Fading Echo Review
Explore interconnected light and dark worlds in Aggelos 2, an old-school action-platformer that goes much bigger than its predecessor.
Fading Echo. Credit: Emeteria / New Tales / Com2uS
Emeteria’s Fading Echo puts you in the shoes of One, a young water diviner trying to stop a reality-eating corruption from finishing off her dying world. You shapeshift into a liquid form that lets you absorb other elements like lava and toxic waste to modify your traversal abilities and exploit enemy weaknesses. The game just doesn’t feel very good to play. It feels like a PS2-era game, and not in a good, nostalgic way.
The story is straightforward enough. It’s presented with cutscenes and voiceover conversations, but the less-than-stellar writing didn’t give me any reason to want to pay much attention to it. The look of the cutscenes, which I’ll get to later, didn’t help.
Combat is just kind of boring. Weaken enemies, then spam your attack combos; repeat until everything is dead. I would do everything I could to kick enemies off platforms to get through fights as quickly as possible. Fighting and movement both feel clunky and unsatisfying. It’s too bad, because there is some genuinely good puzzle-platforming design here. I just couldn’t have fun with it thanks to how it felt.
Fading Echo. Credit: Emeteria / New Tales / Com2uS
Fading Echo. Credit: Emeteria / New Tales / Com2uS
The visuals are lackluster, particularly the cutscenes. They’re presented as a rudimentary motion comic, with panels made up of 3D models frozen in place while parts of the scene are sometimes animated. It’s particularly off-putting when a character’s hair is moving while the character wearing it looks like a lifeless mannequin. They should have just gone for actual still frames or 2D illustrations. The gameplay graphics aren’t offensive, just unremarkable. The environments look kind of boring.
Fading Echo could have been a genuinely great game, but its execution gets in the way. The cutscenes and writing turned me off immediately, but I kept on trucking. I was tired of the game long before it was over.
Fading Echo
Fading Echo has clever puzzle-platforming buried beneath combat, movement, and presentation that make playing it feel like a chore.
Emeteria’s Fading Echo is an action platformer with some clever ideas that falls flat in its execution.