how to use a gun which is a huge plus in the town of Echo. This route also has the best divergent endings of the game offering two endings that left me floored and on the verge of tears.
Carl’s Route
James versus John was pretty hype and watching Carl’s character develop was pretty rewarding. This route was really good in a way that diverges from the main problems of the other routes. Instead of focusing on the group’s trauma about the loss of Sydney, it focuses on Carl’s problems and the truth about what happened to John Begay. It works, and Carl letting go of James’ influences parallels his need to free himself of his reliance on others. The good ending was a nice and happy exclamation point to the Echo experience for me after all the shit that happens in these routes.
For fun, I'm going to rank the routes from worst to best here: Jenna, Carl, Flynn, TJ, Leo. Although Tj, Carl, and Flynn are really close so I don’t even know if I stand by this to be honest.
This is not a perfect game and there are a few flaws. It is not the most polished game ever, but that is to be sort of expected for an Itch.io download. I counted 4 or 5 typos and grammatical errors within the game. The artwork is great but used very sparingly which left me wanting a lot more. Also Raven was a large miss. He is pretty boring and kinda stupid. He serves a purpose but he is just kinda a buzzkill. I also am not a huge fan of all the psychological thriller/sleep paralysis elements. They can be hit or miss at times, but the fact that I like a lot of them is saying quite a bit for me.
Jenna’s Route
Jenna’s route was my first, and, in hindsight, probably the weakest. However, it really is hard to say because I felt the routes continued to get better as I went likely as a result of learning more about the world and characters. I decided to go with her because I felt she was the most reasonable and relatable for me. She by far has moved on the most since Sydney’s death. She goes to college, has friends outside the group, and has a clear plan for her future. She’s not perfect, but she probably thinks she is which is one of many factors that is preventing the echo reunion from being a fruitful one. Ironically, despite being in psychology, she has what feels like little to no empathy for anyone but TJ for most of the routes in this game. She is shrouded by her closeness to the events and fails to see things from a perspective outside of her own. Her route is kind of boring for the most part. You learn a lot more about the junkies of Echo and how the town has affected them. There is also a really nice scene about Jenna’s grandmother, and Jenna and Chase's banter is pretty fun. Outside of that though. It is sort of forgettable and I am not really a huge fan of the diverting endings of the route. Echo taking the forgiving god of the junkies was too far though these guys are LOST without my man.
Flynn’s Route
After playing Jenna’s route and having her talk and talk about how Flynn was the devil, I wanted a chance to see things from his perspective, and I am glad I did. In stark contrast to Jenna, he is hurting the most due to the loss of Sydney, and it is not in his nature to just let that be like it might be for Carl or TJ. He lost his best friend. He buried a man for Sydney. He wants the truth, but his friends repress it, and those that don’t know the truth support those that do. He is alone, and he has felt that way ever since he lost Sydney. This route explores that desperation and depravity with some of the most disturbing imagery Echo has to offer. This route also offers the most depressing ending of the game which has me feeling really bad for the lizard. I also like Daxton a lot in this route. Unapologetically and uncompromisingly a dweeb.
TJ’s Route
No route highlights the powerlessness of living in the Echo area code like TJ’s route. I hate everyone in this route. I hate Chase, I hate Janice, I kinda hate Julian but he really hasn’t done anything wrong, and I despise TJ. By the end of it, they are all consumed by the grief and guilt of Echo and its secrets, and to say you hate them is to basically say you hate what the town has brought out of them. With that being said though, I really did not like TJ beforehand, and being with him an entire route only made that more agonizing. I struggled alongside Chase as TJ refused to say no. He has a blatant disregard for his own well-being that is downright insane, and I am starting to understand why I decided to do Jenna as my first route. TJ is the opposite of Jenna despite their closeness. He literally agrees to dig a grave for an insane woman because he fears letting her down, and I have to just go along with that. And then he strings you along the most cursed scavenger hunt of all time only for Chase to pull the slimeball move of the century and gaslight the entire group into Flynn hate. Chase in this route is an absolute trainwreck that you have to watch unfold full well knowing this infatuation with TJ mixed with the underlying truth will not end well. It’s a really entertaining trainwreck though as the cycle of echo repeats.
