Echo is a 18+ horror visual novel that I've recently had the opportunity to play and think about. MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD.

This is a repackage of some of the thoughts I've already written about on my cohost! page, so if you've already read it there, this won't be anything new. Additionally, while the game is 18+, this article won't have any explicit content in it. Additionally, any and all major spoilers have been hidden behind clickthroughs. This is a game I will recommend you play before spoiling too much, if you're interested.

Patricia Taxxon's Art, Furries, God is an incredible video on its own. If you are a furry and care about art, I consider it a must-watch.

Incidentally, and only tangentially related to the thesis of the video, Patricia's recommendation for The Echo Project's Adastra finally got me to try it, and I devoured it over a weekend, only once needing to stop, go find my boyfriend, and sob into his arms. (That's once without the boyfriend. Make no mistake: I cried multiple times.)

That actually wasn't my first Patricia Taxxon video though; my first was her Marble Blast series retrospective, in which she recommends The Echo Project's... well, Echo. Having completed Adastra I knew I needed to read this one, too.

It is, as it says on the tin, an 18+ gay furry psychological-horror visual novel about the return of the protagonist to their childhood small town, meeting back up with their five friends, digging up old trauma, and resolving mysteries about the town itself.

When playing choice-y games or visual novels, I try to keep to a strict "make honest choices until you get to at least one ending", and for better or for worse, consider that my own personal "canonical" ending. While it occasionally gets me burned hard (looking at you, Nekojishi, with your not-merely-bad-but-horrifyingly-depressing bad endings), it generally keeps me best engaged with the story. However, I broke this rule in following with Patricia's recommendation to "save Flynn's route for last".

I also broke the rule in a slightly different way, opting to lean away from Leo's route the first time around, since I was scared picking the character that i would be most personally attracted to / attached to might fuck me up (see Lin-hu, Amicus). The final route choice was TJ, then Carl, then Leo, then Jenna, then Flynn.

TJ's route

With those two constraints, I chose TJ's route first. Got fucked up, but in a different way where I just want to give everyone in the story a hug. Or therapy. Or an exorcist. Maybe all three. No spoilers, but this was a hell of a first route to have chosen. Wish I had saved this one for at least second, just because I think the other routes benefit from not knowing what happens here. Definitely the most compelling route for me.

Carl's route

It is incredibly fascinating how Echo is able to not just draw from different parts of the plot for horror to focus on, but also seemingly use different styles of horror to do so. Carl's route was a lot more of a ghost story and gave a lot of background to the setting of Echo, and felt a lot more like a supernatural horror flick. That's about the most I can say without being a hell of a lot more spoilery.

I definitely found Carl's the scariest in the game, and the first version of the ending that I got was a gut punch and a half. (Context-free spoilers for which one: house fire). Since I played TJ's route first with exactly one ending, I learned here in Carl's that yes, some routes actually DO have multiple endings, so of course I had to stay up and awake to see them all. good video game

Leo's route

I had predicted that i would be most attached to Leo, so I saved him for third so as to... somewhat shield myself from inevitable pain. That didn't happen as much as I expected, in part due to... well. There's not many ways I can speak about it without major spoilers, so this paragraph gets a extra-special no-for-real-this-is-a-major-spoiler, spoiler warning.

Regardless, yeah, this one was good and the ending is quite deliciously bittersweet, a feeling this game doesn't give you often.

Jenna's route

Okay! The only route to make me actually cry, and also and stop and question my sexuality. (I think the best descriptor for me right now is "pan-gay". That is, if you date me, it WILL be gay, regardless of either gender.) That, or I'm just a sucker for hot fluffy fox ladies. potato tomato

This is, as others have pointed out, the happiest version of the story. The kinda "maybe things aren't perfect, but stuff is looking up". Well, for some of the cast at least.

Flynn

A bitter final route to swallow, this one. Mostly just leaving me clamoring for more. I suppose that's why the other games in the Echo universe are there.

Poor fucker has not caught a break literally this entire game. I just feel bad for him.

However, I don't feel this was the strongest writing of the game. To elaborate I have to be a heck of a lot more spoilery, so...

However, I could be biased. I do think Flynn is a really compelling character and probably my favorite. What can I say, guess I've got a thing for six foot seven tsundere predators.

Overall thoughts

Someone once praised Adastra for its highly efficient storytelling, able to take disparate story themes, character arcs, and plot beats and blend them together, often writing in multiple "layers" of engagement at the same time. A single scene can press themes, develop characters, and in Echo, be spooky, all at the same time. It never quite lets you disengage with any one story line or character arc because it will almost always swing back around.

I'm usually not one for horror, usually, but I feel that Echo really did benefit from never taking the easy route and giving the sappy slice-of-life stuff (even though that's what everyone draws). And in doing so, it can paint an emotionally honest picture of how stuff like abusive relationships, depression, poverty, drugs, and queerphobia affect, traumatize, and yes, echo out to other people, if not literally honest (because demon ghosts aren't real).

A couple last story beats

• One tiny thing that I loved in the game. As a queer dog who grew up in a dying train town... holy shit, the train sound effect legitimately fooled me the first time, despite having moved 100+ miles away a couple years ago.

• This game has a good way of making you question the fuck out of literally everyone who says "I'm fine", ever, for any reason, because you watch Chase lie "I'm fine" out to everyone else, and then watch everyone else lie to Chase about it as well. It's a painfully honest depiction of everyone painting over their problems instead of engaging with them, which might just be the central thesis of the game. Oh, besides dating hot furry men.

• In addition to the above, the same can also be said for when characters describe their motivations for their behavior with "I don't know", since we also watch Chase take mysterious external influence and then respond with that when asked why he's doing that.

• And with those two things, part of what makes the whole game so heartwrenching is the knowledge that, yes, these characters have flaws, and yes, their avoidant behavior is reinforcing those flaws to their and their friends' suffering, but that there's obviously an external force amplifying all those problems to eleven and a half. Maybe in another town, another timeline, another place altogether, separate from this corrupting thing, there was a way for everyone to recognize, start to fix, and perhaps atone for their behavior. Somewhere else, these people might have reckoned with their problems. But not in echo.

• The cyclical bits of the game are masterfully written, very well lined up. It does an excellent job of inducing horror when you are able to see shit coming due to not just foreshadowing from the current route, but all the other routes as well. Some elements appear and disappear without much cross-route elaboration, but there are few enough of these so as to not be too disappointing.

• The repeated motif of otters, in Chase's eyes, being "swimming clowns" to everyone else feels like queer subtext for... well, being queer/gay in straight society. And it does a really good job of depicting how exactly it feels to be reminded that the performance of queerness in straight society is something that will, even in the best of times, be an object of entertainment; picked up, laughed at a bit, and discarded.

Good game. Very, very good game. Only cried once though, so it's clearly inferior to Adastra (cried 4+ times, and more than that if you count all the times I cried to the soundtrack), BAD game I wanted to see the OTTER and the WOLF do a SMOOCH