Echo Review - Diary Version
The following review contains writings of adult themes, sexual references and mentions of body horror and gore, suicide, violence and sexual misconduct. Viewer discretion is advised.
Echo is a visual novel that had its first release in 2015 which is also the year it is set, and its final version was released in 2021. It is a psychological thriller mixed in with similar framing to a dating simulator, though it’s not really a dating simulator so much as each route is like a story that mainly follows your choice of character at the route divide.
We follow a journalism student called Chase, who is here to do a school project about his hometown called “Echo”. He was invited by a member of his old friend group who has organised a reunion, which doesn’t quite go to plan as the course of time has left a strange impact on the friends while a historical supernatural event comes crawling back during their stay.
Before getting into Echo, I should mention that a friend who helped me to get into this series actually had me read Echo Route 65 first, which is a smaller visual novel set in our main cast's childhoods on the day that our protagonist accidentally outed himself as gay to his parents. I don’t plan on doing a whole review of Route 65, nor will I go into any spoilers for it like I will when we get into the bulk of this review, but here’s a small paragraph of what I think on it:
I didn’t really get anything from reading it first and I wasn’t really left with any opinion on any character nor any questions about anything. I still enjoyed it and there have been moments while reading Echo that I’ve thought back on it as “oh right, that happened”, but otherwise it’s not greatly enhanced my experience with the main visual novel and I find myself, after finishing the whole thing, wanting to go back read every route on it just to be more clued in on what I missed previously.
Anyway, if you from the audience on main somehow didn’t know I’m a furry already, you do now. My attachment to the series before this year wasn’t all that interesting - I first encountered these Visual Novels years ago, but it never really landed on me. At the time I was a teenager who knew what he was looking for and was only really interested in visual novels from a perspective of what visual enjoyment I could get out of them, I say with a wink and a nudge, so I believe my first try at one was a very early build of The Smoke Room and if I’m remembering correctly, it was extremely incomplete at the time and I didn’t really read that deep given I was frustrated having read so many incomplete visual novels at the time. I know in the time since I played it they’ll have made years of progress and I basically don’t remember anything about it so I can see myself giving it another shot now that I'm not a teenager and I now also come with more commitment to reading…
So about that… Let’s touch on this while it’s relevant, and so it’s not as awkward when the name comes up later.
I wrote the start of my review back in October and since then (i.e. the time this current part of the review was written near the end of the process) TSR has been completely removed from Echo Project, with mention that the novels lead writer GeorgeSquares will have a team continue with the visual novels progress, with the Echo developers stating the following on Patreon; “Because TSR was conceived in late 2017, with multiple parties contributing ideas and work while not under contract, there are still ongoing negotiations regarding the rights to the assets. This includes the title of the visual novel”. They go on… “all characters and stories in TSR no longer have any relation to Echo Project, or its visual novels and we no longer consider it as part of Echo.” The Smoke Room was then reuploaded onto The Goodnight Fellowship’s Itch.io page, which is the aforementioned GeorgeSquares’ take on the visual novel.
Now, that puts some things in a spin because some characters are at least mentioned by name in Echo, the title is used to refer to an in-story location, and there are photos from in the game which depict characters from it, so how this statement will affect Echo as a whole is yet to be determined. As someone who still plans to read his copy of the final build under Echo Project’s name, it’ll be hard not to connect it until a formal retcon is made either to Echo or The Smoke Room to correct this.
This news is disappointing and I do feel this outcome is not the most fair, but when you consider the angle from which this news comes as well as the controversy leading to this decision in the first place, it’s hard not to understand why it may have been the best option for both teams’ mental healths. I will not be covering the details of what caused this to happen, primarily because I don’t think it’s any of my business given I literally just got here, but I will still make mention of The Smoke Room in this review simply because I’ve already written a whole 90-odd pages and I don’t want to retcon what was going through my head while I was originally reading the story. I likely will no longer be reviewing The Smoke Room, at least not as an Echo title out of respect for this decision, and whether or not I will read or review the adapted story under the Goodnight Fellowship is still to be decided because I want to know more about the people on the team.
With that addressed…
I would like to mention that I wrote this review as I read the VN, so this very long review basically functions as a diary of the time I played the game with some proofreading and some footnotes to clarify things that I may have changed my mind on later or to fact check things that went unconfirmed while I was originally writing (the footnote tag will be boldened and italicised if the footnote contains a spoiler for another route we hadn’t gone over - if there’s a footnote in Leo’s Route for instance, it will be bold and italicised if it contains a spoiler for Jenna or Carl’s Route, but not for TJ or Flynn’s Route). If at any point I say something that sounds wrong as an assumption while I’m reviewing things in each route, it’s because I hadn’t read a thing that wholly contradicts it at the time of writing and if it is a standout detail to me that I initially got wrong, I will correct it when it comes up again and/or in a footnote which will hover above the text that needs more context.