Leo’s Route
This one is the best and I don’t think it's particularly close. The Leo and Chase relationship is the most fleshed out in the game and there is so much baggage with it that unpacking it would take me way too long. The line between a healthy productive relationship and an abusive harmful couple has been blurred and blotched. One thing is for sure though, Leo feels like he needs Chase and there is no way around that for him. When he lost him with the opposite of closure, he had to spawn an echo body double to cope with it that ends up terrorizing the entire town into thinking that Chase caused the mass hysteria which has huge repercussions on almost all the routes(and they’d be right) (but not because of the body double) (I find this funny but also sick). Suffice to say Leo is not over it, but Chase mostly is, but Chase also doesn’t know when to stop leading everyone in his life on which results in the worst possible thing for Leo: more of Chase. However, I can kind of understand it. These two really do love each other and their moments of connection were probably the happiest to watch early in the route. It feels so genuine and there's a lot to like about the couple despite how unhealthy it is for the two of them. The real hero of this route is Kudzu. This raccoon is an absolute chad and helps pull Chase away from Leo in a way slow, accepting, and unassuming way that allows both parties to move on in a healthy fashion. He also is a goddamn hero who doesn’t know how to use a gun which is a huge plus in the town of Echo. This route also has the best divergent endings of the game offering two endings that left me floored and on the verge of tears.
Carl’s Route
James versus John was pretty hype and watching Carl’s character develop was pretty rewarding. This route was really good in a way that diverges from the main problems of the other routes. Instead of focusing on the group’s trauma about the loss of Sydney, it focuses on Carl’s problems and the truth about what happened to John Begay. It works, and Carl letting go of James’ influences parallels his need to free himself of his reliance on others. The good ending was a nice and happy exclamation point to the Echo experience for me after all the shit that happens in these routes.
For fun, I'm going to rank the routes from worst to best here: Jenna, Carl, Flynn, TJ, Leo. Although Tj, Carl, and Flynn are really close so I don’t even know if I stand by this to be honest.
This is not a perfect game and there are a few flaws. It is not the most polished game ever, but that is to be sort of expected for an Itch.io download. I counted 4 or 5 typos and grammatical errors within the game. The artwork is great but used very sparingly which left me wanting a lot more. Also Raven was a large miss. He is pretty boring and kinda stupid. He serves a purpose but he is just kinda a buzzkill. I also am not a huge fan of all the psychological thriller/sleep paralysis elements. They can be hit or miss at times, but the fact that I like a lot of them is saying quite a bit for me.
Uma das melhores visual novels que eu já tive o prazer de ler. Echo em sua essência é uma visual novel de romance e terror, esse jogo é dividido em várias rotas com vários finais dependendo das suas escolhas. A seleção musical (mesmo a maioria sendo royalties free) funciona nesse caso pois houve uma excelente seleção delas e em alguns casos remixes delas. Seus personagens são incríveis e o jeito que a história é contando sempre te deixa querendo mais, o único "problema" em si é que é um jogo furry mas se você ainda gosta de uma boa história e não liga pra esse detalhe, é um ótimo jogo com uma escrita excelente. Recomendado.
Echo at a very surface level glance kind of just seems like exactly the kind of trashy sorta thing that would appeal to a very specific crowd. The cast is made up of furry anthropomorphic designs, the vast majority of whom are male and gay, plus tags on the itch.io page for "gay, furry, bara, romance, queer, yaoi"; what should obviously come across as just a dating sim that appeals to the biggest degenerates of all, gay furries (me!), has far more actually going on under the initial first glance, a curtain that it pulls away within its first hour. That or you saw the suspicious and kind of horrific looking screenshot on the itch.io page of a character looking at a mirror with their eyes and world falling apart in a mirror, and the extra tag for "Psychological Horror." And the trigger warnings. One of the those, either works! And that's the key thing that I really want anyone reading this and might be even kind of curious to know: Echo isn't about wish fulfillment for a certain crowd of people like it kind of initially looks like. Past the furry characters and artwork, it's a horror game about hurt people who grew up in less than ideal circumstances, all with both personal and shared traumas, coming together again expecting everything to just work out together like they always used to. And despite the other strange and possibly paranormal happenings going on, they all need to confront those past demons whether they want to or not, and no matter what way it will end for those involved.
There is trigger warning stuff I should bring up now in case I actually did pique anyone's interest in playing this. Echo is not an easy read. Sexual assault, stalking, homophobia, suicide, unhealthy obsessions and relationships, trauma and PTSD, abuse, arachnophobia, night terrors, sleep paralysis, two scenes of kidnapping and torture; in general just a long assortment of things ranging in severity, likely more stuff that I've also missed. If any of that stuff is not for you, then yeah I would keep away from playing this. It's not that I think Echo disrespects any of its subject matters, and in fact far from it, but rather that the game doesn't shy away from depicting any of it. The text is uncomfortable and intentionally so, and while I don't want to speak for the developers because it would be shitty to do so, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of what makes Echo's conflicts and world come across so effectively came from some level of personal experiences.
