Lone Echo: Review
It took me two goes to get into this, as it suffers a bit from style over substance, with the puzzles being far less stimulating than the spacey setting. But now it's clicked I can see why it's heralded.
For being the first game to successfully combine bespoke gameplay mechanics with lavish AAA gloss, this is close to a must-play. The feeling of cruising around tinkering with an ailing space station is great early on, and when it leans more towards 'environmental puzzle' exploration it's just enough to ring the changes, while still being in-keeping with its 'walking sim' leanings.
Or should I say floating sim? The zero-G motion really is a joy. They're not the first to do it by any means, but the execution is excellent, with 'inverse kinematic' arms, and a multitude of things and places to fling yourself off and around.
Even though the 'tasks' are somewhat rote, the sensation of saving lives and surviving against the odds is strangely elevated by the 'raise that electrical charge here' so you can 'cut your way through that malfunctioning conduit there' pragmatics.
I also warmed to their radiation scanning technique, which allowed for a more free-form feeling puzzle-pathing approach to navigation.
It's all tied together well by the pleasing narrative hook, centred on the NPC human companion to your player automaton. It's all very neat, with you respawning into new shells as you deal with hazards, while she shows obvious attachment to your persistent personality (expressed, simply enough, through dialogue choices & lots of canned chat). The actress has a strong presence, which is accentuated by the astro-animations that see her free-float around the place convincingly, and is only undercut by a certain deadness around the eyes. The broader narrative, while not afraid of some clunking tropes, is an enjoyable sci-fi backdrop to that relationship.
CONS
* Massive initial load time, even with SSD
* Very high specs (I still had to run it on low even with a 1080 for the outside stuff)
* Puzzles are very much on the simple end
PROS
* Environments are pretty great, with the odd grand set piece
* The characterisation, acting and plot are all pretty effective. (Aside from a slight deadness to her face the Liv character really feels like someone you've had an adventure with by the end).
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