Echo
Description
Echo is a top-down narrative adventure about a woman with Dementia. You play as the woman's subconscious as she attempts to piece together lost memories. Wander around a world shrouded in darkness looking for sentimental items that can trigger a forgotten memory.
Though you must be quick, the disease, represented by a fog that will be continuously shrinking aims to reset all of your progress. Every neural pathway that you build by placing an item inside of the fountain holds the fog back.
Currently there is a bug with the reset that occurs when the fog reaches you. If you get reset by the fog, unfortunately you will need to refresh the page. The reset is causing a soft-lock due to the memories not getting set back to the correct order. My apologies.
Controls
LMB - Moves the character around.
RMB - Interacts with objects in the world, such as the sentimental items and the memory fountain.
SPACE - Sends out a ping to either the nearest item or the memory fountain, so that you don't get lost.
Credits
Music is not made by me as I am musically inept: Frequency of Sleep Meditation | Pixabay
Eternal credit to those who inspired this project.
Gameplay Video
Download
Comments
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Great job. This game made me think about my father and our relationship. This did a really good job of using ludo-narrative mechanics to evoke a feeling and story about the human condition. I enjoyed navigating your space a lot.
Your player character movement felt quite nice and the art is really awesome. Your use of "fog of war" space rendering is really impactful and beautiful. This is a great game.
I wasn't immediately sure that you were supposed to bring memory circles to the pond, so for a while I was trying to bring one orb to another. Eventually I figured it out.
Before I learned that you could "ping" the location of orbs/the pool, I spent a lot of time seeking the orbs, which really felt like it played into the theme. Although for mechanical reasons I see why the ping became necessary, once I found it existed, I sort of missed when I wasn't able to use it, as it solved the game for me.
I found some bugs in your game. One time I was not able to drop off my memory circle, leading to me to be stuck for a while, but also able to broaden my horizon infinitely. That was as far as I was able to go. A previous "level" lead me to be stuck until the world collapsed on me. That might be by design, I'm not sure.
When the butterfly reaches it's target and the mouse is held down, the sprite swaps back and forth rapidly. This could be fixed by only moving the sprite if the requested distance is of a certain minimum distance, or switching it into an idle state when it reaches it's target range.
For accessibility I found it a bit taxing holding the mouse button to move after a while.
Firstly, thank you for your incredibly kind words! Secondly thank you very much for playing my game.
I completely agree that the goal of the game wasn't inherently clear. I was in the process of implementing a simple interactive tutorial (along with many other things). I fell just short of the deadline.
The becoming stuck is definitely a new one. I will look into this further.
Before the deadline I did send the game to play testers. They too seemed to become soft-locked in the same manner. I scrambled to find the cause, but idk if it was my general rustiness or just poor time management but I wasn't able to find the cause. The people that did test the game for me did say that when they got soft-locked, reloading the page allowed them to complete the game without issue.
However, I'm going to assume that wasn't the case for you, so I apologize that you weren't able to complete my game. I'm hopeful that the future of the project is plagued less by these issues and your feedback will help in that endeavor so thank you again!
Wow, this game goes deep. I enjoyed this game and it made me feel things. Good job!
Thank you that means a lot!