When we think of humanity in space, we think of astronauts and cosmonauts and the International Space Station, but many of us don’t realize what it takes to keep humans alive in orbit. In order to survive, astronauts on the ISS need to eat every day, drink water, and go to the bathroom, but that’s not the only challenge they face. They need to stay healthy in weightlessness, and they need to keep their minds sharp and active. ALIENATING.
Back in January, I talked to a friend about building a new VR arcade unit. He was intrigued, so I started to research the process. This lead me into the world of custom cabinets for VR, and it wasn’t long before I met a man named Jason Barnes. I visited his workshop to see his latest creation: an IKEA shelf that was repurposed to house an Oculus Rift headset and a Kinect sensor. It was a great example of what can be done with DIY technology, and I had the urge to share it with as many people as possible.
Last week, when Google launched its new VR headset, it spent a lot of time hyping the previously little-known “Lone Echo” game. Set for a 2019 release, “Lone Echo” is a sci-fi FPS that puts you into the shoes of a robot. The game’s plot begins on a distant moon, where you are tasked with finding a missing astronaut. A mysterious AI grants you a few upgrades along the way, and surprises you with a thrilling twist.. Read more about lone echo and let us know what you think.
Sometimes all sci-fi games have to do is throw you into a gleaming new world, allowing you to inhabit a cosmos apparently plucked from TV and cinema, and call it a day. Then there are games that utilize science fiction as a background for a more human tale, one that has been told a million times and in a million different ways before, but which we always like hearing because we are human. These tales coexist with awe-inspiring technology like as holograms, faster-than-light travel, and massive spaceships. Lone Echo is a first-person narrative-driven adventure that is one of those profoundly human stories; a tough task when you’re a robot from the twenty-first century.
Lone Echo Information:
Official Site
Ready at Dawn is a developer. Oculus Rift is a virtual reality headset (Touch required) Oculus Rift was used for this review. The film will be released on July 20, 2017.
NOTE TO READERS: This article, like all of our reviews (unless otherwise noted), includes NO SPOILERS. Read away, safe in the knowledge that we won’t spoil anything for you!
Gameplay
It is the year 2126. Your programming forces you to help Captain Olivia “Liv” Rhodes with her daily duties as the only human onboard Khronos II, a mining facility just outside the rings of Saturn. Captain Liv’s right-hand android has become a close friend and confidant as a result of the circumstances, but she is about to rotate out. Despite Liv’s stiff upper lip, the idea of saying goodbye to her Echo-1 companion, whom she lovingly refers to as Jack, is tangible.
Everything is well until an anomaly emerges in the distance, taking out all of the ship’s systems. You both set out to repair the damage the anomaly has caused, explore a strange spacecraft that has suddenly warped into view, and travel farther than a tiny prospecting Echo-1 unit has ever gone before, snapping back into action and leaving the idea of tearful goodbyes behind.
picture courtesy of At the crack of dawn, everything is in place.
Captain Liv behaves as a taskmaster at first, sending you out to repair various sections of the enormous station complex, including places far distant from the main station that need tiny (‘on-rails’) ‘Fury’ transport boats to access. Despite the fact that she is the boss, she looks to you for guidance, which you may offer through a conversation box with a variety of prepared answers. You may also opt not to respond to Liv, allowing her to wonder what she did to anger you. At times, it seems to be a regular discussion, and she even expresses concern for your safety when you must go out into the vast dark wilderness to fix equipment.
Despite the fact that Liv is the taskmaster, the action does not seem over-tutoralized by Liv since fundamental teaching is provided by Hera, Khronos’ resident AI, and is delivered via autonomous, in-software learning modules. This gives you greater freedom to enjoy the story with Liv as your captain and buddy rather as your schoolmarm. In the ‘Immersion’ part, we’ll go through Liv in more detail.
You learn how to move in zero-G and utilize the two tools you have at your disposal, a blowtorch and a scanner that serves as a radiation meter, via these training courses. Both of these items are triggered by pushing a button on either side of your robotic wrist. Radiation is the game’s number one killer, and the scanner assists you in avoiding hot areas that appear throughout. There are lots of things to slice open with your torch, such as access hatches and control panels, but the game’s sequence of operations may be a bit irritating at times. You must first utilize the conversation box to ask what something is, after which the game will let you to use your torch, as shown by a blue print overlaid on the metal panel.
using a blowtorch
Attempting to cut before ‘officially enquiring’ makes your torch useless, as it does on everything else in the game (yes, I attempted to torch Liv, I apologize). This has only occurred a few times, but it’s always a show-stopper, prompting you to check for the tiny arrows over everything to see if they’re not essential, plot-moving components. You accept what must be done and go on after you realize that the sequence of operations is infallible and that skipping ahead would get you nowhere. Flipping out the tiny torch and slicing through objects becomes second nature after you get the hang of it, if not a fascinating experiment in making something apparently mundane into a wonderful, immersive way of engaging with the environment.
examining the things
a radioactive source is being ‘painted’
box of dialogue
Let’s speak about dying for a moment. You can’t truly die as an artificial intelligence. When you are exposed to too much radiation or are injured in any manner, your consciousness is immediately transferred to a new body. This takes away a lot of the pain of dying as you exit each pod, but it still leaves you with the aggravation of having to travel back to where you started. You may also recharge your mobile radiation shield by stopping by one of the many recharge stations located around the city. Liv doesn’t have this privilege as a human.
