Dark Echo is a minimalistic exploration game. You are shrouded in darkness (or, for the second half of the game, in blinding light), and theDark Echo is a minimalistic exploration game. You are shrouded in darkness (or, for the second half of the game, in blinding light), and the only way for you to navigate through the levels is the echos of your footsteps (represented by colored lines which radiate out from where you’re standing). You have the ability to stomp your foot (making louder echoes), walk silently (to avoid alerting enemies to your presence), and throw stones (to make echoes in a remote location to lure enemies away).
The game is very simple; there are only a handful of mechanics. There are red enemies who move towards the last sound they were in range of earing, there are pits of water which slow you down and which make a lot of sound to move through, there are red areas that killed you if you moved into them, there were walls that would collapse when you made a loud sound (opening an area but also attracting enemies), and there were moving blocks which pushed you around.
Mostly, the game worked fairly decently; you are introduced to all the games’ mechanics gradually over the first half of the game, and navigate through a series of increasingly-difficult levels which force you to combine the mechanics in increasingly interesting ways.
While the game was mostly fairly solid, the moving blocks mechanic was probably the most frustrating; while it only appears in a handful of levels, the fact that the pushes are so difficult to see ahead of time is kind of frustrating. Eventually you figure out how they work (for a while, I just thought they were sloped areas that I was skidding down), but at times it felt like the game broke its own rules, such as one level where you had to navigate up little ramps that felt like they actually were sloped areas on the sides of the room.
Mostly, though, the game played very fairly, and even the frustrating levels were mostly quite short. After beating the game, you could hunt back through for treasures, or play through the “light” versions of the levels, where additional enemies were added in to make you play more carefully (as well as the layouts of some of the levels being changed to make them more difficult).
That said, the game is nothing super special; the gameplay isn’t really amazing, but it is decent enough. Ultimately, this is a sort of time-waster game – the sort of thing you’d play while chatting to someone or doing something else, sporadically playing it. It was originally a mobile game, and I suspect it is better suited to that platform simply because of its “play in short bursts” nature.
Still, it is okay, and if you’re looking for something to do between doing other things, it isn’t a bad choice, and goes to show that just because you don’t spend a whole lot on graphics doesn’t mean you can’t make a visually striking game. Just don’t expect it to be anything more than a distraction.… Expand
