Echo: Secrets of the Lost Cavern

"A short but well put together adventure"

Echo is very small but nice adventure game coming from The Adventure Company. The Adventure Company puts out many adventure games a year, all with a low price tag. The majority of them range from not that great to reeking of suck-etude. Echo, while not a blockbuster is a decent game.

Graphics
This is a very pretty game. There isn't really anything special about the graphics, other than the whole game looks nice. Most of the backgrounds are pre-rendered, with a few animations of grazing animals. The cut-scenes are very nice, but again, no major achievements.

Sound
Just like the graphics, they are nice, but nothing major. The animals all sound real enough, and the humans all have slightly different accents for each area you enter, even though they all speak English. Most all other sounds are environmental sounds, like a river flowing, or water dripping.

Controls
The controls are very simple and very easy to pick up, even if you never played an adventure game before. The whole game is basically one cursor that changes when you move it over a space that you can do an action. You have a full 360 degree view of the world. To use an item in your inventory, just open up the inventory and select it, then click it where you want to use it; also very simple.

Story
The story is what drives this game. You start off as a young man in the “cave-man days”. You go out hunting and you are chased by a saber-tooth tiger into a cave. When you start looking around the cave, you realize that one of your former teachers has passed through here, leaving some clues as to where to find him. So you set off to find him, solving puzzles as you encounter them. Your ultimate goal is to meet up with him and have him continue to teach you.

Game play
This is a pure adventure game, which means that everything is based on puzzles. Some are your basic puzzles you find in most adventure games, like trying to get a fire started so you can cook the fish you just caught. Others are a little more unique to this game, they involve the various cave paintings you see throughout the game. In most cases, if you make it happen in the painting on the wall, it will happen in real life. For example, there is one painting of a series of Deer galloping across a large pond, with a human figure trying to grab on. If you make it so the human can grab on and the deer get across in the painting, then you will find yourself across the pond as well. Weird huh? There are also some parts where you must play music, but this is not hard at all. If you are good at experimenting and problem solving, you won't even need a guide for any puzzle in this game. Even if you just experiment, you should get by with about 90% of the puzzles, and only need a hint or two to solve the others. There is only 1 extremely difficult puzzle, and that is toward the end, but even that one does not require a full solution for the average gamer to complete.

All in all, this is a very nice budge adventure game. It has a nice story, pretty visuals, easy to use interface, and decent puzzles. It is rather short however. I am a slow gamer, and it took me about 5 hours to finish. I only checked for solutions of 2 puzzles, and both were just hints on what to do, not the full detailed solution. If I can solve it in 5 hours, then a hard-core adventure fan will probably finish in about 3 hours, and an extremely slow-playing adventure gamer will take about 6 to 7 hours.

So while this game is short, and fairly easy, its $20 price tag makes up for it. This is in no way a blockbuster, but it is a nice break for adventure game fans who were disappointed in the latest big games. (Cough*Dreamfall*cough)

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 11/27/06