From the Manufacturer
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In 1913 the ship Orpheus mysteriously vanished, 45 soulswere
lost...or were they? Echo Night thrusts you into the middle of a
supernatural adventure to past times and distant places. As Echo
Night's spellbinding story unfoldsyou'll visit past eras while
meeting unusual characters and learning the secrets of the dead.
Review
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What would you do if you learned that your her was not just
an average Joe, but instead he was a relentless sleuth hot on the
trail of a demonic murderer? That's the premise of Echo Night, a
first-person puzzle-solving adventure that puts you into the
middle of a time-traveling quest to find out what has happened to
your her.
Your life is turned upside down with the delivery of the mail.
You receive a letter from your missing dad that contains a key to
unlock a time-traveling adventure. With the aid of time-warping
books and paintings, you learn that your her is chasing a
sadistic murderer possessed by a demonic red . Your task is
to aid your pop's quest while releasing the trapped souls of
people murdered by the evil man's evil . To do this, you'll
hop about to various locations at different points in time, all
intertwined with your her's manhunt. You'll solve puzzles and
appease souls with items you picked up along the way. Once you've
completed the game, the nonlinear storyline will make sense, and
you'll able to reconstruct the proper plot from the shuffled
scenes you've seen.
The main evil character in the game is extremely creepy looking -
unfortunately, so is everybody else. All the characters you
encounter suffer from a polygon deficiency - they all have pointy
chins or blocky faces. What's even worse is that most of the
characters also suffer from a lack of textures. Conveniently,
most of the game's NPCs are spirits, which appear in the form of
wireframes with light gray textures. This makes almost every
ghost uninteresting and doesn't help motivate you to free the
spirit. The backgrounds all retain the proper style for the time
period you happen to be in and are delightfully mediocre. Not
much can be said about the sound except that there's very little
of it. You spend most of the game in musical silence until
something disturbing happens. The sound effects are all very drab
and unappealing.
Still, the most frustrating aspect of this game is the game
engine. Even with the speed turned up all the way your movements
still seem too sluggish, and waiting for the cutscenes attached
to every warping sequence becomes irritating rather quickly.
Almost as annoying is the maddening use of time warping - it
would appear that cabinets, paintings, dolls, and clocks are all
capable of transporting you to different time periods. Although
this is mainly a puzzle-solving mystery, your character can still
take damage. It's not uncommon to run into a few different evil
spirits. Unfortunately, there are no cool weapons for you to use;
instead, you'll dispose of evil spirits with a light switch.
Flipping on the lights isn't what I'd consider an adventure.
At Echo Night's heart there are some great puzzles.
Unfortunately, they're few and far between, and most of the game
revolves around sticking the object you had found two rooms
earlier into something in the room you're currently in. The plot
becomes too muddled, and it's easy to mistake one bland spirit
for another. The game is also extremely short - about six to
eight hours for the average player, and the offer of multiple
endings isn't really compelling enough for you to want to put up
with the game's flaws all over again. The only thing this game
does exceedingly well is give you an excellent example of how not
to do a first-person puzzle-solving game. --Ben Stahl
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