If Echo was emotional catharsis that was paced out over a tense 30 hours, Arches is an unrelenting 5-6 hour panic attack. Arches has some of the most grueling, devastating, genuinely upsetting horror that I've seen in any piece of media and a lot of it is only further exemplified by how non-stop it is. Arches doesn't have brakes for quieter lighter moments like Echo did and is just more visceral in general when it comes to its descriptions and subjects it tackles, to the point that the content warnings and trigger warnings are to be taken even more seriously than Echo's were. If Echo was a difficult read and you had to stop playing it because of how grim and screwed up it got, do not play this game. Even for somebody like me, there was a point reading this where I would almost describe the writing as unhinged, almost close to teetering over the line of excess and being genuinely too much. There's a couple spots where I think I was worried for the writer himself and am actually hoping he's doing okay, because holy shit, some of the stuff in here is the kind of stuff that you can't just make up on your own.
And yet somehow despite being the most graphic and upsetting of any of the Echo Project titles, Arches might have managed to come out in the end with the single most resonating message across the Echo Project games. Getting there is painful and difficult, and it's... just kind of part of the point? While I think I still probably prefer the larger cast and scale of Echo and just the feelings I got from the entirety of playing through that package, Arches has a much more clear defined point to it that not only satisfies and hit home in a way I wasn't expecting for this story, but also serves to make a grander point across all three of the games taking place in the setting (Echo, The Smoke Room, and this). While the material here is harsh and brutal to get through, if it's something you can stomach and have played Echo before this, this is a worthy sequel in a thematic sense that I wasn't expecting to nail the landing as hard as it did, and I probably will be incapable of not thinking about it for months on end like I was with Echo.
And yet somehow despite being the most graphic and upsetting of any of the Echo Project titles, Arches might have managed to come out in the end with the single most resonating message across the Echo Project games. Getting there is painful and difficult, and it's... just kind of part of the point? While I think I still probably prefer the larger cast and scale of Echo and just the feelings I got from the entirety of playing through that package, Arches has a much more clear defined point to it that not only satisfies and hit home in a way I wasn't expecting for this story, but also serves to make a grander point across all three of the games taking place in the setting (Echo, The Smoke Room, and this). While the material here is harsh and brutal to get through, if it's something you can stomach and have played Echo before this, this is a worthy sequel in a thematic sense that I wasn't expecting to nail the landing as hard as it did, and I probably will be incapable of not thinking about it for months on end like I was with Echo.