The atmosphere is chilling and the heart-pounding encounters with spirits add a lot to an otherwise standard adventure.
User Rating: 7 | Nebula: Echo Night PS2
It's not often that a niche title like Echo Night: Beyond finds its way onto a console. If you are familiar with the original Echo Night, you may remember it as a graphically deficient puzzle-solving game, in which you piece together an intricate time-traveling story by releasing imprisoned souls. In the most recent incarnation, you will find yourself trapped in space, piecing together a story from wandering ghosts as you search for your missing wife. At its best, you will be immersed in the tense atmosphere and intrigued by the creepy and subdued pacing. Unfortunately, many gamers will be put off by the traditional frustrations to be found within, which pull you from complete immersion just as you find yourself involved. In Echo Night: Beyond, you are the sole survivor of a crash during your lunar honeymoon voyage. The other passengers, including Claudia, your betrothed, are missing, and you soon find yourself searching for her in the desolate remains of an abandoned space colony. The station is not totally unpopulated, however: the former occupants remain in the form of specters that wander the halls, imploring you for help and helping you piece together the story of the mysterious red rock mined there and the fog that gradually crept in, killing them but still keeping them captive. What is this rock, what does it have to do with this sinister fog, and what is the enormous structure in the center of the station? Like many other creep-fests, Echo Night: Beyond attempts to make a name for itself in its manner of storytelling, and not necessarily in the intricate but ultimately lackluster plot of the spirit-infested spaceport. Filling a game with spooky mist, reverberating moans, and surprise scares is the gaming equivalent of a carnival funhouse: cool for a cheap, creepy thrill, but immediately forgettable, if there is no real substance to give the mood any true point. If you were hoping to find some Silent Hill-brand horror, you won't find it here. EN:B features no combat or other action. What you will discover is some measured, old-style adventure exploration in the grand Myst tradition. Your quest is done in a first-person view, with a simple HUD depicting your space suit and a heart rate monitor. The crux of the gameplay is in the solving of the game's numerous puzzles, exploring new areas, and propelling the story forward. During your travels, the ghosts you encounter are of special significance, and come in two varieties: benign and evil. When you encounter them, your heart rate will increase; mildly, in the case of benign ghosts, and fatally, when meeting evil ones. These encounters provide the most fascinating moments in Echo Night: Beyond, giving a sense of urgency in a genre often lacking it. You can run to the nearest ventilation system to clear the fog, thus making the evil ghost harmless; or conversely, run to the closest exit and wait for your heart to stabilize until you figure out where the vent control is. Most of your quests and story continuations are provided by the more kindly spirits, who may ask you to reunite them with their missing daughter, or find a stuffed lion and deliver it to their mischievous brother. However, as with many games in this style, you are effectively alone, going about your business in relative silence until you encounter the next ghost or trigger the next cutscene. You will also encounter various control rooms strewn about the space station, where you can use security cameras to check out areas before exploring them. The same cameras will trigger past conversations of the now-ghostly occupants, helping you piece together story remnants, or giving you puzzle clues. They will also show you the location of spirits within, an important element, as you usually cannot see them in person until you are right upon them. Those same rooms also contain save points, which are frequent enough to be helpful but not so common as to lull the player into a sense of security. Your trusty flashlight is also important, lighting the way in the dark, dank corridors. It does not have unlimited battery capacity though, so you will find the power cells strewn about the levels to be helpful indeed. In a neat touch, if your heart rate has gotten dangerously fast, your vision becomes limited, further darkening the mood. It's too bad that old-fashioned adventure gaming also brings along a bevy of old-fashioned complaints. The puzzles aren't Riven-style difficult, but they are obtuse enough to cause some head-scratching. Miss that video disc on the floor, or the keycard in the top bunk? Can't find the work order papers? Then you will have some traditional backtracking in store, by way of Echo Night: Beyond's own brand of pixel hunting – made even more annoying by the difficulty in maneuvering the camera in just the right way to view or pick up the item you need. Even the control scheme is old-school; unlike in most modern first-person games, in which you use the right analog stick to view your surroundings, you will strafe and look on the vertical axis by using the controller's triggers. It's also worth noting that like in the original title, EN:B features multiple endings – four, in this case - although they aren't engaging enough to warrant a replay, just a quick restart from your last save point to make a different choice. Depending on your puzzle-solving prowess, you would likely finish the game in around ten hours. In a game filled with deep-space exploration, it's too bad that there really isn't more too see. Given the space-station setting, the monochromatic surroundings can be understandable, but only to a point. Most of what you see consists of various shades of gray, with some flashes of blue or green but little else. We love the shiny, reflective floors and walls, which give a metallic feel to the structures, and in combination with some moody lighting and dense fog, the effect is quite attractive. It's easy to miss, though, when noticing the blocky objects, under-detailed rooms, or cookie-cutter textures. Also quite noticeable is the significant frame-rate stuttering when you move the camera around an area littered with objects. Considering the lack of polygons and detail, we are stymied by this phenomenon. Loading times are sometimes amazingly long, and on one occasion, we experienced a bug in which text was replaced by white blocks. While cutscenes are generally competent enough, the completely unsynchronized sound in some scenes while characters talk, as if this were a badly-dubbed Bruce Lee movie, is almost laughable. Still, the foggy, minimal graphics add the proper mood to a title that is almost solely based on its chilling ambience. Fortunately, your ears will be somewhat more pleased than your eyes. Echo Night: Beyond is largely silent, save for your breathing and footsteps, so crashes and ghostly moans have a chilling effect. On the occasions when the game features music, it is appropriate and eerie, and even the Beethoven sonata in the opening credits is worth hearing. Voice acting is mediocre, featuring an array of incomprehensible accents and muddled reverb - because as we all know, spirits' voices sound as if they are in an empty bathroom. Still, From Software's approach to the sound is one of minimalism, and for the most part, it works, making the haunted-house thrills of glass unexpectedly breaking - and the sparse, spooky soundtrack - that much more effective. There is no doubt that Echo Night: Beyond appeals to a very specific audience, and those that like thoughtful adventuring will find enough appealing content to warrant a rental – or a purchase, if the slightly discounted price tag appeals to them. The atmosphere is chilling and the heart-pounding encounters with spirits add a lot to an otherwise standard adventure. Even if you consider yourself a fan of the genre, though, you may see through this ethereal haze of a game to discover that in the end, there isn't much meat on its foggy bones.
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