Review: Purple Noise Echo (2018)

Original post: https://misthold.dreamwidth.org/10809.html

Purple Noise Echo (2018) is an early access game still in development, but it has a really great look and will probably end up being a fun game. It's an “ambient tactical” game in which you play a “silicon entity” (sort of a robot?) who has to wander around and gather resources. You can only see a few spaces around your robot body at a time, and it's very dark and semi-spooky (in a scifi kinda way, rather than a gothic horror way). Great background sounds/robot noises, and the robot design itself is awesome.

However, the gameplay still needs work. There's not a lot of instructions and it's not super obvious what you're supposed to do, or why. Maybe rescue somebody? Apparently that's the point, as the description says: “The game is about discovering the hard way: the mechanics, the place, the story and more.”

That might work better in a fully-finished game, but in an early access game it just means you're clicking around trying stuff and then the game crashes. And I think even in an exploration game, it's a good idea to have a story element or a specific goal, to make it worth the effort of finding out that stuff in the first place.

Purple Noise Echo made my Mac slow down to the point that I thought it might crash the COMPUTER, so I had to shut it down after 7 minutes. Despite that, I thought it was a good beginning to what seems like a neat game.

Price: $7.00

Available for Windows and macOS. I played the Mac version.