Making the reader uncomfortable is something that Echo excels in across the board, and it's not from just trying to get a rise out of the audience through shock value like those trigger warnings suggest. For just general horror shenanigans, a personal credit I really want to give the game is how it does avoid any cheap jumpscares: no loud dumb stinger sounds, nothing coming completely out of nowhere and disappearing to get an "oOoOoOooo gotcha" out of the player. Echo has some great standout scares, and all of them are really well built up to by just ratcheting up the tension to ridiculous degrees, where clicking for the next piece of text alone is tough enough on its own, a haunting freaky image coming up be damned. I'm a complete pansy and find any jumpscares just generally detestable, so big props to the dev team for avoiding the easy shortcut to a heart attack, and giving me terrifying moments that I genuinely enjoyed being scared to get through. But the real horror of Echo, what makes it so effective as a story that I kept wanting to play through more of and beyond the paranormal stuff was this group of old friends and the secrets they all kept. The strange looking furry cast of characters are some of the most grounded realistic depictions of people I've seen in a game, and also funnily enough is the second game I've played with furry characters that are all a part of an old group of friends separated by time and place, that being Night in the Woods. Probably an odd coincidence more than anything, considering how much more graphic and uncomfortable this game is! And Echo respects the player enough with its writing to take it all in, the loud and quiet moments, to be able to read between the lines and figure out the full history of these people yourself. These people did know each other, or at least they thought they did, why would they need to dig up every little thing together and monologue to each other about it?
The old best friend who dropped out of college and sits around with drugs all day. The goody two shoes who can't handle direct conflict. The leader who's terrified of others leaving him behind and forgotten. The jaded one who had to fend for themselves because they were different and strange. The know-it-all who tries to get a handle on how people tick because home didn't treat them any better. And the one lost within all of it struggling with their own inner nightmares. All in the middle of nowhere, in a small enough town where everybody knows everybody that's falling apart by the day, that some of them may still have to call home, some tried to escape and leave from. And that town happens to have a strange history of some kind of hysteria that drives people insane. But really, what that strange paranormal element of Echo does for the cast and each of their routes is reveal their deep-seated terrors and force them to confront it all. The paranormal stuff can be scary, absolutely so with later routes in the game when you know more secrets and details and the game starts to play with your knowledge further, but Echo can also be just as scary when you have to watch these old friends argue with each other, when it reaches a crescendo and people will be hurt, either emotionally or even physically sometimes if it really was that bad. The grudges and issues that were left unresolved for years because they just thought they probably moved on and wouldn't ever come up again. That the horrible thing that happened when they were only kids probably shouldn't be spoken of again. It's not just getting past an increasingly dangerous paranormal situation that will affect everybody, it's also getting over old demons once and for all, shared and individual.
Also, since this is an adults 18+ game with all the stigmas initially there, yes: Echo does have a small number of sex scenes. But they're frankly few and pretty far between each other, and unlike a vast majority of other titles in the genre with similar content, Echo's sex scenes are not played up to be attractive; if anything, Echo is one of very few pieces of media I've seen in general, let alone for video games, that depicts sex as a mixed bag sort of thing, complicated. Besides the fact that the game usually tends to actually fade to black and skip over the scene itself before it gets overly explicit, sex in Echo can range from being nice and enjoyable at one moment, to being tinged with regret and consequences the next. One route in particular does keep the sex scenes explicit, but does so on purpose to showcase how much it could be a regretful thing, a bad spur of the moment impulse that both parties feel gross about and deal with consequences for. It's great how much further Echo plays with that dating sim visual novel convention of the player getting their sexy times with the character they want when a time the game gives a choice to the player on whether they want to go after the sexy times, it's in the most upsettingly uncomfortable place imaginable with every vibe in the complete opposite spectrum of "sexy." There may be gay furries in this thing, and you may or may not find some of the dudes attractive if that is your thing, but it is not why you will play and actually stick with Echo.
