it started out with a kiss, how did it end up like this...

its so weird and hard to try and explain whats good about echo because its surface level is equally ridden with humble shortcomings and overwhelming power...the prose is not anything special, the presentation is often in the novice land of weird sprites and endless kevin macleod music (though the cgs tend to be wonderful at least) theres a couple route-specific flaws, and maybe a couple ideas or plot beats have been Done Before if u care about that stuff. but its just so clearly one of the greatest things ive ever experienced in any medium, and could only exist in this specific form as a visibly amateurish gay furry itch.io cult classic...a sprawling, ambitious, colorful, comforting, gutting, endlessly fascinating generator of Thoughts and Feelings stepped in the kind of emotional truth you can only get from a niche product whos very conception will grant it the safety of probably not penetrating beyond its niche. but maybe thats a shame...echo is difficult to recommend, but i Do want more people to know about it, if for no other reason then its going to inspire at least one of them to take its lessons and go back something possibly even better...tho nothing could ever replace this

i am under no illusions that i will write a definitive review of echo, especially in the spoiler-free fashion i keep my stuff in, but after having spent literal years now reading this (i read my first route in late 2021, and took massive gap breaks between all the times i slowly returned to chip away at it), starting in one of the most tumultuous times of my life and ending it what has been one of the most peaceful times of my life, there are some things is especially have to commend...i owe it that much for its companionship

for me, echo's greatest strength, and its greatest thematic idea, is its commitment to the long-term effect...a relative de-emphasis on the individual moment-to-moment reading experience as anything amazing in isolation, and ability to weave these seemingly non-amazing scenes into something unspeakably identifiable and powerful. identity , for the game, for its routes, for its characters, is rich and multifaceted because it exists less in any big gestures and more in an increasingly dense personal history spent interacting with them. part of why the game took so damn long for me to playthru is that it has a kind of naturally rising emotional difficulty...the more routes u do, the more emotional baggage u have with the characters, the more u have to reckon with when they are onscreen , consciously and subconsciously. its not the the innocuous becomes massive in hindsight, it mostly stays innocuous...but it takes on a different color and flavor, becomes more specific and distinct

none of this is unique to echo, hopefully it could be applied to most good longform storytelling. but i do think echo has a uniquely powerful and steady hand in this department that resonates in myriad ways...its characters overwhelmingly traumatized queers with varying backgrounds of abuse, attempting to not be defined by the dry and brittle embrace of the town they spent their whole lives in...a struggle that often fails because the past cannot be truly left behind, and when actively denied manifests in secret subtle horrible ways that are now beyond your understanding because you have refused to reckon with it. the characters are their experiences, every moment of their lives enabled by every previous moment of their lives...there is no way to un-form themselves, who were formed in great pain and a deeply unjust world.

it is in this way that this being not just a gay game but a Gay Furry game is so fucking important. being queer is inherently traumatic in the cishetero patriarchal world, inherently abusive...even if not overtly, then internally, raised in an abnormality in a world that doesnt even teach u to recognize urself as one, leading to potentially years and years of ur identity and attractions being isolated from urself as u subconsciously recognize they are not yours. furries are overwhelmingly queer, and why not? u spend so long separated from urself, that u have to look in unexpected places to find it in a comforting and authentic way...why not cute animal people?

echo's niche is not tangential to its power (tho it is refreshingly un-exhausting about the logistics of its animal people world, leading by almost entirely intuition with a couple moments of playfully leaning on the unmovable concession that is the central aesthetic identity), it is Exactly Why i dont care if another vn ten years ago did similar things with anime girls or whatever. this is a frank and harrowing and emotionally complex discussion of internal and external queer trauma for an audience that will inherently understand it, without having to do any pandering or explanations to those who dont. this is why the game constantly blurs the line between romanticism/eroticism and horror, rather then being a DDLC style bait and switch where one becomes the other. this is why every single one of the deeply lovable incredible main characters could be convincingly argued to be a terrible person, and why theres no contradiction in that when the game asks u to love and accept them anyway. this is why every route has revelations that re-contextualize the entire game, with a full workable picture denied until the very end (and even then, in a world so vast, whos to say what we're still missing?). this is why the shit with sydney's dad is the way it is.

