![]() While the interface gameplay and wayfinding is similar to that in games such as inkle’s 80 Days and Jump Over the Age’s In Other Waters, unlike those games, you don’t have to think about the consequences of your decisions much, since EoS’ focus is on telling a story, and failure may get in the way of telling that story. You may for example lose armour running into a military convoy, but you’re almost guaranteed to make enough money to quickly replace it at your next stop. With increasing resources and reputation, the Red Chamber crew becomes almost too good at evading space pirates and other unsavoury folk, and even if you don’t, you can fix almost any damage. I liked these parts a lot for providing some friction, but unfortunately the danger of encounters decreases as part of the ongoing narrative. In these situations, you need to make a choice – you can voluntarily take damage and lose armour plates, or you can let a random number generator determine your luck at subterfuge. Some may hail you with an SOS, some may turn out to be military vessels that want to inspect your ship. The star map is an an all-in-one interface to navigate to destinations, read messages and scan coordinatesīefore you reach your actual destination, you run into other ships. Each journey costs fuel, and you regularly need to stop at travel hubs to refuel, otherwise someone has to come and rescue the ship. Many games without puzzles are essentially just you moving a stick around a pressing a button, so while this can be considered light gameplay, I liked the idea that a game would allow me to do a plethora of things nonetheless. Over the course of the game, you will also navigate an asteroid field, tune into the lumen’s frequency, put out fires and repair broken computer terminals, all with the simple action of pointing your cursor at something and pressing a button. Travelling from planet to planet is an exercise in navigating an interface – you select a signal, move your cursor there, press a button to analyse it and then press the same button to make the trip there with your starship. Because of this foregone conclusion, there’s no game over in Echo of Starsong, and there are very few situations you can outright fail, themselves clumsily framed as old Jun forgetting what actually happened.Īs a player, you do quite a lot in Echo of Starsong, but the way you do it is simple. ![]() It also means I don’t spoil anything by saying that things for Jun will not be going well, but he will live to see old age. ![]() ![]() What’s more, what you experience is actually Jun as an old man reminiscing, an interesting narrative device that allows him to fit in some more background info on how he felt at the time and how he feels about certain situations in hindsight. As context for a plot-driven video game, it’s a lot. From a worldbuilding perspective, it’s nothing short of amazing. There’s a large war in the planetary system’s rearview mirror lumen, which isn’t only a pretty form of space diesel but also sometimes-sentient and definitely magic and we can’t forget about the galaxy’s genesis and religious practices. If you are now thinking “lumen what? Witch who?” I can’t blame you, because EoS unleashes the full brunt of its worldbuilding onto you immediately within its opening hours, nay, minutes. Jun eventually meets the witch Eda and her companion Remi, and joins their crew aboard the Red Chamber. From this point onwards, Jun becomes obsessed with finding new caves so he can restore the clan’s honour and return home. The Lumen Association, an intergalactic body handling cave ownership, reassigns the Lee clan’s caves following Jun’s faux-pas, leaving the clan shamed and with little income. When he talks back to the wrong person at the wrong time, he costs his clan most of their precious lumen caves (in the world of Echo of Starsong, the explorer who finds a cave gets to register it to their name and mine the lumen within, thus ensuring a steady income for as long as there’s lumen). Jun Lee, the first character you meet, is a lesser noble of the Lee clan. Jun is a runner, someone fit and fearless enough to bring lumen back from the caves
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