As I have been reading these, I have been jotting down my thoughts in the form of a graph for opinions on the characters, so that is going to be how I format this review: we will cover each route in the order I played them and go over the progression of my opinions of the characters throughout. We will start on a prologue, then follow on to review each route in the order I read them in: TJ’s Route, Flynn’s Route, Leo’s Route, Jenna’s Route and Carl’s Route. I was given an order to best read the routes in, but I did reject it, wanting to take it at my own pace. You won’t see the graphs I drew because they mostly exist for the sake of reminding myself what I was thinking at any given point in the story, but I will describe some of my thoughts as if we’re looking at the graph.
All that said, before we get into spoiler territory, I want to offer my thoughts on all the characters before we start reviewing so you get a brief look at my thoughts without the supporting context, and those who have already read it can get a disclaimer on if I end up ripping into their favourite character. We’ll come back to these and explain them in the concluding section.
Characters:
The characters can be split up according to importance. We have the main friend group which I call the Core 6; this includes our main character Chase, along with the 5 characters we all have routes with; Carl, Flynn, Jenna, TJ and Leo.
On Chase, I said: The main guy is a journalism-student otter. When I read this, the voice and mannerisms I gave him in my head were basically the voice of Brian Griffin, weirdly enough; very normal male voice, he’s kinda just average when it comes to how he puts himself out there, but the character is largely found inside. 5/10
Carl is kinda like a spoiled rich kid ram who is facing the consequences of being a spoiled rich kid. His character profile is kinda gifted-kid energy, but also not? 9/10
Flynn is a lowkey neurodivergent clerk lizard. He’s kinda like the group's brute, but he’s socially awkward and his words come out with spines. He is also hot. 10/10
Jenna is a psych-student fennec fox. She’s very logical, but also values emotion in a weird way. You’d probably expect that out of a psychology student actually. 7/10
TJ is a student lynx in some kind of sports field - I forget the exact details, but I know he has good knowledge on fitness to a holistic level. He’s very sensitive and spiritually Christian. 7/10
And lastly, Leo is a mechanic wolf. He’s heavy-handed, sensitive, protective and strong. 1/10
I won’t go into what level of importance the rest of these characters have because it’s not something you could infer from the title page; i.e. these are ones that aren’t on the image at the start of this review. In no particular order:
Janice is a server coyote. She’s quite bubbly and clearly knows what she wants and expects. 4/10
Sydney is a temperamental, anxious otter. He comes from a strict and unfair childhood home. 7/10
Daxton is a geeky salamander. He makes a lot of references to Adastra. He’s a bit of a hermit. 7/10
Jeremy is a drug dealing fennec fox. He is grouchy and menacing. 3/10
Clint is a scared lemur and by no means a coward, he’s quite brave. 7/10
Mayor Moore is a mayor (obviously) and also a lizard. She is a strong character. 6/10
Julian is a server deer. He’s laid back and faithful and kind of a people pleaser. 4/10
Micha is a drug dealer’s assistant bat. He is witty, lowkey and emotional. 10/10
Raven is a shop keep husky. He is jolly and always in high spirits. 4/10
Brian is a sadistic bear. 1/10, would go lower if I could.
Duke is an authority figure weasel. He is suspicious (the emotion, not the adjective), and also a druggard. 5/10
Heather is a drug dealer's assistant cat. She is skittish, bubbly and distraught. 6/10
Kudzu is a clerk Raccoon. He is laid-back, sensitive, protective and strong. 10/10
Prologue
The prologue starts with Chase, TJ and Jenna driving on the way to Echo and unpacking their things at the motel. Then, Carl shows up to meet with them followed by Leo and Flynn. They talk a while, Chase gives an awkward glance toward Leo’s anchor bracelet, and that comes up later in the prologue when Leo and Chase’s ex-relationship is addressed and it ends with the split-off into different routes.
This split off moment isn’t great in my opinion, but I also understand, after doing one route, why this happens - the story is only covering one week. A typical VN like this would have you spend a good amount of individual time with each character before having you decide who you want to go off with - a personal favourite of mine spends a whole 3 days getting you invested in the main characters and an additional 3 days getting you invested in side characters before having a path splitter. This game has no such thing, likely because of the time constraint of the story taking place over a week in combination with the fact that a) these characters already know each other and b) Chase is not our self-insert - although we are here to control some of his actions, he’s not a Joker Persona 5 with a core personality and blank spaces for readers opinions, no, Chase is making most of the decisions by himself whether we the reader agree with it or not… more on that later..