because if queerness is beautiful, yet also inherently traumatic, then that trauma can be, from some specific angle and trick of the light, beautiful as well...or at least, it can still produce a beautiful being, of which i have known countless...we are our experiences, especially our ugliest and most unjust ones. we cannot undo it, and yet we are worth something anyway. this is the revelation, and reorientation of how i see myself, that has allowed me to like myself for the first time in my life

i hadnt had this realization when i started echo, finishing it now id say its been the dominant pattern in my thought for the past year or so. echo is a space where i have returned like an intellectual checkpoint. am i being as kind and understanding to my younger self and their mistakes as i am to sydney? am i keeping a good holistic view of all of this enlightened traumaqueery to make sure im not making any excuses for genuine abuse, from or against or outside myself? has my acceptance turned to passivity? has my fear of passivity overturned my acceptance? have i been remembering that my worth and energy comes not from easily listenable or observable traits but something far more ephemeral built up by individual points of view choosing to spend time with me? echo has been equal parts challenging and comforting, realist and idealist, indulgent and thoughtful, spiraling and perceptive. at least in this stage of my life, its difficult to imagine being "done" with it , or having learned all i can from it. but even if i move on eventually, it, like everything, will remain within me. i could not be happier to have it here

kinda difficult to parse...oftentimes literally (busy artstyle and cacophonous sound design made things unpleasant more often then id appreciate) but also just a strange compromised vision that was perhaps lucky enough to land on some extremely striking decisions in the concept stage. even more lucky is how much i value Being In A Place in video games, perhaps more then anything else in the medium...if nothing else, rapture is an enduring Video Game Place, its garish advertisements are fun to navigate by, and just about every level is a well defined and satisfying Enough contained exploration box. the game plays all its cards on making sure u know How It Feels To Exist In Rapture, and the imprint is strong...definitely something i will be able to recall well into the future. randian aesthetics always make for great visual maximalism as huge egos splatter their wills all over the canvas of the world. the whale-like gurgles of the big daddies and their animal-like patterns of behavior are mesmerizing to be in the presence of. the environmental storytelling cracked open the brains of a bunch of teenagers in 2007 who didnt even know u could Do stuff like this in games. and water is so pretty!

everything else i am mixed or conflicted on. the actual play experience is fairly exhausting, yet weirdly frictionless...extreme player fragility even up to the end of the game intersects with effectively consequenceless death, and the resulting chemistry robs the game of some of its potential color. there are many tools by which to strategize, many resources to manage, but the economy is deceptively forgiving (often swinging wildly between loaded and starved and back again in the matter of a half hour) and effort towards strategy effectively only buys you some saved time from running back from a vita chamber and throwing yourself at the same enemy over and over in a battle of attrition. i can like this sort of messy systems design, and its not like theres no logic to it, but i kept wishing for either a more refined high octane action game or a slower more strategic survival horror thing...system shock 2 may still have the best rhythm for this particular vision. the gloppy soup here of not quite action, not quite survival horror, not quite immersive sim is a real bummer for me considering i usually go for this kinda weird spicy Not Totally Functional Stuff...often i think it just lacks texture

the narrative stuff is a lot more focused, but it also leaves me a little cold. i think if the game manages at least one salient critique of its randian society its that andrew ryan replicates all the bureaucracy and state sanctioned violence of the world he claims to reject , under the guise of privatization. it jabs right at the heart of what is so unworkable about hypercapitalism that posits itself as "anti status quo"...it is still creating and enabling and Requiring all of the same behaviors that lead to statism or "corporatism" or whatever the boogeyman is. this is also potentially resonant with the big cheeky flashy metacommentary on lack of player agency in games...the unquestioned illusion of freedom , but entirely within man-made confines. whether this parallel is exactly Meaningful i dont rly know, but its at least a resonance

this does all, of course, run up against the games actual desire to get lost in the illusion, to have freedom and player choice as earnest back-of-the-box features. its debatable whether it succeeds, but it is an intended directive...i suppose that also brings up the fact that u are playing thru a cartoonishly anarchic rapture, where the actual hypercapitalist moment of everything being authoritatively controlled by those who can afford to control it has relatively passed and now everyone is Running Loose and Killing Eachother and Taking The Crazy Drugs That Make U Crazy Wooooo Spooky!!! as someone Fond Of Anarchism i have my own objections to this, but i guess it drives home how in its basest elements, bioshock cant quite achieve full aesthetic unity, at least in my eyes. youre supposed to be helplessly strung along by higher powers without ur knowledge, but also play in a freeform way that is unique to you. ur supposed to be horrified at the sins of rapture, but also bask in the looting and shooting and consequence-free chaos its ruins allow. ur supposed to rescue all the little sisters to demonstrate ur selflessness, but it ends up better for you personally in the long run. ur supposed to think about faults in our current society, but also critique rapture exclusively in relation to our current society, as ryan's foolish hubris leads him to believe he could escape the world

i love a good contradiction, the resulting sparks of the clash can be rly vivid to me. but theres not rly a mystery here or any questions to ponder deeply. the gameplay is incoherent because its at the behest of what a AAA game in 2007 was expected to do to sell, and the politics are incoherent because for ken levine imagining a world unlike our own is a strictly fictional exercise, one to warn us about extremism in any direction (a thread in all of his shock games). rapture matters as nothing more then it matters as a Cool Place To Shoot Things In. the illusion of freedom, of choice, of critique, is more comforting and sellable to a mainstream audience then any truth of those things. i suppose all that matters is that the self-deception is a conscious choice by the individual. andrew ryan would approve.