Yeah, yeah, everybody makes their lists about scary, creepy, or flat-out weird games to play each October and we’re not about to buck the trend. But we’re going to assume you’re a retro gamer who’s read enough to know the big franchises everybody else writes about. Because if you’ve picked up a controller in the last fifteen years, you know about Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Dino Crisis. You’ve played Sweet Home‘s NES translation, you’ve watched an Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem long play on YouTube, and if some scarf-wearing hipster starts harping on Fatal Frame again, you will stuff his camera where the flash won’t illuminate. Where does one go from there? Well, we’ve got some ideas with which to season your braincase if you care to join us.

Echo Night – PS1: From Software is one of my favorite development studios because they’re willing to give damn near anything a try, and much of what they put out is budget-level software the rest of the industry wouldn’t dream of taking a chance upon. This isn’t to say From Software has never produced a crap title–they’ve made loads of them. But they’re also responsible for some criminally overlooked gems. You’ll see their name pop up several times in this series.

Echo Night doesn’t have shambling zombies, leaping velociraptors, or chainsaw-wielding lunatics seeking to significantly widen your stomach cavity. It doesn’t rely on twitch mechanics or deformed nightmares to shock you into spilling the Doritos. It’s a mystery involving an old steam liner from 1913 and the ghosts who still inhabit it. And as protagonist Richard Osmond, it’s your job to free them from their attachments to this world so they can move on to the next. So yeah, it’s Titanic meets Ghost Ship crossed with the Bermuda Triangle wrapped up in a nice point-and-click style adventure shell for your PlayStation, released a month before the Dreamcast addicted everyone to Soul Calibur, and had an advertising budget measured in macadamia nut cookies. Of course no one bought it–nobody likes macadamia nut cookies.

Note to developers: no ocean liner has ever disappeared under non-mysterious circumstances.

Now you know better though.  Echo Night‘s slow pacing and heavy reliance on reading can easily turn off gamers looking for massive adrenaline rushes, but gamers who enjoy a more cerebral aspect to their creepy gaming habits will eat this one up. And while it’s not exactly kid-friendly, Echo Night‘s ghosts bear little resemblance to the broken-necked, eyeball-gouged phantasms of the Fatal Frame series. Combat, when it occurs, usually involves the player running to find a light switch (ghosts prefer darkness, so illuminating the room puts them on the defensive), or evading the angry spirit until you can find the item which calms them down and allows you to have a less-violent interaction.

Echo Night: Starting games with peculiar letters two years before Silent Hill 2, bitches!

Controls take a bit of getting used to, especially looking up and down which use the shoulder buttons instead of the analog sticks, and turn fast loading off if you’re running it via emulation on a PS2 or PS3, or else the voices and music won’t play properly. It’s also not a terribly long game, so don’t expect this one to soak up weeks of your life. A second play-through will yield secrets the first one does not, but even with this you’re still only looking at five-six hours of game time total. For retro gamers on a time crunch this is perfect, as it can easily be finished in a lazy afternoon or spanning a couple hours’ of play time each day of a weekend.

Clearly no parents were involved in the design of the Orpheus’s play areas.

A note about the sound: Echo Night is one of the most atmospheric games you’ll ever load into a PS1. The music is subtle, elegant, and most often completely absent. Composers Kota Hoshino and Tsukasa Saitoh weave their notes skillfully between tinkling chimes, moaning ghosts, and creaking floors to fabulous effect. You won’t remember a single tune from the game once you’re done playing, but that’s not a complaint–it means the music is doing its job perfectly. It’s rare to see sound design this excellent, doubly so in a budget title.

A scary young girl with freaky supernatural powers? Thanks, Japan, I didn’t want to sleep tonight.

Echo Night is very much a love-it-or-hate-it experience, so if you need brilliant graphics and a fast-paced environment you’d do well to give this one a pass. But for those who don’t mind a few moments of heart-stopping tension interspersed with a little detective work and a story where your main duty isn’t to go around slaughtering everything that moves for once, Echo Night is delightfully entertaining without being the gore-drenched orgy of violence and torture that is seemingly the only style game devs pass off as ‘horror’ these days. The Evil Within is awesome, but it is still possible to scare gamers without spilling gallons of dark-red pixels. Just sayin’.

Michael Crisman

In 1979, Michael Crisman was mauled by a radioactive Gorgar pinball machine. After the wounds healed, doctors discovered his DNA had been re-coded. No longer fully human, Michael requires regular infusions of video games in order to continue living among you. If you see him, he can see you. Make no sudden moves, but instead bribe him with old issues of computer and video game magazines or a mint-in-box copy of Dragon Warrior IV.


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