As for why I don’t entirely like this split off point, it reads your decision to go and tend to a characters emotional needs as a subconscious preference for the character rather than one choice that fits the situation. In any typical circumstance this would feel either like a way t tell you how different characters react to conflict to aid your eventual route-splitting decision, or it would be a key event that happens in the middle of the game where the decision could make or break the friendship/relationship you decided to pursue. It feels odd that this argument determines the one person you spend most of the week with as it’s not a conscious decision to do so - you make plans on the Monday and then you fulfil those plans on Tuesday, which is when the route truly begins, but then all routes lead to roughly the same Wednesday scenario and you’re still deciding to spend the rest of the story with this character for Wednesday evening and every day after, which can make it feel more like I’m forced this way on the foundation that I may not have even realised that the lake argument was even the path split. Again though, I appreciate and understand why they did this and it does make total sense to me, it’s just not within my preferences.
Okay, now my thoughts on the characters.
Throughout the prologue my opinions of characters are just barely forming.
My opinion of Chase is inconsistent, levelling out on a slightly optimistic note as the prologue ends. It was actually this early on that I started to realise we are not playing as Chase - there’s something about characters meant as the reader's self-insert that makes it very clear that’s what they are meant to be - it’s how decisions are handled. Other visual novels that do have us as the main character and that I won’t name specifically so as not to tell on my viewing habits will have it that you make a few decisions per “scene”, plus, many I’ve read will allow you to give yourself a name rather than assign you one. In this novel I believe there are, what, 3 decisions in the prologue? I have two written down from when I was keeping track of what decision each save I had moving on was indicative of, but I can swear down there’s a third somewhere before them,1 but the decisions are:
1. At the theme park, while watching the shows with TJ and Carl, Chase starts to get sleepy and you’re given a choice of who it fall asleep on - I chose Carl
2. Jenna at some point asks Chase about his sexual orientation and you’re given a choice between gay or bisexual.
There are several other moments a typical VN might have had as choices if the main character was meant to be the reader, like when you wake up from a nightmare while leaning on one of the boys a choice might be to decide how to explain why you woke up the way you did, but these are not decisions we are able to make, which to me immediately gives the game away that Chase and the reader are separate and we are not meant to see ourselves in Chase at all.
Still though, my opinion on him is up-and-down as he says agreeable and disagreeable things when it’s on his own accord. The highest peak was during the conversation about the anchor bracelet, where I actually think Chase was right to stand his ground on not wanting to associate with Echo anymore. Even having read through my whole first route I still believe this, even if it’s not for a reason I would be inclined to celebrate, I do still believe Leo is wrong to insist Chase keep wearing a bracelet he has lost his attachment to.
Leo seems like a loving character, but the Anchor moment really did give me the ick - I find it a little bit controlling to imply that Chase should actually still cling onto his roots and just wear the damn bracelet. I don’t think Chase has ever forgotten his roots, I don’t think it has to be something anyone has to keep in their mind constantly even if “for the sake of the group”, he’s allowed to make himself independent from Echo and especially from Leo.
I didn't like the direction Carl had gone in. Through the prologue, ashamedly, I feel like his whole personality is just being a pothead loser and I find myself not really having a lot to say about him. During the argument at the river I actually kinda found myself agreeing with Flynn on that one.
I liked Flynn's snark throughout the prologue, but the Lake blow-up threw off a good amount of my opinion as I wasn’t really picking up the impressions he had for the most part. I remained sympathetic though.
I find TJ endearing the whole way through. Without going into too much detail, of what I’ve read thus far, a common theme for how people talk about TJ is “people need to stop treating him like a child”. I do agree with that, but it doesn’t impede my opinion of him.
Jenna bores me a little throughout the prologue, but I overall feel positively about her by this point in the story, finding her opinions overall agreeable, but the graph is kept relatively low, as far as the positive side of the coin is concerned.
At the branch off I choose to go with TJ because his response to Flynn's berating seems like it' needs tending to the most - instead of crying or becoming fearful or even flinching at Flynn's use of words or having any reaction at all, he just sits there and then just drags his feet away. Even after pushing through the whole of TJ’s Route this move doesn’t make that much sense to me; it feels a little out of character to what I know of, because he feels like the sort of character to panic and go into a frenzy.
TJ’s Route
This is where spoilers get heavy, so if you have not read TJ’s Route yet I highly advise you dip out and come back.
Overall, my thoughts on TJ continue to just shine. I think he is a remarkable character that embodies perfectly the exact sort of person we have all met in our lives; he’s very spiritual, following a Christian set of values strictly and choosing not to involve himself with conflicting thoughts. He can obnoxiously police other peoples nomenclature, but it’s not in a gross “forcing my religion unto you” type of way, it’s in a “please respect my wishes in how you should talk to me” type of way.
