There are supernatural secrets brewing in Maple Town. Two siblings embark on a quest to uncover the mysteries within their hometown and reveal the truth surrounding their father’s disappearance. A turn-based action RPG, “Echo Generation” pits you against extraterrestrial entities to save your home.
While fun in some regards, “Echo Generation” doesn’t quite land properly when executing the story and gameplay.
Set in the ‘90s, Maple Town takes on a nostalgic voxel-based appearance. For the uninitiated, voxels are essentially 3D pixels, which makes for a blocky environment. Think a bit like “Minecraft,” but with much more detail. The graphics and set-pieces within the game are certainly the strongest aspect of the experience, making for breathtaking exploration and vivid locales.
Assembling a team is usually a fun and interesting aspect of role playing games, but here it’s simply serviceable. Building my party worked well enough, although there isn’t much room for making unique builds. Two of the three members are static and cannot be replaced, meaning only one member of the team can be swapped out. This last party member takes the form of a pet, of which there are five to recruit, each having their own set of unlockable moves. Though for the majority of my playthrough I simply used the Cat. This was mainly because it was the first one I was able to unlock, it placed me at the same level of my other party members and they were one of the only members that had a healing ability.
In terms of combat, it’s turn-based. This means that your team attacks the enemy, then they get a turn to swing on you, but there is a bit of a twist. All attacks have a quick-time minigame that involves the player doing an action to get bonus damage. This might be mashing a button to wind up a swing or lining up crosshairs to get a critical hit. This helped keep me engaged in the fight rather than just simply letting the game play itself. Different moves can be discovered through finding comic books around Maple Town. These are exciting enough, although some moves are simply much more powerful than others, meaning I often just used the same attacks during every fight.
Unfortunately, there were a few glaring issues that I faced during my time playing “Echo Generation.” The most frustrating aspect of the game is that there is no indication of what I was supposed to be doing. There were no quest markers, no task list — nothing. There were times where I would wander the map looking for anything that would progress the game, and I just didn’t find the next step. Oftentimes I would stumble upon random items, but have no clue what I was supposed to do with them. Examining the items seldom gave me any help, and if it wasn’t overtly obvious what to do with it, I just held onto it hoping that some character would want it later.
To give a better understanding of what I mean, let me give an example. There is a man inside a trailer that wants a book from downtown. This seems simple enough, but when I got to the store, the book in question was part of a display, and the employee told me I couldn’t take it. I was able to figure out how to distract the employee by stalling a toy train and telling her to fix it, but she told me that she would only listen to her manager. I assumed this meant that I would need to locate this person in order for her to leave so I could take the book behind her back. This was not the case at all.
The real way to solve this “puzzle” is to break into the school down the street, then trespass into the principal’s office and prank call the bookstore pretending to be the manager. How the average player is meant to figure that out without any clues from the game is beyond me. Situations like this plague the experience, and I think a simple menu of quests would have made this so much better.
The narrative as a whole is also a bit iffy in my opinion. It seems to want to take multiple themes and mash them together without fleshing any of them out. At one moment I’m fighting animatronic puppets in an abandoned repair shop, and then all of a sudden I’m fighting ghost cats in a cemetery. Then if that wasn’t weird enough, now I’m fighting aliens and federal agents. At the start of the game I was just supposed to be making a film with my neighborhood friends, which never even happened.
There were also some more serious situations the game glossed over that felt weird. Mild spoilers ahead, so this is your warning. There were posters all over town that a child was missing, and after breaking into the principal’s house I was able to get into his basement. There I found the missing kid locked in a cage, and after I freed him I had to fight the principal himself, who was brandishing a bloody knife. This was such a shocking shift in tone from the upbeat music in the neighborhood streets where I was fighting a comical raccoon with pants named “Uncle Jimmy.” The weirdest part is that this had nothing to do with the overall plot and is forgotten as soon as you leave the house. This all comes without solid transitions and felt strange to watch unfold.
However, there is some fun to be had here if you’re a big fan of turn-based RPGs, or if you are interested in checking out a voxel-based game, though I find it hard to recommend otherwise. It’s clear the developers at Cococumber put a lot of love into this game, it just has some issues with execution. At a lower price point of $25, it won’t set you back too far to those interested, or if you’re an active Game Pass subscriber you can give it a shot. For most players, I would say this is one you could pass up due to a disjointed storyline and unorganized mechanics, making it a bit of a disappointing experience.