Do I have issues with Echo? Sure, absolutely. I really wish the final release version of Echo would've gated off route selection to a certain order, because the game gives you free reign to pick between any of them from the start and that's absolutely not how you should play through the game. Play through the routes by the order they were finished and released in: Carl, Leo, TJ, Flynn, and Jenna. Doing otherwise will ruin how some mysteries are revealed and toyed with in different routes, and I would feel genuinely horrible for anybody who didn't play Jenna's route last since it's clearly written as a big climactic finale that ties everything together. Some of the presentation isn't always consistent and up to snuff, like character sprites that vary in style (the redone Chase sprites from the anniversary update look far too clean compared to everyone else for one route) or some lame stock sound effects. You can kind of tell how much better of a grasp the writers had on the pacing and direction by the last few routes, and also how much more experimental they were willing to get compared to earlier routes. Carl's route is easily the weakest one because of this, being the only route in the entire game where the writing got stuck trying to pace out monologues with plot details that weren't very interesting and were also too far removed from the core ideas and themes, and with an ending that resolves its conflicts far too easily in a way that goes against the rest of the game's routes. The quality of the rest of the game immediately leaps into the stratosphere as soon as Leo's route starts, which only further makes Carl's route weaker by comparison. I kind of wish there were more backgrounds and CGs for scenes that the game either gets incredibly descriptive for, or not descriptive enough for, especially also because I think there could've been more truly effectively scary moments combining it all together. But frankly? I don't think these issues are grand enough to really hurt the whole package for me.
Echo is a game about trauma. It doesn't romanticize and pretty any of it up to look good. It shows how much it can warp people, change them from the person you might have known at one point, whether it was right that moment or years down the line. How it can separate, push people away from each other, how easy it is to just dwell upon a single horrible incident, or maybe multiple smaller ones, and have it take over your well-being and isolate yourself. But Echo is also about those very people, all of those struggles be damned, finding a way to just cope. Coping is not easy, and the shortcuts, the ones that help you skip and ignore those struggles rather than confronting and truly moving on, can be just as unhealthy and damaging. But rather, that you aren't alone in those struggles no matter how much they hurt, no matter where you are, no matter what has happened. That the people who matter most are the ones that come back for you, despite everything. The ones who were there for you from the beginning that you may have grown up with, the ones you might have remembered from a long time ago that you both see in another light now, or maybe the ones that you just met that will stand up with you. Despite whatever may ail you, you are still here and you can move on. It's that feeling, that message that makes Echo a game I admire and appreciate even despite the rough edges, and one that I hope more people can experience and get something out of as much as I did. For a game made by two writers and five artists, funded by only Patreon backers, made over the course of 6 years, and released entirely for free, I can have some complaints and things to nitpick but a lot of it just kind of simmers away when I can just tell you to go play it yourself right now.
There is trigger warning stuff I should bring up now in case I actually did pique anyone's interest in playing this. Echo is not an easy read. Sexual assault, stalking, homophobia, suicide, unhealthy obsessions and relationships, trauma and PTSD, abuse, arachnophobia, night terrors, sleep paralysis, two scenes of kidnapping and torture; in general just a long assortment of things ranging in severity, likely more stuff that I've also missed. If any of that stuff is not for you, then yeah I would keep away from playing this. It's not that I think Echo disrespects any of its subject matters, and in fact far from it, but rather that the game doesn't shy away from depicting any of it. The text is uncomfortable and intentionally so, and while I don't want to speak for the developers because it would be shitty to do so, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of what makes Echo's conflicts and world come across so effectively came from some level of personal experiences.
Making the reader uncomfortable is something that Echo excels in across the board, and it's not from just trying to get a rise out of the audience through shock value like those trigger warnings suggest. For just general horror shenanigans, a personal credit I really want to give the game is how it does avoid any cheap jumpscares: no loud dumb stinger sounds, nothing coming completely out of nowhere and disappearing to get an "oOoOoOooo gotcha" out of the player. Echo has some great standout scares, and all of them are really well built up to by just ratcheting up the tension to ridiculous degrees, where clicking for the next piece of text alone is tough enough on its own, a haunting freaky image coming up be damned. I'm a complete pansy and find any jumpscares just generally detestable, so big props to the dev team for avoiding the easy shortcut to a heart attack, and giving me terrifying moments that I genuinely enjoyed being scared to get through. But the real horror of Echo, what makes it so effective as a story that I kept wanting to play through more of and beyond the paranormal stuff was this group of old friends and the secrets they all kept. The strange looking furry cast of characters are some of the most grounded realistic depictions of people I've seen in a game, and also funnily enough is the second game I've played with furry characters that are all a part of an old group of friends separated by time and place, that being Night in the Woods. Probably an odd coincidence more than anything, considering how much more graphic and uncomfortable this game is! And Echo respects the player enough with its writing to take it all in, the loud and quiet moments, to be able to read between the lines and figure out the full history of these people yourself. These people did know each other, or at least they thought they did, why would they need to dig up every little thing together and monologue to each other about it?