A core conflict in the cast of characters is Flynn vs Jenna. It’s framed very much as a Flynn vs TJ thing, but I think the most of Flynn’s anger towards TJ actually comes from the way Jenna ardently protects TJ from any conflicting things Flynn might do. Where Flynn stands is that TJ is a little overprotected and that TJ should not be stopped from having conversations about what happened to Sydney… I haven’t mentioned that yet…
Sydney is a childhood friend of the group who was pulled into Lake Emma and drowned, with the only witness being TJ. This makes Flynn suspicious of TJ, with Flynn believing that since TJ is the only witness and TJ did not greatly like Sydney, that must mean TJ pushed Sydney into the Lake and let him get pulled away by the current. Chase is then the one to try and save Sydney by pulling him out of the water, but it’s too late. Flynn seems to believe TJ’s innocence and ardent religiosity comes from some kind of deep regret and some attempt to right his past wrongs, though from what I have read so far, this has not actually been stated, so this is just a guess.
Anyway, point is, TJ is massively protected by the group and Flynn thinks that is ridiculous, which makes for the most of Flynn and Jenna's involvement in TJ’s Route. For the most part I follow along with Jenna’s side of the coin here in that TJ should be protected from Flynn with regards to Flynn’s approach to the topic of how Sydney died - Flynn’s wording isn’t exactly choice and there is also a point during the argument at the river where Flynn winds his arm back to punch TJ, though he gives up and lowers it in the end, seeming a touch embarrassed.
Another major player in this route is Carl, though he settles into this route quite late. There’s a point where Carl invites Chase and TJ over to his house. Carl is in a bad mood that day and needs the company. My opinion on Carl was already dwindling throughout the prologue, but his nonchalance comes off to me as uncaring through most of this route. It’s during the stay over at Carls that my opinion kinda drops off for Carl - they play Never Have I Ever and TJ targets a lot of his questions at Chase, but that is lost on Carl who relates far too much with TJ’s prompts which start to worsen Carl's mood. It’s when TJ prompts the possibility of being in a car accident that Carl snaps and get’s a little bit fiery with TJ. My opinion on Carl isn’t irreparable though, as when Carl apologises to TJ later on, I find it really genuine and I trust his promise to repair where he chipped away at. Chase didn't like his apology, so that knocks him down a little bit.
As for Leo, he barely shows up in this route at all. There’s a moment in the middle somewhere where they visit a state fair and Leo and Jenna have a bit of a competition to win Chase a prize,2 but Leo kinda goes away again after that and shows up again right before the climax of the VN, where he actively apologises for not showing up a lot and tries to set up another meetup somewhere later down the line, which makes my opinion of Leo boost neatly to a near clean-slate, although in order for me to go fully to a new slate with Leo I’d have needed to see the actual actions Leo planned to take on that regard.
My opinion of Chase slips throughout the story and nosedives off a cliff before we can even get to the huge twist in the ending. My fondness for Chase rises as the bond between him and TJ grows closer, but then Chase tries to “improve” TJ… good! Friends, partners, whatever they’re supposed to be, should try to improve each other… but the substance of Chase's advice is that TJ needs to be more confrontational, following Janice’s pleading and frankly manipulative ways to get TJ to keep helping her with yard work. While I do think a good part of improvement to TJ would be toning down his extreme people-pleasing tendencies, that does not mean we need to reverse and reshape TJ’s personality to be more confrontational to fit - he can be mild-tempered and delicate and be able to say no to people. More on the nosedive in thoughts about Chase later.
There’s another big character in this route called Julian, who is an old friend of TJ that he shares history with in Christian camps. I believe the whole point of Julian is to draw out Chase’s darker side which has my opinion on Chase dwindling - Chase is jealous of him. Ardently too - he sees them literally just being best friends with each other and it stings his heart. He gets angry even looking at Julian and I kinda hate him for this.
There’s a few flashbacks to the group's lives as kids, including one where we find Chase accusing Sydney of killing his father to Carl and TJ behind Sydney’s back. Sydney interrupts them mid conversation and grows sceptical to what the boys are talking about. My main belief about the scene is that it's meant to show where Sydney’s behaviours may have come from; other flashbacks show scenes of Sydney trying to drown TJ in the lake before Chase jumps in to save TJ, and this scene where Chase slyly accuses Sydney shows where this belief that Sydney was not a great person might have come from.3
Overall the span of TJ’s Route is kinda boring to me? There was a peak in it during the hike at the start because TJ continues to be a really pleasing character. His shyness to even remotely call Chase attractive is kinda adorable and it boosts my opinion of TJ to be as high as it could possibly be and then my opinion stagnates at that point. I could have broken the upper limits of opinions and formally become a TJ stan had he experienced any growth throughout the story, but he simply does not. More on that as we move on to the Scavenger Hunt and climax.
The Scavenger Hunt starts when Carl finds an old note written by Sydney in his house. The group decides to do this Scavenger Hunt, but without Leo and Flynn who they all know would object to this. The Scavenger Hunt has a strange focus on Chase; the first clue references the forest, in which the note claims Chase would probably find entering the forest too scary, in reference to an old event where Chase opened up to Sydney about hallucinating the image of a fox hanging himself from the trees in the forest. The last hint leads the group to the river, where the clue says that the group is about to “find out what Chase has done”. Every clue has a hint about Chase in it, which means this is a set-up against Chase.
