Echo's been sitting on my hard drive since 2015 or so and Patricia Taxxon's Marble Blast Ultra video's been rotating in my mind lately, so I'm finally sinking my teeth into it.
I'd intended for this post to be a bit; like, I actually had no idea what the hell Echo was when I was going into it aside from seeing art of its many colorful characters, and I was going to circle back to this in a couple of days with the reaction I'd had upon finishing it, which actually happened shortly before making this post.
and I found out immediately after writing it that Echo's had some updates since I'd downloaded the version that I played, which was build 0.40. I don't know where I originally got it from; the binary was compiled in early 2015, the included readme's from mid-2016.
some Echo spoilers follow? I think??
in short, the version of the game I played had hardly any art (even some of the portraits for secondary characters were entirely absent), and, to my recollection, no decisions at all that would affect the path of the story. Playing the 0.40 build was the experience of reading a psychological thriller written in the first-person, vicariously experiencing someone else's bad decisions without any agency through which to guide them — which, from the story the game is telling, I'd assumed was just the way that story was meant to be told, to achieve that exact effect.
so now I have to play Echo, again.
jesus. okay.