The old best friend who dropped out of college and sits around with drugs all day. The goody two shoes who can't handle direct conflict. The leader who's terrified of others leaving him behind and forgotten. The jaded one who had to fend for themselves because they were different and strange. The know-it-all who tries to get a handle on how people tick because home didn't treat them any better. And the one lost within all of it struggling with their own inner nightmares. All in the middle of nowhere, in a small enough town where everybody knows everybody that's falling apart by the day, that some of them may still have to call home, some tried to escape and leave from. And that town happens to have a strange history of some kind of hysteria that drives people insane. But really, what that strange paranormal element of Echo does for the cast and each of their routes is reveal their deep-seated terrors and force them to confront it all. The paranormal stuff can be scary, absolutely so with later routes in the game when you know more secrets and details and the game starts to play with your knowledge further, but Echo can also be just as scary when you have to watch these old friends argue with each other, when it reaches a crescendo and people will be hurt, either emotionally or even physically sometimes if it really was that bad. The grudges and issues that were left unresolved for years because they just thought they probably moved on and wouldn't ever come up again. That the horrible thing that happened when they were only kids probably shouldn't be spoken of again. It's not just getting past an increasingly dangerous paranormal situation that will affect everybody, it's also getting over old demons once and for all, shared and individual.
Also, since this is an adults 18+ game with all the stigmas initially there, yes: Echo does have a small number of sex scenes. But they're frankly few and pretty far between each other, and unlike a vast majority of other titles in the genre with similar content, Echo's sex scenes are not played up to be attractive; if anything, Echo is one of very few pieces of media I've seen in general, let alone for video games, that depicts sex as a mixed bag sort of thing, complicated. Besides the fact that the game usually tends to actually fade to black and skip over the scene itself before it gets overly explicit, sex in Echo can range from being nice and enjoyable at one moment, to being tinged with regret and consequences the next. One route in particular does keep the sex scenes explicit, but does so on purpose to showcase how much it could be a regretful thing, a bad spur of the moment impulse that both parties feel gross about and deal with consequences for. It's great how much further Echo plays with that dating sim visual novel convention of the player getting their sexy times with the character they want when a time the game gives a choice to the player on whether they want to go after the sexy times, it's in the most upsettingly uncomfortable place imaginable with every vibe in the complete opposite spectrum of "sexy." There may be gay furries in this thing, and you may or may not find some of the dudes attractive if that is your thing, but it is not why you will play and actually stick with Echo.
Do I have issues with Echo? Sure, absolutely. I really wish the final release version of Echo would've gated off route selection to a certain order, because the game gives you free reign to pick between any of them from the start and that's absolutely not how you should play through the game. Play through the routes by the order they were finished and released in: Carl, Leo, TJ, Flynn, and Jenna. Doing otherwise will ruin how some mysteries are revealed and toyed with in different routes, and I would feel genuinely horrible for anybody who didn't play Jenna's route last since it's clearly written as a big climactic finale that ties everything together. Some of the presentation isn't always consistent and up to snuff, like character sprites that vary in style (the redone Chase sprites from the anniversary update look far too clean compared to everyone else for one route) or some lame stock sound effects. You can kind of tell how much better of a grasp the writers had on the pacing and direction by the last few routes, and also how much more experimental they were willing to get compared to earlier routes. Carl's route is easily the weakest one because of this, being the only route in the entire game where the writing got stuck trying to pace out monologues with plot details that weren't very interesting and were also too far removed from the core ideas and themes, and with an ending that resolves its conflicts far too easily in a way that goes against the rest of the game's routes. The quality of the rest of the game immediately leaps into the stratosphere as soon as Leo's route starts, which only further makes Carl's route weaker by comparison. I kind of wish there were more backgrounds and CGs for scenes that the game either gets incredibly descriptive for, or not descriptive enough for, especially also because I think there could've been more truly effectively scary moments combining it all together. But frankly? I don't think these issues are grand enough to really hurt the whole package for me.