As Chase grows more weary of this, he suspects Flynn and Carl of setting this up, but this never fully makes sense to him. As Chase's anger about the set-up grows he only grows more clingy towards and protective of TJ. Chase gets so out of whack that after a trip to some amusements with Julian and TJ, Chase takes TJ to the forest and in a moment of dejectedness from TJ he kisses TJ without his consent - there’s that nosedive off the charts I mentioned; how about we don’t sexually assault our peers.
As Chase's suspicions grow I briefly find him agreeable, but it’s after the clue they get from the school that my suspicions settle in more and stagnate my opinion and slowly start to lower it before the nosedive happens. As my opinions on Chase sag, my opinions of Flynn and Carl actually start rising.
Before the day they follow the last clue of the Scavenger Hunt, Chase rushes to the lake to ruin the Scavenger Hunts prize by digging it up, removing the note that explains “what Chase has done” and replacing it with a fake. When the group goes to obtain this prize, another argument happens. Chase gets angry at Carl for setting it up, Carl is confused and tries to escape as TJ grows protective of Chase and in the process of running away, Carl falls and breaks a leg, which sets guilt into TJ. At this point you can’t help but feel for Carl and you can almost hear his crying, which speaks to the quality of the writing.
My opinion of Flynn flings right back up during the first fight between Chase and he - Flynn shows up at the motel to have a conversation with TJ, and Chase goes outside to stop him from coming in. He accuses Flynn of setting up the Scavenger Hunt and becomes so aggressively defensive of TJ that they physically fight until Chase gets vicious enough that Flynn, of all people, is actively scared off. Flynn’s confusion about the accusations towards him leave an impression Flynn isn’t actually someone we should be suspicious of and that our own minds had been swayed by Chase, if you’d chosen to believe him up to this point, which was a faith I’d redacted earlier.
The climax of the novel comes when Flynn is dragging TJ to the lakes shore to have a conversation about what happened formally. As Chase approaches them here the distant view of the conversation as we approach shows that it’s actually quite a gentle one and though we don’t have the context for it, there’s no impression left that Flynn is being as careless as we were led to believe. When Chase shows up, they start to fight, with the climax of this fight being Chase removing the Scavenger Hunts prize note from his pocket and presenting it to Flynn.
The clue depicts a cutesy drawing of TJ at the shore watching the river as Sydney is held face down in the water by Chase - what actually happened at the river is not a mystery to Chase nor TJ as they've both known Chase dragged Sydney into the water the entire time, this following an event in which Sydney pranked TJ by holding him underwater for a while which Chase interpreted as attempted murder.4
After Chase had successfully killed Sydney he pulled him out to shore and that’s when the others showed up, the story becoming: Sydney is mysteriously dragged away by some ghostly presence while TJ starts to shout for help, Chase “rescues” Sydney and the others show up when he is carrying him to shore. Flynn doesn’t hear the true story, but seeing the note he starts to beat up Chase. TJ then stands, seemingly slightly guilty at the sight before him and falsely confesses that he murdered Sydney. Flynn grows shocked and stands up to which Chase takes the opportunity to draw Flynn into the water and drown him, causing him to die, at least by how I played it.
After Chase kills Flynn, he goes right back to protecting a now even more guilty-feeling TJ, as Chase continues gaslighting him into believing that murdering Flynn was a good thing actually and some act of heroism towards TJ. The story closes off with two strangers meeting at the lake years later. They reference Flynn’s murder, claiming that Chase got off Scott-free on the grounds of self-defence before one of them hallucinates the image of Flynn’s dead body floating on the surface of the water.
I believe the climax reveals that TJ’s innocence is indeed a self-defence mechanism from guilt, but instead about protecting Chase. Chase never lets Flynn talk to TJ because he knows that if he does, Flynn is going to find out he killed Sydney and then point his accusations at Chase, and I believe that had Chase not interrupted them at the river this would have eventually happened. But what actually happens stunts TJ from any form of growth whatsoever and he is unsatisfyingly still a victim to Chase's manipulations. There is this implication that TJ is the one who set up the scavenger hunt, which, if true, I think is a great way to show he was on the brink of growing, but it’s almost like Chase picks up on this and stops it before it can happen. It’s psychotic, but really well pulled-off.
I think this makes for a great bad ending to the story - the unsatisfying lack of growth from TJ is not a bad thing at all to me since it’s clear to me this is supposed to be a more villainous route anyway. My biggest contentions with this route are the boring bits in the middle which felt like heap-loads of filler to me and I also think the twist villain-arc of Chase was a little too blatant - I could faintly see it coming by the time of the Scavenger Hunts clue from the school and by the time Carl was breaking his leg, I could see exactly what the ending would be right at that moment unfortunately. The most surprising thing to me, funnily enough, was Leo showing up again before the climax and making my opinion spur all the way up and I really liked that. I think if I couldn’t see Chase being a murderer coming it might have been a better ending to me.
