Echoplex bouncing out of the early access cave
Echo... echo... echooo... echooooo
It’s fun to sabotage your future self, you should try it. Here, use FutureMe.org to berate an unidentifiable version of yourself who is five or ten years older. It’s what I do. If you don’t want to go that far, you could just play Echoplex. It’s a first-person puzzle game about finding your way out of strange chambers while being pursued by malicious “echos” of your prior self. It’s been in early access since last year but now is going to break free of its past. A full release is set for March 15. Here's a trailer full of flashing images.
Don’t confuse it with Echo, the other game about being harassed by angry facsimiles. This is more like Portal or Antichamber but with the ghostly copies of Cursor*10 taking on a whole body. Your past selves move and act in exactly the way you moved and acted a few seconds ago. And if you collide with them, you die. Because of the way the levels are set up, this means you often cross paths or come scarily close to your old bod. It’s odd to describe your own actions as “unpredictable” but this is exactly how it sometimes feels if you’ve forgotten which side of the corridor you ran down only 20 seconds ago.
I had a go at the early access version last year and found the idea excellent. But there were some game-breaking bugs, and a few of the puzzles and mechanics weren’t clearly explained or introduced. However, developers Output Games have been welding away at the seams.
“Over the last few months we've done a lot of work on the game,” Tyron van Vuuren tells us. “Including on some of the issues you raised in your Premature Evaluation article (confusing geography, lack of context on puzzles, etc).”
They’re also working on a behind the scenes video, explaining how it was put together. The game’s story is told with live action film between the levels, as your character’s memory comes back to him - a tale of experimental drugs and corporate dodginess. And this too is something the behind-the-scenes video will go into. I'd promise to keep an eye out for that on your behalf, but I've learned to keep my future plans a secret from my present self.