Trust the echo to escape the darkness

Surrounded in pitch black darkness, Dark Echo players must use utilize a visual concept of audio to make their way safely through dangerous and intimidating locations. The noises generated from your movements you make will reverberate off proximate obstacles, helping the players to discern the shape of the area and its surroundings. Sooner rather than later, your only sensory interaction with the world will summon an unspeakable abomination that gobbles echoes, souls and even sounds.

Gameplay

You must make it through 80 levels that will cause heart palpitations and impart to you a terrifying, constant terror every time you see a red line. A darkly sensual and dread inspiring soundscape, best “enjoyed” with surround sound headphones, sets a morbid tone for your escapade. Players of Dark Echo are required to solve puzzles and explore the dark world, but more importantly – they must survive at all costs.

Run away silently

On a Windows operating system, Dark Echo requires a minimum of Windows XP or higher. It requires a minimum of 512 MB of RAM, and 100 MB of storage space. For Apple iOS and Mac OS 10.7 or higher 512 MB of RAM is also a minimum, with 150 MB of storage space to have effective game play. In a sense, Dark Echo is about a memorization by trial and error of enemies and traps, since the ideal style of playing is to make absolutely zero noise. Complications arise when the game introduces a series of newer enemies and extra water, forcing you to haul groups further out of your way so you’ll have additional time to make your movements. Detecting enemies also causes complications, as detection depends on lines of sound hitting the enemy. These lines of sound may be pretty consistent, but it would seem to be more sensible to feature doppler style waves for consistent effects. Tossed rocks will tend to miss when hurled from medium range, unless rocks hit the wall to amplify the sound.

Stylish but not comprehensive

The game sounds lengthy with its 80 levels, but almost half of them are repeat levels with added levels of difficulty. The elements of horror survival are minimized by the veritable plethora of identical foes and repetitive series of deaths. The puzzle solving sections are just slight tweaks, and they offer no real brain stretching exercises beyond mere rote learning. The low level of in game tension and inundation of challenges leave the game with the overall feel of a hard slog to complete, despite in fact being very short. Completion would take little over five hours. Sadly it’s another artsy game that says nothing and puts style over substance. Overall the game is reasonable value, and enjoyable at first but in reality it puts a premium on style over substance and suffers as a result.