Echoes

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/6/25
Playtime: 3h (2 endings)

Echoes was a seminal composition in the discography of the band Pink Floyd. From their album Meddle, it was a watershed, melding their established trippy and entrancing musical compositions with a dramatic leap forward in lyrics and artistic preoccupation. Taking half the album, the work was notice that, as popular as they were, they were on the precipice of a quantum leap forward. A leap that would deliver seminal works: Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals (fight me, it belongs in this list!), and The Wall.

Is this to be the legacy of Ben’s Echoes as well? Well first off reviewer, that is a DEEPLY unfair comparison to even posit. Though there are, as any time a full-of-their-conceit reviewer turns their mind to something, ways to wring out some parallels. Maybe I can buy some good will by revealing that Pink Floyd was the first band I resonated with in a non-superficial way, and consumed large chunks of my personality through high school. Meaning for me, even drawing the comparison displays the esteem I have for this author’s works. An ECHO of it, if you will. Uh, you won’t? Oh reader, I have bad news about the conceit of this review…

This author leapt onto my radar with their overwhelming graphical prowess, their composition skills if you will. Professional, evocative, superbly integrated with gameplay and narrative, I can’t think of anyone doing it better currently. On top of that, Ben is creatively voracious. Different platforms, UI experimentation, Google Forms fer crissake. Deeply creative and engaging premises, across multiple genres, crafting finely tuned, friction-free gameplay experiences that are so unfair to the rest of us that maybe he DESERVES to be compared to a towering super group just to take him down a peg.

This work feels like a fractal view of the entire ludography - an anthology of different playstyles, different genres, different narrative aims all bouncing off and resonating with each other in a uniting narrative. Multiple movements all building to a unified whole, as the movements of Pink Floyd’s Echoes does. A quick survey:

Sticks and Stones: the longest play of the three, itself a fractal composition of three movements. A fantasy dungeon crawl leveraging parser tradition, but with a streamlined and zippy arrow-button interface. It is peppered with wit and leverages familiar tropes both as shorthand player guidance and to twist them to humorous or gameplay effect. It is so effective and confident it looks much easier than it is.

Treasure of the Deep: a short, linear horror narrative, employing language not exactly in a pastiche of HP Lovecraft, but HP adjacent, evoking the feel of it without slavishly recreating it. Like the gameplay above, the pitfalls here are numerous and deep, but so deftly avoided it seems deceptively simple. If only there was a word for something that rang and reminded of an original…

Labyrinth: a quasi-ancient-Greek multiplayer escape room, leveraging mythology for soft guidance and mood, but leaning hard into escape room style puzzle play. The puzzles were clever, and put a premium on multiplayer communication (even if schizophrenically driven by a single player).

All three established gameplay conventions, thematic preoccupations and lore unique to their episode but reinforcing and resonating with each other. It would already be an impressive submission if left there. But no! The Master Conductor then unites all three, interweaving those disparate gameplay, themes and lores into a cohesive, finely tuned whole! A series of puzzles follow that stitch them all together in a wonderfully satisfying clockwork that once again appears natural and inevitable when in fact is out of reach to all but the most accomplished watch makers. Kind of like the recurring single note in (musical) Echoes that launches multiple musical divergences, only to reassert at the end.

Y’know what I haven’t remarked on? The graphics. They are, as usual, uniformly wonderful when employed, but just not the focus of the work here. They precisely fit the concerns of the work, enhancing both gameplay and dramatic beats, but still subordinate to the experience. In some ways they are the Careful With That Axe, Eugene of the work, their accomplished quality setting prior expectations, and informing but ultimately only one facet of a larger whole.

So, is this the notice of Ben’s coming quantum leap into superstardom? Is his Dark Side right around the corner? I dunno man, I can’t see the future. Even if not, even if I posit a timeline where Meddle was the last Pink Floyd album of consequence, that album itself was an accomplishment few bands achieve. I still listen to it ALL THE TIME. This feels like the creative space this Echoes occupies.

And here is where the Floyd parallels end. I do not recommend gummies with THIS Echoes.

Horror Icon: Pinhead
Vibe: Kaleidescope
Polish: Gleaming
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my work I would be so astonished that I could produce something this well honed that I would fall into a creative paralysis over the prospects of further work. I am confident, like Floyd, the actual author will not be so stricken.

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.

This game was entered in Spring Thing 25, and it was a pleasure to play. It consists of three smaller games all tied together by a larger meta-story.

The first game I played was Sticks and Stones, which reminded me a lot of Tavern Crawler, an IFComp winner from a few years ago. This mini-game is played completely by arrow keys, with arrows serving both as navigation and as ways to interact. It includes combat, a money system, two protagonists, a variety of NPCs, and made me feel like I was playing a really enjoyable game (as Spring Thing organizer, I can reveal that this game actually came in 3rd in votes, and was only off by 1 vote).

I then played Treasures of the Deep, which I had seen someone else mention as short and linear, which it was. I saw the author mention in his postmortem that he went out of this comfort zone for the writing here, and I think it paid off. It gave the feeling of 'this is a person who often writes gripping stories' rather than 'this is this author's first time.'

I then played The Labyrinth, which I enjoyed but didn't like quite as much. The escape room model matches his other games, but the difficulty is reduced, so some of it felt like busy work (this is amplified by me playing all 4 people at once. I've only ever managed to pull off one multiplayer IF game.) I saw in his postmortem that new players got confused, so it wasn't super easy, but I think the real issue here is that it's important in a puzzly game to model early on the type of content and puzzles you're going to have. The Labyrinth has a lot of frustrating things (including early deaths) and content you can't interact with yet (like door riddles and the patterns on the well) before you reach the first sharable piece of information. I think it might have been better to have an optional early piece of information you can share that just gives the other players a thumbs up or encouragement or something so they can get the pattern down early. But I'm not sure.

I enjoyed the meta-puzzle at the end. I had expected it to be more subtle and had copied down patterns of gem-pushing in each game, sure that I'd have to do something like navigate to the menu to find a secret meta-puzzle by the order I push gems at the beginning. Instead, everything was quite clear and out in the open, which was fun.

Seeing only one review on IFDB, I assumed very few people had completed the game. I was really surprised to get to the end and see that over 30 people had recorded their names. I guess that really shows that the general rule of the internet applies (10 times as many people see something as interact, 10 times as many people interact as comment).

Echoes is an anthology of three games in one. I didn’t do the Labyrinth one as it didn’t appeal to me that much. Treasure of the Deep is also a fairly short and very linear tale, such that it’s more of a story than a game. It was a fun read, but not really an interactive one.

Still, the one I did enjoy was Sticks and Stones, a humorous multi-part adventure where you travel around a dungeon, solving puzzles and collecting items, while trying to reach the next part of the game. Navigating the dungeon was tricky at first, but I managed to handle this by visualizing a grid in my mind. There are a good number of interesting puzzles there, and finding the different items to proceed also didn’t feel overly challenging, even though I went around in circles a few times. There is also a pretty basic but fun combat system, and the game allows you to retry whenever you lose a fight.

The writing is entertaining and there was good art to accompany the writing, such as the backgrounds for the linear Treasure of the Deep story. Overall, I’d say the full product is pretty solid, although I tried just two thirds of it.