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Ultra Ultra finally shared a trailer, that details the unusual gameplay mechanics and shows clever gamedev content re-usage.
We’ve told you about ECHO quite some time ago. It’s a very interesting experimental project, which takes a lot of liberties with traditional gameplay mechanics. You play as En – a girl, who wakes up from stasis. She finds herself in a Palace – a marvel of the old civilization. The palace is inhibited by echos – direct copies of En, which repeats everything you do. The trailer explains all the mechanics much better than me.
The Palace creates “Echoes”, exact copies of you in every way, that behaves like you and only do the things you do. So the way you play the game shapes your enemy. If you run, soon the Echoes will get faster. If you sneak, they will get stealthier. If you shoot, they will start to shoot back. The game constantly reacts to your every choice and input.
The Palace “reboots” every few minutes, resulting in a blackout. This blackout-cycle is the rhythm at which the “Echoes” get updated with your latest behavior, learning and unlearning from your actions. During the blackout the palace is blind, giving you the freedom to act without consequence. This is the time to run and gun and do all the things you don’t want the Echoes to learn.
What’s interesting about ECHO is the wonderful work with the environment. The levels look absolutely gorgeous, thanks to clever design and beautiful lighting/material combo. Plus the devs saved a bunch of time of content creation, reusing character models and arch-meshes. Very clever approach to game production. You can check out the game at PAX WEST. Full release will be someday in spring 2017.