A lot of thoughts go through my head in the morning. The first is usually about getting coffee into myself as quickly as possible. The next is usually a rundown of all the things I have to do that day. This morning, though, I had a nice break from my standard to-do list panic when I suddenly thought, “Boy, Echo was a great game.”
Echo was a stealth game from 2017, by a studio called Ultra Ultra that abruptly closed down in 2019, leaving Echo its only game. It had a convoluted sci-fi plot focused on a young woman named En, who goes to an elegant space station called a Palace to use its technology to try to resurrect her grandfather. The backstory of this mission has something to do with a cult she grew up in, and we learn more about all that through moments in the game when En walks and talks/bickers with her AI companion London.
When I covered Echo for the old site, I found the game’s opening hours slow, but came to miss them as the game got into its core action. The Palace is full of beings En called “Echoes,” copies of herself that fill each spacious room by the dozen. Here’s where things get weird, but also awesome: when the lights are on, anything En does is recorded by the Palace. After a while, the Palace has a blackout and then reboots; in the next light cycle, the Echoes learn to do anything En did in the previous cycle. In between the end of a light cycle and the reboot, there’s a brief period of semi-darkness where En can do anything she wants.
One of your first introductions to this is a level where multiple Echoes are separated from En by water they can’t cross. En has to cross it, though, to reach a key she needs to unlock a door. On the next light cycle, the Echoes can walk through the water because En did it, meaning you’ve lost one of your tools for avoiding them.
The whole roughly six-hour game is this give-and-take. You can crouch and sneak to avoid Echoes, but then they can do it too. You can run, but they’ll run, and they’re always faster than you. You can make the game’s worst decision and use your gun, but it sucks when the Echoes get a gun.
As I wrote in 2017,
Echo uses the hallmarks of good stealth play against you. Creativity and improvisation are usually the sole possession of the player, weapons against the patterns and limits of the AI. But when anything you do can be done to you in turn, thinking like a stealth player becomes a liability. In-the-moment calculations have immediate rewards and future risks. In one level, I tried to avoid opening doors as much as possible so I could close off the Echoes in [the] next round, but this meant taking circuitous routes through the Palace’s rooms and having to vault barriers instead, which led to a round of Echoes vaulting up behind me. I ate fruit I didn’t need to slow Echoes down, only to find them loitering near my cover spots next time, munching away. The AI isn’t that smart, but there are a lot of them, and when they can do the kinds of things usually only a player can do, they can be unstoppable.
Echo’s design means the game seems to always have a counter for anything you do, with both stealth and run-and-gun having their own consequences. The goal of each level is to gather a number of keys you need to get to the next level, which forces you to move through space, encountering Echoes and making choices and then creating new problems for yourself. Our Kotaku colleague Harper made an excellent video breaking down exactly how the game’s design creates its unique brand of tension.
I remember the absolutely revelatory feeling of playing it, with its unusual twist on one of my favorite genres making me think about stealth games in a whole new way. (I’d call it a stealth game, but it doesn’t have to be; blending genres was another of the cool things Echo did.) It’s not a perfect game by any stretch: the tense levels can be unpleasant depending on your stress tolerance, and interrupting the action with long sections of forced slow walking and exposition can mess with the pacing. You could argue it never does anything new with its core mechanic, but honestly, thank goodness: you get enough variables in each light-and-dark cycle without adding more to the mix. There’s no one strategy that will work the whole way through, and I never found any tricks or ways to “game” the design. You just have to face what the game wants you to face, dealing with the Echoes and with your own choices as best you can.
I don’t know why Ultra Ultra shut down. In its announcement, the studio wrote simply that “Ultra Ultra has ceased to exist,” and its inactive Facebook page says “Ultra Ultra is a defunct Indie Game Studio. We made ECHO before disappearing into the void.” It feels criminal that Echo was the studio’s only game; there was a movie in the works, but no one seems to have heard about it since 2019. While I doubt the movie still exists, I also don’t think it would do justice to what makes the game special. Playing it is the best way to experience it, which luckily you can still do on PC and PlayStation. If you missed it in 2017, you should absolutely check it out.