Flynn’s Route
What made me choose Flynn’s Route next was actually before TJ’s Route even started. See, when the prologue split-off event happened, I didn’t actually notice it was a split-off at first until the hike on TJ’s Route which had romantic undertones to it. I got suspicious of that and asked a friend if this was the case, which was when I found out and decided at that point that Flynn would be my second route - I thought it would be interesting to see where the route would differ if I instead followed the cause of the group's divide as opposed to who seemed to be the main subject of it. And so, the day after finishing off with TJ I immediately started on Flynn’s Route… Oh boy, what an opening…
Before we get into it, let me note something about my history with Flynn - I barely remember seeing Flynn during the prologue and in Echo Route 65 as I didn’t choose to come out to him, so the only other interaction I had with him prior was over text messages that were happening while Carl was trying to tell us a story, which was really difficult for me to follow. In other words, going into Flynn's Route I kinda forgot I didn’t actually really know what Flynn’s behaviour looks like in a normal situation; in the prologue he comes off as socially awkward and almost like he’s walking on eggshells. Every other interaction besides the start of the prologue was intense during TJ’s Route, so moving into Flynn’s Route is the first time I actually got to see his normal self isolated from everyone else’s.
Off jump, Flynn has hefty mood swings - when we start following him out from the river he starts angry, finds a weak spot on Chase and teases him about the comment that Chase wants to fuck everyone, which leads to Flynn being flirtatious. Flynn is then suddenly sulky and they stop at the lake for a sombre chat, which they then take to a diner where Flynn gets a little mad, which in turn makes him embarrassed, and by the time they’re sat down and Janice is taking their order, he goes back to being sulky and then is easily overstimulated by the environment.
I find it all really endearing, honestly, him instantly becoming a favourite. The scene at the bar kinda spoke to me as Flynn being neurodivergent with how the atmosphere quickly set him to an awkward mood and with several cues being pointed out as being the cause; the chattering and clinking of eating utensils from the other patrons, the fact he was covering his eyes almost like the brightness of the lights was getting to his head and the way he shrunk into himself when Janice was speaking. In later scenes he also doesn’t seem able to pick up the tones with which people are speaking and the scene at Carl’s “party” gives a similar energy to the trope of the solutions oriented neurodivergent friend giving advice at an inappropriate time; every character trait I see in him is something I feel like I have, though I definitely hold back more than he does if I know my instincts are liable to upset whoever I’m talking to.
Anyway, at the time of writing the entirety of this post so far, I still have not finished Flynn’s Route - I’m at a point where we’re about to enter a bar. I said I would write this as I read and now it’s time to actually start doing that…
Okay, coming back to this review roughly 24 hours later, I have finished Flynn’s Route.
Flynn’s Route starts with a brief argument between him and Chase as he questions why Chase would choose to follow him. There’s a strange line here where Flynn puffs his chest out and then his chest “hits Chase around the neck”… not entirely sure what that means, but I believe “around” in this context is “approximately” rather than “surrounding”, I just think it’s a really bizarre way of putting it and also really hard to envision without some really questionable physics… Chase also seems quite a bit shorter than Flynn, so his chest probably actually would have hit his face instead, but I digress…
One of Flynn’s accusations towards Chase is that he's just trying to work his tail around the boys in the group; that he only sticks around with them so he can have sex with them all, which is our first peak at Flynn’s overtly sexual nature that comes to full force on Tuesday when we go fishing with Carl at the lake. Flynn teaches Chase how to fish by grasping at his fishing rod around his body from behind and has a few comments about Chase's reaction. Later, after Chase takes a dip for the sake of untangling Carl's line from a branch across the river, Chase goes downstream to a cleaner part of the water to wash himself off when Flynn interrupts him. He explains that there's a towel in the car and while Chase looks for it Flynn shoves him against the window and releases some of the sexual tension between the two by palming all over his body, which Chase very much enjoys and Flynn cuts off.
Flynn’s flamboyant sexuality picks up its paces 3 times throughout this route; the second time is after a snide comment towards Leo about how Flynn wishes to be taken out to dinner before having a sexual encounter where Chase goes over to Flynn’s house so Flynn can flex his cooking skills - Flynn takes him to the bedroom after.
And then later, when Chase, Carl and Flynn's roommate Daxton (who we’ll discuss later) run off to a secret bar which Flynn seems to have left his invitation to very well-presented on the counter. They take off to the bar to find Flynn and Flynn takes him to The Smoke Room in which they have what actually starts off to be quite a sweet encounter before 4 or 5 strangers also attending the brothel pile onto them to join in, at which point Chase actually feels quite self-conscious about the fact Flynn would let other people join in on their 1-on-1 fun and not just enjoy the moment with Chase. Flynn keeps enjoying it and Chase runs out as Flynn continues to indulge. This scene is grimy and greasy, but it’s by far the happiest Flynn is throughout his route, which was really nice to see, and it’s also the closest we see Chase and Flynn even despite two previous sexual interactions.
