I always do my best to finish the games I review, and while there are some that I may have taken the easy way out, very few are entries that I have given up on. Echoic Memory is not one of those games. I really wanted to finish this game, as it's a somewhat interesting concept for a game and the visuals are genuinely really well done. However, this game is an absolute slog to play. It's an auditory matching game. The game plays a several second-long audio clip, and you need to identify which of the four to sixteen samples matches it. Many of these tracks only vary slightly from each other, making the choice difficult. If the game had stopped there, this would've been an enjoyable, if routine game. What makes this game awful is that the audio tracks are all... shifted? corrupted? altered? in some way. By turning the crank, these changes are undone and you can try and "tune into" the actual audio. This mechanic simply does not work. It's very unclear, at least to a musical layperson, what turning the crank is actually doing, so I have no idea how far or which way the crank should actually be turned to restore the audio to its clean state. There are some entire levels that no matter what I did, I didn't end up with anywhere close to the clean audio tracks, which makes distinguishing the differences between them an exercise in futility. The game only gives you three mistakes per level and, even worse, there's a time limit. I really strove to finish this one, but got to the point where I was dreading playing it so much that I was avoiding my Playdate altogether. In fairness to the other games then, I will throw in the towel on this one and move on with my life. It's a shame too, this is one of the better looking Playdate games, and there's a fairly interesting story about a new worker attempting to fix these machines who are clearly growing in sentience. My guess is that there's ghosts in the shell, but I guess I'll never find out.