Echo: Secrets of the Lost Cavern E3 2005 Impressions

Adventure gamers looking for a fresh story and some intriguing gameplay mechanics will want to check out Echo: Secrets of the Lost Cavern, which puts you in the shoes of Arok, a shamanistic caveman fresco painter. If you're like us and can't get enough of the caveman fresco painting genre, then you'll be happy to know that Echo lives up to the standards set by its predecessors, and then some.

We had a chance to sit down with DreamCatcher for a behind-closed-doors demo of the game and came away suitably impressed by the graphical style of the game and the unique gameplay. The game looks superb, in a word, with what appears to be 3D-rendered backgrounds that are intricately detailed and fit into the game's brown-and-red color scheme. (You do, after all, apparently spend a good deal of time in caves.) You are capable of looking around with mouselook at all angles, but you don't have free movement; instead, you'll be clicking around in the world to move from vantage point to vantage point, like in earlier Myst games. When you reach a vantage point, you'll have to solve puzzles and find items by mousing over hotspots.

One of the first puzzles we were shown involved Arok being stuck in a cave with a bear. If he moved down off a ledge on which he was hiding, he'd be eaten by the bear. There was also a pool of water that Arok was intending to cross, but since he apparently can't swim, we were told that he'd have to find a way to cross the water by dropping stalagmites from the ceiling.

To get by the bear, then, Arok had to use his fresco painting skills. On the wall of the cave, there was a painting of the situation, which was actually animated. A representation of Arok was standing above the ledge with a number of small rocks. By clicking on the rocks to pick them up, then clicking on a part of the cave in the painting, he could throw the painted rocks into the cave painting. By doing so, he managed to bounce rocks off of the cave wall onto the bear, confusing it enough so that it eventually turned around and hid in a small hole in the wall of the cave. By using more rock ammo, Arok then managed to dislodge some larger stones above the hole, causing a bit of a landslide and trapping the bear. The weird thing is that these changes affected the real world; when Arok left the painting, the real bear was really stuck in a real hole by real rocks. This bizarre reality-altering power seems to be a pretty cool way to represent puzzles in an adventure game, and we're hoping that some of the later puzzles in the game are appropriately complex.

In addition to the wonderful graphics and unique gameplay, Echo features a number of beautifully prerendered cutscenes and should ship with 10 to 15 hours of gameplay. Keep an eye on GameSpot for more info on Echo: Secrets of the Lost Cavern as they become available.