Every new fact I learnt about Flynn only had my opinion shoot higher up the chart. He is extremely charming and although TJ and Jenna feel like they’re intended by the group to be the moral centres of our cast of six,5 I find Flynn’s beliefs the most realistic and accurate to how things should be, even if the way he expresses it doesn’t entirely convey that meaning. There’s that neurodivergence coming in again.
Another big arc for Flynn’s character along this route is getting to the bottom of how Sydney died, which includes a conversation with TJ about it. Flynn’s approach to this conversation is really gentle and he handles the issue with a great amount of care. I hear his tone of voice being quite soft and non-judgemental and just as TJ is about to say it Leo and Jenna bound in to shut it all down. Chase sets that occurrence up behind the reader's back and falsely accuses Flynn of leading him on for sex - this reads to me a lot like Chase was upset that Flynn was being sexually open despite the fact that Chase and Flynn aren’t actually partners; it feels as though this conflict of interest in how the two should handle their desires for each other made Chase feel betrayed where for Flynn it was just a normal Thursday visit to the local bar.
Out of nowhere TJ states that when he witnessed Sydney’s drowning he saw two brown bodies in the water as it happened… he finally said that Chase was the culprit all along. That broke TJ above the upper bound opinions-wise - that big moment I was hoping to see from TJ in his own route instead shows up here, which is a great way of showing the dark truth that when Chase isn’t there to intervene, everyone is more than capable of growth.6
Another swooping part of this route is Leo having an additional conversation with Chase, which Chase keeps avoiding because he doesn’t want Leo to know he’s been fucking around with Flynn and possibly break Leo’s heart and the friendship group as a whole. When they actually finally have the conversation, which happens right in the middle of Chase's abandoned old home, Chase just blurts out that it’s been happening to which Leo comments on how he has also fucked around with Flynn before going down a conversation about how Leo has noticed Chase has changed so much over the years… it’s quite beautiful actually; though it’s a little insane to know Leo has become so distraught over losing Chase that he keeps pretending they're still together, by hugging pillows while pretending they're him and talks to a fake version of Chase he keeps in his head, and it is creepy, but it’s also just nostalgic, bittersweet and a big show of how Leo’s love for him never went away, even if that love is towards a version of Chase that no longer exists.7
Carl as a character sneaks his way up to the peak of my opinions during this route when he defends Flynn after Leo, Chase and Jenna start accusing him during the conversation with TJ. But all the way through this route he is nothing but endearing and even after I previously sounded him out as a bit of an ass, I just started feeling more and more sympathetic throughout this route. His life is kinda sad and he reads like someone who has just lost all hope or being independent, which I find a little bit relatable, sadly.
During that conversation my thoughts on Leo and Jenna droop a bit, but they also drooped earlier on in the route when they are unnecessarily rude towards Flynn for simply trying to talk to TJ as a friend; these gestures do nothing but hinder the groups ability to move on and actually address the unspoken feeling about these events. Jenna drooped down further during her fit over this as she not only does this with harsher words for Flynn, but she also does it out in public, which only serves to make an entire shop full of people feel awkward and, including TJ, the person she was trying to protect in the first place. Jenna is particularly frustrating on this route because psychology is kinda her field and it feels like she just isn’t open to hearing people out on their struggles if it’s inconvenient for her goals.
Lastly, just like we had Julian in TJ’s Route we have our own little extra in this route called Daxton, who is Flynn's roommate. Daxton is far more involved than Julian was. We meet him when Chase first comes to Flynn's house, when he’s invited to be wooed by Flynn's cooking. It comes as a shock to Chase, but Daxton very much exists and is a massive nerd for Adastra… we’re really getting a lot of references to follow up visual novels in this one, aren’t we?
It was at this moment I even remembered Adastra was a part of Echo Project… forgive me for not being a big Echo-head before this. Funny enough, I had read that years ago too, but… and please don’t get mad, I found it boring whenever I first read it and started skimming large chunks. Maybe my newfound attachment to Dax and more commitment to reading as an adult would help me appreciate it more, but all I remember was Amicus was cute but kinda annoying to me and Neferu was hot. Neferu was my biggest takeaway, to be completely honest, forgive me for being a hormonal teenager who’d made an Itch account for less savoury purposes.
Where were we? Ah, yes, Daxton!
