Echo Night: Beyond
Dozens are dead on the the moon. Some are angry. The rest want their stuff back.
Tags: Echo Night: Beyond Categories: PS2 Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Brad on Sep 12th, 2004
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Echo Night: Beyond (title page) | 1 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Adventure | No | ||
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In space, no one can hear you scream. On the moon, they can hear you but ask that you keep it down after 9:30. This isn’t too much to demand, as the screams fade to yawns in Echo Night Beyond for the Playstation 2.
The game starts out intriguing enough. You’ve crash landed your shuttle into a research outpost on the lunar surface and appear to be the sole survivor. Your wife has gone missing, and you remember little of what led up to your revival on the ship. The wrecked interior of the shuttle cabin is dark and slightly warped behind the all encompassing face shield of your space suit. Your pulse, your staggered breath, and heavy footprints ring out in the silence, broken occasionally by the groaning of the ship’s structure or the sparking circuitry of a smashed and useless utility android.
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Your mounted flashlight sweeps every darkened corridor. A voice calls to you from another deck. “Everyone’s dead.” You bump into something in your path and your heart races. You can feel your pulse in your very hands. A blurred, wispy form settles on the floor in front of you, a dispossessed spirit that swivels its head toward you and locks you with an otherworldly gaze.
“God! I need a drink! Could you fetch me my flask? It’s lying around here somewhere, but I’m too depressed and dead to get my ass off the floor and look for it myself. Haven’t quite got the hang of this haunting thing, you see? Be a friend.”
So begins the first of the approximately eight and a half billion fetch quests of Echo Night Beyond.
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Seemingly lost somewhere in 1996, this game employs the greatest tricks of the PSX gameplay toolbox, all rolled up in a very atmospheric setting that tricks you into thinking the payoff is right around the corner, that a truly frightening thing might pop out and make you sorry you ever found that level 3 access key card.
Sadly, that payoff never comes and you’re left with a long and trying series of backtracks to search for lost objects that will settle the spirits of lunar researchers and their families. It doesn’t take long to come to the same conclusion that your first ghostly host did. They’re all dead. Some of them are just a little more pissed off about it.
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Breaking away from the Survival Horror mold, Echo Night Beyond doesn’t muck around with all that nasty fun combat. Like Shag and Scoob, you’ve got to run from the smears of color and rising heart rate that accompanies a ghost attack, charging through any available doorway that lies off their strict patrol route before your heart explodes and you join their ranks. Another ghost might lie in wait on the other side, but it’s perfectly likely that this one is friendly and will disappear if you give it the chocolate it so craved.
The difference, as you’ll learn to see, is a wispy mist that clutches to the floors of some rooms, turning the ghosts that touch it evil and angry! These ghosts you run from! The other ghosts you talk to! Got it? Good!
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Angry ghosts are best avoided, easily done once you learn the patterns of where they walk. This is easy enough. Just hijack one of the security camera monitoring stations and slowly position the cameras to watch whatever hallway you want to get through. Then wait. For a long time. It’ll happen eventually… there! The ghost turns left every five minutes or so! That’s your chance! Haul ass, Shaggy!
Or, if you’re feeling a little more Fred and Velma, you can just run circles around them and get through a door before the ghost spots you. We like options.
Echo Night Beyond does have its high points. Early on this does feel like a genuinely atmospheric game. The slow, plodding movements of a man in a space suit actually feel reasonable and add a certain tension to the movement as you try to backpedal away from an angry spirit. Thankfully, developer Agetec was kind enough to offer three different control schemas, including the FPS free look and strafe movement that still evades Capcom to this day.
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Also, the sound draws you in. The heavy breathing inside your helmet, the echoing cries of the dead, and the general absence of anything else makes you feel truly isolated in a good 2001: A Space Odyssey sort of way. The voiceovers played by the ghosts, both malignant and benign are good, but either poorly written or poorly translated from the original Japanese. Very cliché.
The graphics are mostly bland and forgettable, the smears of blurry effect layered over the stiff and repetitive animations of the ghosts not quite achieving a Silent Hill kind of puppet scariness. The slight distortion through which the whole world is viewed is kind of cool, and with most of the game being seen through a flashlight beam, the darkness does hide some flaws well.
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The box touts the draw of the game’s exploration, and rightfully so. You’ll spend a lot of time backtracking over the same routes over and over again, scanning every room personally or via security camera for whatever object the damned call upon you to fetch this time. There are occasionally data entry puzzles that require you to pay attention to some signboard or document laying about, but they’re few and far between and not nearly enough to make up for the otherwise cookie-cutter linear progression of the rest of the game.
I picked up this game on the off chance that it might offer something different. It turns out that it’s just a few years behind. The atmosphere apparently comes from quite the pedigree of solitude-horror games reaching back to the Playstation 1. It’s just a shame it brought the game play with it to this century.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
|
- Great claustrophobic atmosphere. - A different kind of survival horror. No acid rounds necessary. |
6.0 |
| What Doesn't | |
|
- A fright payoff that never comes. - OOOOOOO! I'M AN ANGRY MOOOOOOON GHOOOOOOST! FETCH ME A... UH... TEDDY BEAR! |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| Nothing to write home about. Get Silent Hill 4 instead if you're in the mood for something a little scary. | |
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Tags: Echo Night: Beyond
Posted by Brad on Sep 12th, 2004 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