Echo is a game about trauma. It doesn't romanticize and pretty any of it up to look good. It shows how much it can warp people, change them from the person you might have known at one point, whether it was right that moment or years down the line. How it can separate, push people away from each other, how easy it is to just dwell upon a single horrible incident, or maybe multiple smaller ones, and have it take over your well-being and isolate yourself. But Echo is also about those very people, all of those struggles be damned, finding a way to just cope. Coping is not easy, and the shortcuts, the ones that help you skip and ignore those struggles rather than confronting and truly moving on, can be just as unhealthy and damaging. But rather, that you aren't alone in those struggles no matter how much they hurt, no matter where you are, no matter what has happened. That the people who matter most are the ones that come back for you, despite everything. The ones who were there for you from the beginning that you may have grown up with, the ones you might have remembered from a long time ago that you both see in another light now, or maybe the ones that you just met that will stand up with you. Despite whatever may ail you, you are still here and you can move on. It's that feeling, that message that makes Echo a game I admire and appreciate even despite the rough edges, and one that I hope more people can experience and get something out of as much as I did. For a game made by two writers and five artists, funded by only Patreon backers, made over the course of 6 years, and released entirely for free, I can have some complaints and things to nitpick but a lot of it just kind of simmers away when I can just tell you to go play it yourself right now.
Erm... Well that happened!
i originally wrote a review of this that was basically just a stream of consciousness thought dump i had when i finished it (i'll put a pastebin in the comments) but it kind of goes over some themes and stuff that show up in the game that i think are cooler to discover yourself as you play, so i'm rewriting it (also because this game has been on my mind nonstop since i finished it and so i've had time to think about why i enjoyed it so much)
Echo is an extremely well written horror/character drama story--it's a little funny that this game filled with furries contains some of the most realistic and human writing i've seen in a story in quite some time. this is a very confrontational piece of art for something that vaguely looks like a dating sim; all of these characters have very real and lasting problems that you're not going to fix in the span of a week and the dynamics between all of them are all very very interesting, both to watch unfold and to pick apart after the fact.
and that's saying nothing about the horror in this game--it's extremely harrowing and it's constantly tense. echo likes to deliver both tense character moments and tense horror moments with a certain method of description, where each line of text is a successive gut punch after the last. it's a style of writing that fits the game really really well and makes the moments with lots of description or internal monologue really pop out. it's the sort of narrative where a simple plot summary misses a huge amount of what makes it good, and yet the rest of the story never feels like it's overburdened by level of detail.
i could gush about every aspect of this story for hours; how tightly-woven everything is, how it takes advantage of player expectations while making an effort to remain within its universe, how good the player choices are, but i think i should probably just stop for now and tell you to play this game. it's free. heed the content/age warnings, they're not a joke, this game can get pretty heavy at times. good luck.
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1.01 edit: the short stories are cool, definitely play if you're wanting more from echo after you finish, but maybe wait a couple days/weeks as most of them are retellings of stories you hear about over the course of the main game. they're definitely not "necessary", but they capture the feel of the main game pretty well, certainly better than route 65
Echo is an extremely well written horror/character drama story--it's a little funny that this game filled with furries contains some of the most realistic and human writing i've seen in a story in quite some time. this is a very confrontational piece of art for something that vaguely looks like a dating sim; all of these characters have very real and lasting problems that you're not going to fix in the span of a week and the dynamics between all of them are all very very interesting, both to watch unfold and to pick apart after the fact.
and that's saying nothing about the horror in this game--it's extremely harrowing and it's constantly tense. echo likes to deliver both tense character moments and tense horror moments with a certain method of description, where each line of text is a successive gut punch after the last. it's a style of writing that fits the game really really well and makes the moments with lots of description or internal monologue really pop out. it's the sort of narrative where a simple plot summary misses a huge amount of what makes it good, and yet the rest of the story never feels like it's overburdened by level of detail.
i could gush about every aspect of this story for hours; how tightly-woven everything is, how it takes advantage of player expectations while making an effort to remain within its universe, how good the player choices are, but i think i should probably just stop for now and tell you to play this game. it's free. heed the content/age warnings, they're not a joke, this game can get pretty heavy at times. good luck.
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1.01 edit: the short stories are cool, definitely play if you're wanting more from echo after you finish, but maybe wait a couple days/weeks as most of them are retellings of stories you hear about over the course of the main game. they're definitely not "necessary", but they capture the feel of the main game pretty well, certainly better than route 65