Echoshift And Friends
It’s unfair that a lovingly crafted and aesthetically stylish game should have turned out to be so philosophically depressing. Echoshift is a beautiful and clever little puzzler, with its haunting army of shadow puppets and harmonised trilling woodwinds on the soundtrack. But what is disturbing about it is inseparable from its central mechanic, encapsulated in the developers’ own cute name for the concept: ‘self co-op’.
‘Self co-op’ is an apt description of the way you must choreograph the actions of your previous selves in gradually iterating a solution to each level (the concept has been seen previously, in arguably purer form, in the Flash game Click*10). Yet the mournful surrealism of ‘self co-op’ also represents a truth about an atomised, mistrustful society, where the only person you can really trust to cooperate with you is yourself.
