Hey, remember at the end of my review for the first Armored Core when I said I’d be reviewing Echo Night? This was mostly a cheeky joke referring to Dark Souls, but I did have the intention of playing this game eventually. Well, here I am, having completed Echo Night before not only Dark Souls, but also Resident Evil and Silent Hill.

Despite the fact that I haven’t beaten Resident Evil, what I have played shows a lot of how Echo Night was lacking. In Resident Evil, enemy encounters are made engaging because of the different options and factors to consider. In Echo Night, most interactions just involve running from enemies. It also hurts a bit that resource management really isn’t that… Hey wait a minute, this is exactly how I started my review for Yomawari Midnight Shadows! These games are pretty similar, honestly. However, a few things separate Echo Night from Yomawari Midnight Shadows.

While enemy interactions are shallow, the purpose of these enemies is usually just roadblocks. Sometimes you do just have to run from an enemy (Especially later in the game), but often you need to use an item or something to make the ghost go away or find a way to turn on a light. It’s a missed opportunity, but it was never meant to be the crux of the gameplay. That crux would be the puzzles involving the pacifist ghosts. Usually, you help a ghost who’s not at peace for some reason, and in return you get an item needed to progress. The puzzles for finding out how to help these ghosts aren’t great, but they’re fine, and some are fun. I can’t really discuss them without spoiling the solutions, but it’s mostly simple stuff that requires you to pay attention to your surroundings.

In terms of the story, it’s alright. Most of it consists of trying to solve the mystery of this boat that went missing called the Orpheus. There’s some stuff about a red stone and blue stone, and your dad has something to do with all of this, but you’re not given much to go off initially. As you progress though, you help the ghosts on board and learn their stories, and possibly more about the greater plot. It’s an alright concept, but the execution leaves a bit to be desired. First, I rarely feel like I’m actually aboard a ship. A lot of the game is inside rooms that aren’t necessarily characteristic of boats. Second, helping ghosts often involves teleporting through space and time, which is something that just happens without any explanation or player input. It’s not just like you get to view past events either, you must take items from the past to use in the future. There are probably more natural ways to get across these backstories than what we have here, and I generally enjoyed the puzzles that took place on the boat more. Well, I say that, but the stuff on the boat itself is some kind of teleportation from the beginning of the game where the player character’s father is missing. When you’re teleported to the boat, it’s just hanging out in the water. Is the boat actually somewhere in the physical world? It went missing, right? Maybe this is a nitpick, but I just don’t want to be wondering about time-travel stuff in a horror game.

Maybe I’m being a little harsh on this game. This was made by a small team, after all. It’s not entirely fair to compare it to something like Resident Evil. It does have the atmosphere down. The sound design is pretty solid and the visuals do feel unsettling in many ways. However, there’s one way that the game could’ve been great independent of budget: Writing. I mean, sure, it was pretty much inevitable that the voice acting would suck (I still love it for the goofiness), but the actual words the characters say could’ve been good. I know this is a Japanese game originally and maybe the Japanese version has incredible writing, but in English, the writing is very disappointing. In horror/puzzle games, it’s often fun to interact with an item and get some flavor text. Maybe it tells us a bit about the character. Maybe it paints a more vivid picture of the world than the limited graphics can display. In Echo Night, 9/10 times you interact with something, it says, “There is a ___.” You look at a chair? “There is a chair.” You check out a bed? “There is a bed.” This is not hyperbole, almost everything that isn’t absolutely tied to solving a puzzle has this kind of description. Could they not be bothered to write something else?!? Did they only have a week to localize the game? I don’t know, but it hurts the final product, and it’s truly a shame.

Echo Night is passable. It’s pretty rough around the edges, something that could also be said about Armored Core, but that game was unique and more focused on a specific premise. Maybe I’ll play the sequels someday, but I think it’s time I play another Fromsoft game. You know, the one that put them on the map for some people when it came out back in the day, where you battle monsters in a brutal world. Yep, it’s finally time. I’m playing King’s Field next! See you then.