What would you do if suddenly your life would no longer be the life you remember? Your girlfriend would no longer exist and nobody in the world would seem to remember that she ever existed. Not even your best friend, not even people that actually saw her with you? Well, these are the questions that are answered by Lost Echo, a new iOS exclusive point and click adventure game by KickBack.
A game with a great premise that promises to keep you hooked in front of your device until you solve the mystery. Unfortunately, it’s off to a pretty slow start that might have you close to the moment of giving up. I was there, but decided to give the game 10 more minutes and it was the smart thing to do. After all, it’s better to have a game that stars slow and gets better instead of one with an explosive start and a poor continuation.
In Lost Echo, you play the guy whose girlfriend disappeared after a strange event and you start an investigation on your own after nobody seems to remember her. In classic point and click adventure style (turned into point and tap, actually), you explore the city, investigate items, solve puzzles, interact with characters and slowly progress to the end. With an emphasis on “slowly”.
The game looks beautiful and does take advantage of every scene to remind you that. Unfortunately, that translates in long intro sequences that don’t add much value to the gameplay. Gameplay which is slowed down even more by problems of the adventure genre that were supposedly gone: interacting with the same object a million times will give you, a million times, the same text description. Now you usually won’t try clicking on an object multiple times, but sometimes you have to. There’s a poker scene for example where you keep entering and exiting the room and every time you go through the same dialogue. Not really the worst deal breaker, but clearly something that is not extremely enjoyable either.
Puzzle-wise, things start to get real after a while in the game, after the slow start I was talking about ends. But then you are thrown into really hardcore adventure gameplay, with very smart puzzles and a story that gets more and more interesting as you find more about it. And these things are enough to have you look over the minor problems the game has which includes having you wander around aimlessly every now and then with “invisible” solutions to the puzzles. But they are there and are very logical.
Visually, KickBack’s title is a joy for the eye: from characters to small details in the background, everything looks good. The facial animations are not extremely detailed, but we’re talking about mobile gaming and I do believe that the developers managed, from a visual point of view, to get the most.
All in all, Lost Echo is a really good adventure game for the fans of the genre. It brings back the classic gameplay that was so popular back in the days, mixes it with a great story that keeps you hooked for hours and sprinkles everything with a bit of always-welcome humor. It’s not Monkey Island, but it’s sure worth playing!
Final rating: 7.5
iTunes link: Lost Echo
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Lost Echo Review