Some Thoughts On "Echo" From A Man With Incomplete Information

[QUICK WARNING UP FRONT: There will be some heavy spoilers for Echo further down, and brief (pretty much spoiler free) discussion of Disco Elysium and Night in the Woods.]

A friend of mine recently asked me if I'd ever heard of the visual novel Echo, to which I immediately googled the game before saying no. My ears perked up at "furry dating visual novel with horror elements," and even moreso at "do you want to stream it for us," to which my answer was: "Yeah Buddy." I've been playing and streaming it to a small group of friends for a little while now in on-and-off sessions between 1-5 hours at a time, and I have to say it has thoroughly hooked me. I don't think it's perfect, but for a free visual novel it definitely deserves praise.

Echo is set in a dying southwestern town of the same name, a former gold rush hot spot that saw considerable issues with discrimination, brain drain and widespread substance abuse problems that definitely aren't based on any real life occurrences. These issues are seen through the eyes of Chase Hunter, a college-going journalistic faithful and previous resident of the desert town as he tries, (huge emphasis on tries,) to write a report on Echo's history. Between the pull to get back with your ex, hanging out with your childhood best buds and trying to avoid That Horrible Thing That Happened, the project takes a backseat to the connections the six of the main cast share and how Echo becomes a part of them, in some way shape or form.

Because it seemed like the most reasonable choice at the time, I ended up picking Leo as my first route, and I can't say I really regret it. For the uninitiated, Leo is your ex. Not your garden variety Messy Shouting Match Breakup Ex, but your Guy Who Is Still Hopelessly Obsessed And You Might Have Made Things Worse In That Regard Ex, which I found both refreshing and bleak in equal measure. Unlike the other route I've played which I'll touch on later, Leo's is the most restrictive of the two in that it focuses almost entirely on Leo and Chase's relationship and what it means to the two of them now.

Leo's route has the trappings of a well thought out getting-back-with-your-ex tale that, ultimately, ends up with you not back with your ex, or dead, which I feel is a lesson we can all learn from. The writing's on the wall not even halfway into the story, because Leo's most of the bad -sives; aggressive, obsessive, possessive, and, unfortunately hot. At the time in the story that I made the decision, however, he also seemed the most levelheaded given the information I had up until that point. I don't want to misconstrue this; there is no wrong choice of who to pursue, even if getting back with your ex when you know things have changed is fundamentally a bad idea.

This is still a visual novel with choices on who to pursue and how to go about it, in which there are "wrong" choices that lead to worse endings, but pursuing each character is really a matter of order more than anything else. I say this because the second-hand sense of difficulty that comes with trying to "make it work" again in Leo's route is portrayed in such a visceral and discomforting way. Among some of the more direct examples, (Leo nearly going overboard defending you from a childhood bully you two have history with, for one,) a situation that I found painfully relatable was a scene wherein Chase and Leo are at the library as the former tries to actually work on the project he came back to Echo for. Despite Chase's earnest attempts to study, Leo is obnoxious and cloying, trying his best to pull Chase away from his work, in an overly sappy moment that gave me douche-chills. I've not been in this exact situation, but I've definitely been on both ends of something similar at different times in my life, and it certainly feels real in a way that's uncomfortable. But like, in the good way, y'know?

Echo has a sizeable amount of writing I find cumbersome, stretches of internal dialogue in which Chase seems to go into deep detail about mundane events that feel more akin to screenplay direction scrawls than a horror visual novel. Through some foggy moments of suffocating detail, however, are these shining vignettes between characters that showcase their relationships, how they've grown up and the ways that adult life and trauma have shaped them. Probably my favorite example so far has been in Carl's route.

Probably your best childhood friend and a huge stoner, Carl was my second choice, and definitely ended up feeling like the flip side of the Hometown Return Tour coin. The two of you spend a good deal of time in the first act lazing around in his parent's massive house, playing video games and drinking. Primary attractions include Carl teasing Chase about maybe being a fat fetishist, testing the limits of drunken bi-curiosity, and beefing a job interview. I'm being flippant here, but there are some genuinely cute and touching moments during it all, and Carl ends up being more than the Fat Best Friend. Tense moments are abundant when the horror aspect comes into play, but I think I ended up liking the horror ties in Leo’s story more, partially due to the fact that I ended up hitting the bad ending in Carl’s route first, and I did initially feel sore about it. The suffocating, detail-oriented writing came in full force this time around, and it felt a little disheartening to go through what was (largely) the same route again to see a very similar path. Carl’s emotional arc does end up a genuinely rewarding one, though, and one that does not hesitate to display Chase as not the center of the universe in these character's lives. Huge props to the good ending route in both this and Leo’s route, they’re fantastic, bittersweet and ultimately just very satisfying bits of writing.

