Echo: Secrets of the Lost Cavern
In Echo you will spend lots of time exploring the pictographs in the caves and making
primitive articles and weapons. You play as Arok, a young boy encouraged to quest for
the White Grotto by the leading artist of the day, Klem. This involves finding a path
through the mountains and solving many puzzles. The puzzles involve finding things to make -- a sling shot, spear thrower, blowpipe. Other puzzles are mazes, sorting and
rotating and ordering. The making of things is the harder part and you will have to go into
the Encyclopedia to find out how -- this is primitive.
The action in the game is cleverly done by acting upon the pictographs as surrogate
action figures. So, you correctly order a series of pictograph stags crossing a stream, showing a rider
upon one of them and you find that you have crossed the stream. The same is true about
trapping a bear in its cave by causing a landslide. This procedure may confound some
players and it took me awhile to figure it out.
The box cover implies the game is filled with magnificent scenery when actually you
spend most of you time in the caves. It is interesting to be back in Cro-Magnon times and
to see some pictographs but the mood is disturbed by the contemporary voice acting. I
didn't expect grunts but the characters sounded like they came from main street.
Reviewed by: Editor - 08/05
Ages: Everyone