#the way it slowly strips you of agency as a source of horror is immaculate

[h-worksrambles]

Echo and player choice: Horror through powerlessness

I have so many thoughts about how Echo plays with player agency to subvert the expectations of a visual novel and add to its horror.

  When you start Echo you have little reason to see Chase as anything more than a typical player character. He has a defined personality and established ties to the cast and the town so he’s definitely not a blank slate protagonist. But you still get to make plenty of choices in the prologue. And ultimately, in typical dating-simulator fashion, you choose a character’s route to follow. So far it feels like you’re making choices as Chase that affect the story, and part of those choices is, eventually choosing which cute anthro guy (or girl) you’ll romance, and getting one of various endings.   But as you play through the routes things start to get a bit...weird. This start with the choices beginning to get sinister, or cryptic, often signified by a specific musical cue. And as the routes go on, we get more and more hints as to what’s really going on.    TJ’s route demonstrates how little control we the player have over Chase, our supposed player character, and also doubles as a commentary on the nature of player choice and romance in a dating sim. The game expects that you chose this route partly because you find TJ appealing as a character, so as Chase begins to show attraction to TJ, he and the player are essentially on the same page. But TJ doesn’t really reciprocate in any way other than friendship, and any tells that Chase picks up on are entirely innocent as far as TJ is concerned. Then Chase starts getting jealous (to the point of malicious) when Julian shows up, resulting in a ‘confession’ scene that looks like this.   

  Through this, Echo makes a commentary on how the mindset behind a dating sim is...kinda messed up. You use your player character, Chase, as a conduit for your own choices and wish fulfillment. And pursue the romantic interest of the route with single minded determination in a way that is kind of possessive. And you get to witness that as Chase’s behaviour gets more and more uncomfortable, and you relate to him less and less. This is also seen outside the romance in the overarching mystery of the letters from Sydney. Chase comes to his own conclusions about what’s really going on in the scavenger hunt, and intervenes in ways the player has no control over. Eventually he goes out to find the last clue, and replaces it with a different piece of paper, which we don’t see. Our player character is not just acting without us, but also witholding information from us. This culminates in the route’s ending, where Chase becomes a full fledged villain, murdering Flynn, manipulatively co-ercing TJ into keeping the secret. And this is the only outcome, the player’s choices don’t affect this ending. If you thought Chase was just a blank slate protag for your choices and TJ was the romantic ‘goal’, you are throughly proven wrong. Chase is a character, with a mind and goals of his own, and TJ’s lack of agency, and being objectified as a cute innocent love interest to be protected is the tragedy of the entire route. Here, Echo turns the fundamentals of a dating sim VN on their head to tell a horror story, all without ever explicitly breaking the fourth wall.

  Leo and Jenna’s routes throw another spanner in the works by introducing us to the ghost of Samuel Ayers...our actual player character. Yep, the whole time, you were not playing the character you thought you were. You control the ghost of Sam Ayers, a resident of the town who died years ago, and whose ghost has been possessing Chase ever since the day Sydney died. You control Sam, who is controlling Chase. You make decisions as Sam, and Chase follows Sam’s instruction. This changes the player’s understanfing of their control over the narrative. Because the character we’re actually controlling is someone we don’t really know. And it’s a great way to get under the player’s skin. It also allows for an interesting dynamic between Chase and Sam. Near the end of Leo and especially Jenna’s route, Chase starts to recognise Sam’s presence as a voice in his head. This allows for an effect similar to a fourth wall break in other games, such as Kris becoming aware of the player’s control in Deltarune. In fact, both games frame the act of player control as a spectral possession that supresses the protagonists’s own personality. But it does this without explicitly breaking that fourth wall. Which is good, because while fourth wall breaks can work in a horror game, recklessly shattering it can risk dimantling the atmosphere of the game’s world, making this less scary by being too overtly meta. Chase doesn’t become aware of the player, and thus question his free will, but does become aware of Sam. Still, in some ways, this is more comforting than TJ’s route, because it restores the player’s illusion of control. Sure, we’re not playing as who we thought we were, but we’re still in control, right? We make choices as Sam, who will in turn guide Chase to good or bad endings depeding on our outcome. That’s what happens in Carl, Jenna and Leo’s routes. After all, what is a visual novel without choice? It’s the only substantial gameplay element this genre has. We’re still in the driver’s seat...right?

  And then we get to Flynn’s route.

  And even that guarantee is ripped away from us. 

  Over the course of Flynn’s route, Sam starts exerting control to force Chase to make decisions the player may not want. He forces Chase to condemn Flynn before the group, hiding the truth of Chase’s own past actions. Eventually, he stops possessing Chase entirely, and takes control of Flynn instead. We now follow Flynn as the POV character, for the rest of the route. And here, too, Sam starts restricting the choices you can make as a player, directing Flynn to an outcome you are kept in the dark about. This culminates in the scene in the vision of the Smoke Room where Echo plays its final card.

  So you know, Sam, the ghost of a dead townsperson of Echo who has been our player character this whole time? Yeeeaahh...turns out we weren’t really controlling him either. ‘Sam’ is simply an offshoot of the ghostly entity behind all of Echo’s supernatural happpenings. One that creates simulations, echoes, if you will, of those long dead to coerce, control and torment the townspeople for its own ends. We were playing as the true eldritch villain of the game this entire time. Our capacity for any control over the events of the story was a lie. Any say we had over the story has well and truly gone, and we can only watch as Flynn is destroyed by his single minded search for the truth, transformed horrifyingly into the Socket Monster. Much as TJ’s route punishes the player for thinking of Chase as a mere blank slate for their actions, by presenting him as a person with goals of his own, so too Flynn’s route punishes you for underestimating Sam, by proving he is far more powerful than we ever expected.

  Echo’s subversion of player choice is fascinating because it has so many layers. In TJ’s route you slowly realise you’re not in control of the person who you think is your player character, and that he has goals outside of you. So when his actions get progressively more messed up, you can’t stop him. Jenna’s route had you realise you’re controlling someone completely different, and while you can steer things to a good or bad outcome, you watch Chase grapple with the existential nightmare that someone else is making all his decisions, and we the player don’t really know anything about who we’re actually controlling.  And Flynn’s route, pulls the final rug out from under you, as you you realise you’re not even in control of Sam, because he’s in the service of the very entity you’ve watched hurt these characters over and over again, route after route. And we only realise, too late, that he’s led us, and Flynn to an inescapable tragedy.      

   Echo takes the visual novel, a genre where the only real piece of gameplay is the choices you make and makes you question your ability to even make said choices. It frightens you by making you feel progressively more powerless.   And yet, you come back. You all come back eventually. You try again on another route, and another, hoping maybe this time things’ll be different. ...Because just like this town...

You’re only moving in circles.