I do feel a compulsion to talk about the bad endings here as well— Leo’s is downright brutal. Whereas his good route involves Chase finally saying what needs to be said, that they need to call it quits and move on, ultimately resulting in the two leading damaged lives but trying their best to push forward, the bad route involves Chase saying it can still work. The gang, all stuck in Echo at this point, hatch a half-thought plan to hop a train to get out of town, and in the middle of their escape attempt, Leo ends up pulling you back, whether through an obsessive jealousy, a momentary possession from the town’s hysteric spirits, or both. The train separates Chase’s legs from his body, in a callback moment to a piece of news Chase found from the town’s bloody history wherein the same thing happened to someone a century ago. The rest of the route is spent bleeding out in Leo’s arms as he swears that he can “make things work.” It’s harrowing, incredibly upsetting, and what I’d consider the writers of Echo flicking you on your nose and going “don’t have sex with your ex. dummy.” It’s almost funny in the darkest possible way.

Carl’s, while I feel is less engaging, delves a bit deeper into the town’s history, as you figure out that Carl and Jenna, one of the group’s other players, are descendants of two infamous figures in the town’s history, and as the hysteria sets into Echo, the two of them become possessed. While Carl’s bad ending involves the two of them succumbing to the possession, eventually killing Jenna and disposing of the evidence of his wrongdoing, (Chase included as “evidence,”) the spirits of the children that Carl’s ancestor killed rip his soul from Carl’s body, leaving him an empty husk as he realizes what’s happened after the fact, and leaving a burning home full of evidence behind the two. While an interesting premise, I feel it’s not given much room to breathe, which is a damn shame. Ultimately, these bad endings feel not so much like punishments, but overt statements that it is simply best, in most cases, for us to move on, no matter the pain that may come with it.

I’ve been secretly obsessed with the phrase “you can’t go home again” for most of my twenties. From my introduction to it in the form of a DJ Shadow song sharing the same name, to the well-meaning but maybe naïve Tumblr I just found while googling the phrase, my admittedly sentimental ass has found it impossible to pry myself away from the idea. Good times are just that. Hanging in the fading memory of a good time for too long eventually makes it impossible to move forward. To simply cast out all our good memories as things we can never revisit or take solace in from time to time, however, is just as harmful as feeling the need to return to simpler times. It’s a difficult balance to keep, and I think the pandemic, as well as our continued march towards climate disaster and how hard it is to simply exist some days as someone who wasn’t born inordinately wealthy, has sought to throw that off. It’s easier to cope with such awful circumstances when we have our best times in our back pocket.

A lot of the games I've played that I've taken the most from in the last 5 or so years of my life have had a lot to say about this, and Echo is no exception.

I also can’t help but shake the feeling that this sentiment, along with the sense of capitalistic burnout and malaise is going to continue to be a constant theme in (particularly, outsider) media for years to come. I’ve been both trying to play Echo and write this blog post without bringing up Night in the Woods, perhaps one of my top 10 favorite games of all time, because I fear I might implicate myself as a man who just can't shut up about furry video games, but... oh well.

While Echo began development two years before NitW’s release in 2017, the similarity between the two is something I really can’t stop thinking about. While the circumstances surrounding Mae Borowski and Chase Hunter’s return to their respective hometowns are quite different, they both return to these troubled, dying mining towns that younger generations are leaving behind, because they simply cannot provide for them. Further technological advancement and an unwillingness to help those struggling and dying in impoverished areas is one of the myriad ways in which the system fails us, both in our reality and the stories we're telling. This goes deeper yet, as both Echo and NitW have paranormal phenomenon that seek to explain or act as stand-ins for real world issues. In both games, and maybe in our world as well, there is a hole at the center of everything. I’m not going to get into my third example because this post is already long enough, and we'll be here all day, but I'm doing some important, dot-connecting work here.

I have no super elegant way to end this blog post that I thought was going to be way shorter than this aside from: I currently can't wait to get back into this game. I apologize if some parts of this meander and don't flow too well, but I swear some sort of gay little spirit overtook me about halfway through writing. If you're into these types of stories in the way that I extremely am and can stomach some existential horror, I encourage you to check Echo out!