Echo at a very surface level glance kind of just seems like exactly the kind of trashy sorta thing that would appeal to a very specific crowd. The cast is made up of furry anthropomorphic designs, the vast majority of whom are male and gay, plus tags on the itch.io page for "gay, furry, bara, romance, queer, yaoi"; what should obviously come across as just a dating sim that appeals to the biggest degenerates of all, gay furries (me!), has far more actually going on under the initial first glance, a curtain that it pulls away within its first hour. That or you saw the suspicious and kind of horrific looking screenshot on the itch.io page of a character looking at a mirror with their eyes and world falling apart in a mirror, and the extra tag for "Psychological Horror." And the trigger warnings. One of the those, either works! And that's the key thing that I really want anyone reading this and might be even kind of curious to know: Echo isn't about wish fulfillment for a certain crowd of people like it kind of initially looks like. Past the furry characters and artwork, it's a horror game about hurt people who grew up in less than ideal circumstances, all with both personal and shared traumas, coming together again expecting everything to just work out together like they always used to. And despite the other strange and possibly paranormal happenings going on, they all need to confront those past demons whether they want to or not, and no matter what way it will end for those involved.

There is trigger warning stuff I should bring up now in case I actually did pique anyone's interest in playing this. Echo is not an easy read. Sexual assault, stalking, homophobia, suicide, unhealthy obsessions and relationships, trauma and PTSD, abuse, arachnophobia, night terrors, sleep paralysis, two scenes of kidnapping and torture; in general just a long assortment of things ranging in severity, likely more stuff that I've also missed. If any of that stuff is not for you, then yeah I would keep away from playing this. It's not that I think Echo disrespects any of its subject matters, and in fact far from it, but rather that the game doesn't shy away from depicting any of it. The text is uncomfortable and intentionally so, and while I don't want to speak for the developers because it would be shitty to do so, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of what makes Echo's conflicts and world come across so effectively came from some level of personal experiences.

Making the reader uncomfortable is something that Echo excels in across the board, and it's not from just trying to get a rise out of the audience through shock value like those trigger warnings suggest. For just general horror shenanigans, a personal credit I really want to give the game is how it does avoid any cheap jumpscares: no loud dumb stinger sounds, nothing coming completely out of nowhere and disappearing to get an "oOoOoOooo gotcha" out of the player. Echo has some great standout scares, and all of them are really well built up to by just ratcheting up the tension to ridiculous degrees, where clicking for the next piece of text alone is tough enough on its own, a haunting freaky image coming up be damned. I'm a complete pansy and find any jumpscares just generally detestable, so big props to the dev team for avoiding the easy shortcut to a heart attack, and giving me terrifying moments that I genuinely enjoyed being scared to get through. But the real horror of Echo, what makes it so effective as a story that I kept wanting to play through more of and beyond the paranormal stuff was this group of old friends and the secrets they all kept. The strange looking furry cast of characters are some of the most grounded realistic depictions of people I've seen in a game, and also funnily enough is the second game I've played with furry characters that are all a part of an old group of friends separated by time and place, that being Night in the Woods. Probably an odd coincidence more than anything, considering how much more graphic and uncomfortable this game is! And Echo respects the player enough with its writing to take it all in, the loud and quiet moments, to be able to read between the lines and figure out the full history of these people yourself. These people did know each other, or at least they thought they did, why would they need to dig up every little thing together and monologue to each other about it?

The old best friend who dropped out of college and sits around with drugs all day. The goody two shoes who can't handle direct conflict. The leader who's terrified of others leaving him behind and forgotten. The jaded one who had to fend for themselves because they were different and strange. The know-it-all who tries to get a handle on how people tick because home didn't treat them any better. And the one lost within all of it struggling with their own inner nightmares. All in the middle of nowhere, in a small enough town where everybody knows everybody that's falling apart by the day, that some of them may still have to call home, some tried to escape and leave from. And that town happens to have a strange history of some kind of hysteria that drives people insane. But really, what that strange paranormal element of Echo does for the cast and each of their routes is reveal their deep-seated terrors and force them to confront it all. The paranormal stuff can be scary, absolutely so with later routes in the game when you know more secrets and details and the game starts to play with your knowledge further, but Echo can also be just as scary when you have to watch these old friends argue with each other, when it reaches a crescendo and people will be hurt, either emotionally or even physically sometimes if it really was that bad. The grudges and issues that were left unresolved for years because they just thought they probably moved on and wouldn't ever come up again. That the horrible thing that happened when they were only kids probably shouldn't be spoken of again. It's not just getting past an increasingly dangerous paranormal situation that will affect everybody, it's also getting over old demons once and for all, shared and individual.

