Note: Although this was posted in November the game itself was started in October and finished November 1st.

SCHLOCKTOBER '21: This October I played a number of games with Halloween appropriate themes, focusing on older and less appreciated games in my backlog. These aren't necessarily horror games but rather games with strong horror elements. I've decided to blog about these games and whether I think they're still worth playing as a seasonal treat or the gaming equivalent of an apple full of razor blades.

Echo Generation is a game that isn’t just bathed in nostalgia but is almost entirely powered by it. It’s a short turn based RPG/Adventure game hybrid that borrows its vibe from Earthbound, its timing based combat from the Mario RPG/Paper Mario series, and its aesthetic from the late 80s early 90s, when it seems to take place. You play as a teen exploring their suburban town in late summer alongside your kid sister and a number of pets. There you can complete a bunch of oddball quests that range from breaking into your school to prank call a book store so you can distract the employee and steal some books to calling down aliens to land just outside of town. This is a pastiche of 80s tropes and the tone doesn’t even attempt to be consistent. At one point you sneak into your principal’s home to steal one of his puppets and trade it for a comic book (which grants a new attack to a party member) with a sentient puppet who hangs out near the repair shop. Later you break into that same principal’s basement to find that he has kidnapped a kid and is keeping him in a cell down there, then you use a cassette tape to lure the principal to the basement where you literally kill him and free the kid. Youthful hijinks are constantly overlayed with serious adult themes, including sex and death. It’s a gleeful pastiche that makes no effort to maintain any consistency of tone or storytelling, focusing much more on gags and references than any kind of emotional resonance.

Echo Generation is set in what seems to be the early 90s but really is a mix of 80s and 90s. Your character’s school communicates to him over the summer via email but people are still using cassette tapes and haven’t moved on to CDs (CDs overtook cassette tapes in 1991, but email at home was still too unusual for schools to rely on it back then.) The graphics are that blocky 3D pixel art look that games like 3D Dot Heroes and The Touryst have used in the past. There are lots of rituals of childhood, from getting cookies from the kindly grandma next door to using a bus pass to get from your suburban street down to the “downtown” of the small city. The game’s main item shop is run by a kid in the local treehouse and your character’s main goal is to create a home movie with his or her friends that’s as exciting as their favorite film franchise, Bunzilla. It’s very much going for that Stephen King mix of nostalgia and sci-fi/horror. While it’s much goofier and wackier than King has ever been, it mostly pulls it off.

The game also looks and sounds great. I really like the 3D faux-pixel graphics, especially with the slick modern lighting the game has, and though animations are simple they work well. The game is extremely colorful with some great neons and contrasts used to make the visuals pop. The music is spectacular and a real highlight for the presentation. There’s no voice acting and the writing is full of goofy gags and written with some constructions that make me think the writer wasn’t American (which isn’t a bad thing but might explain why there are so many anachronisms) but the story is good enough to keep the gags flowing and there are some characters and lines that made me smile. It’s hard to be too down on a game where the first enemies you face are a gang of surly racoons and one of the major side quests is literally helping an old woman cross the street.

The main problem Echo Generation has is its gameplay. It’s not that it’s bad, but it’s pretty bare bones. As stated above this game is something of a cross between a Paper Mario style RPG and an adventure game. Most of your time will be spent running around picking up items and figuring out where to use them. You run into enemies (mostly visible on the game screen but there are a few Final Fantasy style invisible random encounters) and fight them in the turn based combat. It’s fine for what it is, but it’s very simple. You have health points and normal attacks and special moves that you draw on a party wide pool to power (new ones are found in the form of comic books scattered across the game world), and there are button timing microgames that you use to attack and defend. There’s good variety in the microgames, ranging from a golf game style swing meter to a short section of rhythm game, but the combat itself is not particularly strategic. Status effects are very limited and so ineffective (except for stun effects) that it seems like they were more or less removed from the game prior to launch, maybe for balance reasons. You can use healing and skill restoration items, but these become so easy to buy mid way through the short game that they basically eliminate the difficulty. Leveling up lets you pick between more attack, more health, and more skill points in the Paper Mario vein and it all works it’s just not all that engaging. Annoyingly your third character slot is reserved for collectable pets and they all start at level 1 and level up individually, meaning that you’re likely to stick with the first one you get throughout the game unless you want to grind the others up. The micro games keep combat from getting too boring, and there’s not a ton of it, but this is not a game you play for deep combat systems. It’s just kind of there.

The adventure game aspect suffers from the issues that most adventure games do, especially those that are intentional throwbacks like this game is. There’s a lot of opaque stuff you have to do and if you’re like me you’ll spend a lot of time wandering around trying to figure out who to talk to or what item to use where to advance the plot. I had to look one thing up, and it was something I thought I’d tried but apparently I hadn’t used quite the right arbitrary combination of things in the right order so I spent an hour trying to advance the game fruitlessly. Some places your companions are necessary to advance the plot and some of the time it’s enough to have collected the character while in other situations you have to specifically have them as your active companion, which is a really irritating decision. In a game world with no real logic it’s annoying to have to try and figure out what wacky idea the designers had about what you should do to move forward. Some people really like that kind of old school design but I’m glad to have moved past it.

In terms of Halloween themes, Echo generation has lots of aliens and skeletons and ghosts but is decidedly not a horror game and never tries to be scary except for one jump scare that’s done for a laugh but was extremely unpleasant and possibly not epilepsy safe, and makes a certain area of the game not fun to explore because of the noise (it’s not scary, it’s just unpleasant.) I played half of it on Halloween proper and the other half the next day, and it can get you into the spirit in the same way something like Costume Quest can, although it doesn’t actually take place on Halloween. But despite the seasonally appropriate themes this is a game that can be played any time, and is more gleefully wacky than horror.

Schlocktober Rating: Mostly good Schlock

Echo Generation is a decent time and delivers some good gags and some nostalgia feels. It has a banging soundtrack and enough gameplay and pretty graphics to make it worth a play through. It’s not something you absolutely have to seek out, but if you have Game Pass and the look intrigues you it’s worth trying out. If this were a Halloween candy it would be Skittles. Bright, colorful, mostly tasty, but with a slightly unpleasant aftertaste and gritty texture that keep it from being a complete delight.