Earlier this year, Broke Studio provided a physical release of The Echoes of Worlds, based on the Game Boy Studio project of the same name by TC Studio. It’s perhaps the most fiendish Game Boy release in recent memory, and I’m not just saying that because one of the many characters you play is a devil scrounging up coins in hell. This is a deviously difficult game, where even just getting across a small room can result in many, many deaths.
The Echoes of Worlds has a lot of charm. Our unnamed hero chases a mysterious portal jumping menace to try and recover his stolen cat, while his moocher of a best friend stays home and doesn’t really know what to do with himself. Every time you load up the game, we see what the moocher is up to before the action flips back to the hero. Annoyingly, the game keeps track of how many moocher cutscenes you’ve seen even if you start a new game.
Minor annoyances like this are unfortunately a fairly frequent presence in The Echoes of Worlds. Though the game does keep track of how many moocher cutscenes you’ve seen, it does not keep track of how many times you’ve spoken to characters at the police station hub world. This is important because you get skill points from reading every single dialog, but you’re forced to cycle through all of them before leaving the room, so instead of pacing yourself with the toxic office drama, you end up stuck with almost all of the exposition at the beginning of the game, through to a mostly uninterrupted stretch of gameplay leading to a mostly unsatisfying ending.
I might not have been quite so disappointed by the ending except for the fact that the characterization is so well done up until that point that the anticlimax is more than a little insulting. The game had teased all these mysteries and doesn’t really answer any of them. I did find myself wondering whether there was a better ending if I could 100% the game, but in the first place, there was no indication in or outside of the game that this was true. And in the second place, by the time I was finished with The Echoes of Worlds, I was more than a little sick of it.
The main gameplay problem revolves around the skill tree. For getting certain achievements in-game, you get skill points that make the game easier by offering extra lives or items or increasing how much money you can buy with the items. Special skills are very expensive and also tend to be the most useful. The trouble comes from the fact that getting skill points in usable quantities requires that you 100% every level, a task which is harder than it sounds because The Echoes of Worlds is a roguelite, which means you do not have control over which levels you play in the main game. They’re selected at random.
After a certain point, The Echoes of Worlds is unplayable without a hefty supply of skill points, and I had to replay Level 2 a lot in order to finally finish off the last stage and earn the majority of the unlockable skill points. By the time I finished Level 3, I was just grateful I had enough coins to unlock the checkpoint, so I didn’t need to try and 100% it too. I barely even played Level 4, I just abused the skill points I had to brute force my way to the end, an accomplishment thoroughly deflated by the lousy ending.
It’s a shame I can only really think of negative things to say about The Echoes of Worlds, because the game is genuinely a lot of fun. I loved the blend of platformer with roguelite. The worldbuilding is great, and the art is delightful. Unfortunately, none of these elements work well with the collectathon style of gameplay that The Echoes of Worlds ultimately treats as a core mechanic, and a skill system that’s clunky both in execution as well as just plain tedious to micromanage in the menus, a surprising contrast to the challenging, fast-paced gameplay that’s not unfair so much as it is unforgiving.
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