Also, since this is an adults 18+ game with all the stigmas initially there, yes: Echo does have a small number of sex scenes. But they're frankly few and pretty far between each other, and unlike a vast majority of other titles in the genre with similar content, Echo's sex scenes are not played up to be attractive; if anything, Echo is one of very few pieces of media I've seen in general, let alone for video games, that depicts sex as a mixed bag sort of thing, complicated. Besides the fact that the game usually tends to actually fade to black and skip over the scene itself before it gets overly explicit, sex in Echo can range from being nice and enjoyable at one moment, to being tinged with regret and consequences the next. One route in particular does keep the sex scenes explicit, but does so on purpose to showcase how much it could be a regretful thing, a bad spur of the moment impulse that both parties feel gross about and deal with consequences for. It's great how much further Echo plays with that dating sim visual novel convention of the player getting their sexy times with the character they want when a time the game gives a choice to the player on whether they want to go after the sexy times, it's in the most upsettingly uncomfortable place imaginable with every vibe in the complete opposite spectrum of "sexy." There may be gay furries in this thing, and you may or may not find some of the dudes attractive if that is your thing, but it is not why you will play and actually stick with Echo.

Do I have issues with Echo? Sure, absolutely. I really wish the final release version of Echo would've gated off route selection to a certain order, because the game gives you free reign to pick between any of them from the start and that's absolutely not how you should play through the game. Play through the routes by the order they were finished and released in: Carl, Leo, TJ, Flynn, and Jenna. Doing otherwise will ruin how some mysteries are revealed and toyed with in different routes, and I would feel genuinely horrible for anybody who didn't play Jenna's route last since it's clearly written as a big climactic finale that ties everything together. Some of the presentation isn't always consistent and up to snuff, like character sprites that vary in style (the redone Chase sprites from the anniversary update look far too clean compared to everyone else for one route) or some lame stock sound effects. You can kind of tell how much better of a grasp the writers had on the pacing and direction by the last few routes, and also how much more experimental they were willing to get compared to earlier routes. Carl's route is easily the weakest one because of this, being the only route in the entire game where the writing got stuck trying to pace out monologues with plot details that weren't very interesting and were also too far removed from the core ideas and themes, and with an ending that resolves its conflicts far too easily in a way that goes against the rest of the game's routes. The quality of the rest of the game immediately leaps into the stratosphere as soon as Leo's route starts, which only further makes Carl's route weaker by comparison. I kind of wish there were more backgrounds and CGs for scenes that the game either gets incredibly descriptive for, or not descriptive enough for, especially also because I think there could've been more truly effectively scary moments combining it all together. But frankly? I don't think these issues are grand enough to really hurt the whole package for me.

Echo is a game about trauma. It doesn't romanticize and pretty any of it up to look good. It shows how much it can warp people, change them from the person you might have known at one point, whether it was right that moment or years down the line. How it can separate, push people away from each other, how easy it is to just dwell upon a single horrible incident, or maybe multiple smaller ones, and have it take over your well-being and isolate yourself. But Echo is also about those very people, all of those struggles be damned, finding a way to just cope. Coping is not easy, and the shortcuts, the ones that help you skip and ignore those struggles rather than confronting and truly moving on, can be just as unhealthy and damaging. But rather, that you aren't alone in those struggles no matter how much they hurt, no matter where you are, no matter what has happened. That the people who matter most are the ones that come back for you, despite everything. The ones who were there for you from the beginning that you may have grown up with, the ones you might have remembered from a long time ago that you both see in another light now, or maybe the ones that you just met that will stand up with you. Despite whatever may ail you, you are still here and you can move on. It's that feeling, that message that makes Echo a game I admire and appreciate even despite the rough edges, and one that I hope more people can experience and get something out of as much as I did. For a game made by two writers and five artists, funded by only Patreon backers, made over the course of 6 years, and released entirely for free, I can have some complaints and things to nitpick but a lot of it just kind of simmers away when I can just tell you to go play it yourself right now.

wow. just wow. talk about a wonderful surprise. here, when i thought furries had become morally and creatively bankrupt, a game like this challenges me and proves me wrong. i cannot think of enough good things to say about this VN. it's deconstructive, it's subversive, it's challenging, it's impactful, it's subtle, and it sticks with you. it's most certainly not for the squeamish or anyone easily triggered by depictions of sexual assault, abuse, etc. but it's so worth your time if you can stomach that. i cannot remember the last time i played a game with such a legitimately well-written story and attention to detail for literary devices. just. wow. play this game if you're even remotely curious about it. do yourself that favor.