Echo Night (PlayStation)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 2.0 stars Mediocre
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 4.2 (2.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Ben Stahl
• Reviewed on: 08/02/1999
• Updated on: 04/28/2000
• Released on: 07/31/1999
• Originally published on GameSpot: Echo Night (PlayStation) Review

What would you do if you learned that your father was not just an average Joe, but instead he was a relentless sleuth hot on the trail of a demonic murderer? That's the premise of Echo Night, a first-person puzzle-solving adventure that puts you into the middle of a time-traveling quest to find out what has happened to your father.

Your life is turned upside down with the delivery of the mail. You receive a letter from your missing dad that contains a key to unlock a time-traveling adventure. With the aid of time-warping books and paintings, you learn that your father is chasing a sadistic murderer possessed by a demonic red knife. Your task is to aid your pop's quest while releasing the trapped souls of people murdered by the evil man's evil knife. To do this, you'll hop about to various locations at different points in time, all intertwined with your father's manhunt. You'll solve puzzles and appease souls with items you picked up along the way. Once you've completed the game, the nonlinear storyline will make sense, and you'll able to reconstruct the proper plot from the shuffled scenes you've seen.

The main evil character in the game is extremely creepy looking - unfortunately, so is everybody else. All the characters you encounter suffer from a polygon deficiency - they all have pointy chins or blocky faces. What's even worse is that most of the characters also suffer from a lack of textures. Conveniently, most of the game's NPCs are spirits, which appear in the form of wireframes with light gray textures. This makes almost every ghost uninteresting and doesn't help motivate you to free the spirit. The backgrounds all retain the proper style for the time period you happen to be in and are delightfully mediocre. Not much can be said about the sound except that there's very little of it. You spend most of the game in musical silence until something disturbing happens. The sound effects are all very drab and unappealing.

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