[rwp-review id=”0″]
This week’s App of the Week is a game, but it isn’t Flappy Bird or Candy Crush. It isn’t one of those games that just make you swipe left and right with minimal brain power *cough* Temple Run *cough*. This week’s app of the week is butt clenching. It makes you sit on the edge of your seat and it’ll make you scream in terror when your cat jumps on your lap to snuggle. From RAC7 studios, I give you: Dark Echo.
First off, discount that Story rating above. This game doesn’t have a story but it certainly doesn’t merit losing points due to that.
If you’re looking for a game that’s full of bright colours or that’s filled with cute sounds as you make an avatar accomplish something, you should stop reading and click away now. Dark Echo, as can be guessed from its name, is game that plays upon and makes you utilise your hearing. As a result, good quality headphones are a must for this game. The game itself gives you a top-down view of a pair of footsteps which belong to you. Moving yourself in game is done by touching the screen; the footsteps will walk towards where ever you’re touching. As you walk, your heavy foot hauls create noise that’s visualised by white lines which travel away from you until they rebound of an obstacle and come back to their point of origin. It’s through this method that the layout of your surroundings is visualised for the few fleeting seconds that you’re moving. You can also hold down on the centre of the screen, where your footsteps are, for different durations of time to simulate stomping your feet, which creates further ripples of sound that emanate from you.
This reminds me of another similar game called The Nightjar which featured the voice of Benedict Cumberbatch as the narrator. While Dark Echo doesn’t have any such names to its credit, it’s no less prestigious. Chapters 1 to 4 of Dark Echo function as a tutorial, guiding you through the basic mechanics of the game, showing you how to analyse pitfalls and traps, dangers which are visualised through distinctive red lines. Later on in the tutorial, in a chapter eerily called “Fear”, you’re given the realisation that you’re not alone and can be hunted by unseen horrors in the dark, which are again represented by red lines. On my first run through of the game I miserably failed at running away from the enemy by constantly bumping into walls and corners. The sickening screams and sounds of a creature ripping meaty chunks of my flesh and crunching my bones to pieces that accompanied these failings were so highly detailed it made me double check if I was missing a limb or two.
I got through eight levels of butt clenching horror before I felt a prostate exam would be necessary. Thinking I’d done spectacularly well with my progression, I was dismayed to find out that seventy-two more levels still awaited. Gulping for breath and hugging my cat so hard I was pretty sure I turned it into a stuffed toy, I put my headphones back on and dove back into the game.
The next twenty levels occupied the better part of an hour or so of my time. Through tips in the game and from trial and error, I discovered that you could essentially tiptoe past aggressive creatures by gently tapping the screen in the direction you wanted to move in. This itself prevented many a limb from being ripped from my body, though at one point I had to tiptoe in between two of the dog like creatures; the resulting pressure and fear left me unable to formulate words for quite a while.
The difficulty level is so gradual you don’t even realise it; you go from just running through levels, lighting up the path through the visualised sound generated by your loud footsteps, to slowly tiptoeing through hallways to avoid making noise. I’m not saying the game is easy, it’s far from that, later on you have to throw rocks to try and generate noise in a different area and thus draw enemies towards the diversion, or you’d have to loudly stomp your foot to draw a creature away from a passage it was blocking and then tiptoe past it as it comes charging towards you. However the tiptoeing becomes a problem later on as the surfaces through which you walk change. Pools of water are especially deadly since they slow you down and the splashing they generate was enough to turn down my volume a bit, so finely attuned did my hearing become after hours of playing Dark Echo. Often, you just barely make it to the exit, conscience of the fact that if it was another metre away, you would be a pile of finely picked bones. It’s these sort of adrenaline filled moments that make you eager to play the next level or to replay a certain level again and try to complete it by using different tricks.
In the end, Dark Echo is fantastic little horror game that has perfected the term: minimalist game design. It’s the sort of game where you’re left with a sense of despair upon reaching a hard level, but one which instills fortitude in you, making you revisit again and again until you beat the level and ultimately the game.
Dark Echo is absolutely brilliant and definitely justifies the $1.99 price tag it comes with.
You can download Dark Echo from Amazon here, the Apple App Store here and the Google Play Store here. And if you, like me, are a PC gamer, you can get it off Steam here.
What do you think of Dark Echo? Do you think a minimalist game such as this could be compared to AAA horror games? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