Although there are lots of extra side chores, audio logs about Liv, and Easter eggs to discover throughout the game, I took around 6 hours to finish Lone Echo. If you’re anything like me, you’ll skip most of them until they’re right in front of you as you attempt to go through the tale, which is one of, if not the most gripping and artfully-crafted VR storylines to date.
Immersion
Like many games, Presence (with a capital ‘P’) grips you when you least expect it: you’re taking a tool from Liv, trying to figure out how to repair a satellite, or using your blowtorch to cut out a vent. For a short time, you forget you’re in your underwear and work suitable clothes in your apartment. Granted, there are moments when you have to fight the game’s technological restrictions (a 33 meter play area is strongly recommended), but Lone Echo completely enthralled me from beginning to end.
picture courtesy of At the crack of dawn, everything is in place.
Despite her space-hardened appearance, Liv cares deeply about your safety, despite the fact that she knows you’re almost immortal. Because she imbues you with humanity, you want to repay the favor by assisting her, by being her only human, despite the fact that your near-human AI has trouble comprehending her usually caustic humor. Lone Echo brilliantly lays the stage for this relationship to develop naturally from the outset, so Liv seems like a lovely, loving elder sister throughout the film—truly the true star of the show.
Ironically, Liv’s own game AI has flaws, and her gaze-tracking isn’t always accurate, leaving you with a look that shoots over your shoulder rather than squarely in your eyes (in VR, it’s easier to notice those tiny nuances, and they’re more important)—but Liv is indisputably human. This is due to a combination of elements, including strong voice acting, meticulous character modeling, and outstanding motion capture, which puts her on the verge of crossing the uncanny valley. To say the least, it’s incredible.
picture courtesy of At the crack of dawn, everything is in place.
With the exception of your feet, which naturally lag behind you as you float in the zero-G world, the game’s inverse kinematics are as excellent as I’ve ever seen in VR, with your arms and hands matching well enough with your actual body to be convincing.
Looking down at your robotic hands, which are coated in a variety of textures such as rubber fingers (complete with raised fingerprints for extra grip) and openly visible connections, coupled with the constant whirr of tiny servos as you flex your robo-appendages, adds to the overall realism. Procedural grip animations were also developed by the creators, which dynamically adapt to the environment around you for a more realistic hand posture.
picture courtesy of At the crack of dawn, everything is in place.
Then there’s the weighing scale. To summarize, the universe is vast, and it’s been portrayed in enough detail—including odd spacecraft and their alien weirdness—to strike all the key beats in what seems frightening but ultimately genuine.
Comfort
The world-shifting locomotion system used in the game has been proved to function in other games, such as Climbey (2016) and The Climb (2016) for Oculus Touch. If you haven’t played any of those games—or the free multiplayer game Echo Arena (2017), which utilizes the same mechanics as Lone Echo—the simplest way to explain it is “grasping the environment and throwing oneself.”
As you take hold of the ship’s framework and utilize it to drive yourself around the universe of Lone Echo, there’s a high degree of predictability, which is partially why Echo Arena has received so much attention in the previous weeks of beta access. It’s simple to understand how to travel around the environment quickly with your hand-mounted boosters, and it’s extremely pleasant as a locomotion scheme (a term I use far too frequently).
The zero-G aspect becomes simpler to manage as well, with objects in your peripheral view helping to ‘anchor’ you to the environment, much way a cockpit does in games like EVE Valkyrie (2016). It’s worth noting that Lone Echo comes with a default horizon lock that keeps you aligned with a consistent up and down that never changes. This can be turned off, but it’s not a good idea for comfort.
After learning to maneuver in virtual zero-G, jumping out of the headset and strolling about my gravity-saturated home was an unusual sensation to say the least. In the back of my mind, I kept seeing me grabbing door jams, my sofa, or whatever else I could find and flying into another room. I’m not sure what more to say about the game’s rock-solid locomotion system if that doesn’t say anything. The game’s transport boats, which take you on a rather twisty-turny journey to your medium-distance places of interest, are the sole niggle. These may be unsettling since they add some artificial (i.e. undesired) turning.
picture courtesy of At the crack of dawn, everything is in place.
For smooth-turning addicts, the game’s settings allow for smooth turning on all axes, allowing you to essentially “pilot” yourself around the environment without even moving your head left or right. For gamers utilizing a two-sensor, front-facing configuration, a more comfortable snap-turn is offered by default, which may be uncomfortable for many. The fact that you can rotate 360 degrees without your body obstructing vision of your controllers would certainly help Lone Echo users with three or more Oculus sensors in terms of comfort and immersion.
This was a source of irritation for me, as a user with just two sensors. I kept automatically shifting my body to face the action, occluding my Touch controllers in the process. I eventually sat down on a chair, which helped, but I was still so engrossed in the game that I didn’t realize I was physically positioned away from the sensors until my hands did the strange skittery dance I’ve come to despise. This can be addressed by adding another sensor, but it’s not standard nor necessary if you can maintain your feet in the same physical location.
If you’re interested in learning more about Echo Arena, Lone Echo’s free multiplayer mode, check out our coverage of the last open beta.
Related Tags
This article broadly covered the following related topics:
- lone echo
- echo arena vr
- lone echo sale
- echo arena vive
- echo arena steam