Daxton's biggest moments come in the form of dream segments; there are two places you may find him talking about his dreams; once with Chase and once with Flynn. We’ll get to the moment with Flynn later, but if you missed the time we talked about this with Chase, it’s tucked away with when Leo has the conversation with Chase; you’re able to choose to hear out Dax or Leo. I went with Leo, but I went back and looked at the Dax choice out of curiosity and was not disappointed. The dream leaves him with an impression on Chase that he finds hard to shake unless he talks with him about it; a sense that something about him is wrong and he suddenly finds Chase to be condemnable. Daxton is described as being relatively reclusive before the events of this story and comes off at times as rather socially awkward to match. He’s a cool character, also lowkey neurodivergent as Flynn. He’s also one of the better nerds I’ve seen in fiction, since nerds tend to be unrealistically overbearing in a lot of stories, but Daxton has the sense of embarrassment about his favourite material that a lot of nerds can experience, which I find refreshing given a lot of fictional nerds talk like incels analysing evolutionary psychology.
One thing that happens seemingly out of nowhere, as many things in this route, comes after the day we’re able to talk to Leo or Daxton. We leave the location and we pan to the next day, which is Saturday, the day where Flynn and TJ are supposed to talk… the world wakes up on Saturday somewhere else though; a wrestling ring. After some vivid wrestling trash talking and the start of the fight we pop out of the vision and find ourselves in a young boy's bedroom, who’s perspective we’re taking on. We are now being berated by our father about how much of a miscreant we’ve become. He blames this on two things; the violent shows we watch at night on TV (the wrestling programs) and our gay best friend Flynn, who our father doesn’t approve of. This makes it apparent we are currently embodying a young Sydney. Another wrestling scene comes in and we wake up in the forest with our father who is teaching us how to hunt. This is where it sank in to me that we are now through the day that Sydney’s father died, which was brought up in TJ’s Route in the flashback where Chase accuses Sydney of murdering his father to Carl and TJ, and after another wrestling cut in when Sydney’s dad storms off from Sydney in anger, we fade back in to see his father forcing us to watch him kill himself.
During the big discussion with TJ, TJ finally admits that he saw what pulled Sydney into the water, but he does so cryptically; “a second brown body was in the water”. There’s a moment of awkwardness as the group starts to turn their attention towards Chase… unlike in TJ’s Route, the group actually finds out the truth in this one, though there’s a lot of scepticism from Jenna and Leo. The group is interrupted by some hooligans deciding to shoot up the place and they decide to leave, but not before Flynn locks Chase up in an off-limits room.
This scene is chilling. Chase starts seeing things and as he moves about in the room he finds himself sitting on something strange before a grim sensation trails its way up his entire body and finds himself covered in his biggest fear; spiders… hundreds of them skittering up his body. He realises the spiders are black widows and he is so panicked he passes out… When we wake up we’re somewhere new entirely, recounting another moment from the past issues faced by Sydney in which we now take on the view of Flynn who helps Sydney bury his dad.
When the scene cuts back to the present, however, we don’t find ourselves in the body of Chase again; we are still Flynn and we don’t stop being Flynn until the end of the route. This great perspective shift picks up where we arrive at Flynn’s with everyone except Chase, who is still scrambling to get spiders off him at this moment. We go on about how we need to protect ourselves from the hooligans and we arm ourselves with guns. Daxton tells us about a dream he had about Flynn where, just like in the Dream about Chase, the image of Flynn in this moment feels wrong to Dax, like it isn’t wholly Flynn, but his description laden with fear does not strike me as negative… and further, he sees some strange being with has a face resembling a socket. What this points to, obviously, is the reader; as I said previously, our perspective is not Chases, otherwise we wouldn’t be playing as Flynn right now, so what Daxton sees that feels wrong is an additional personality.8 That and the visual description of a face made of holes.
And, since I hadn’t read this bit when I last mentioned this part, Flynn being lowkey neurodivergent? Well, when he starts internally complaining about “the A word” (Daxton mentioned “Asperger’s”) it kinda throws us the bone that people in-universe see it too or he may even actually be diagnosed… not a display he’s most happy with, but it’s a cool note and I did a little celebration to myself for immediately catching on when we started on the Monday. For transparency, I’m not diagnosed with autism or anything and I’m not sure whether or not I’m autistic specifically, but I do know I am neurodivergent, and neuro recognises neuro, y’know?
Anyway, one thing they all talk about is a supernatural being TJ saw in the water while Sydney was drowned by Chase; not of either of their bodies, in fact just a strange presence at the far bank of the river just standing and watching, not moving, just there looking on with no eyes nor a mouth… Flynn denies the possibility of it being real, but Daxton reminds him of what he saw in his dream and then Jenna chimes in talking about how she saw the same being in her childhood. Flynn never believes it. In fact he doesn’t believe in anything paranormal, which is incredibly strange given literally ever other person in the town does experience it.
Eventually we find ourselves going back to the town hall to try and ask the Mayor, Flynn's auntie, about the strange occurrences going through the town, including the phone line mysteriously dropping, where Chase is also formally accused of the murder of Sydney, but his responses are cold and empty as though trying to keep it unknown whether he actually did it. We’re interrupted again and dragged outside to see piles of villagers coming in to ask the Mayor all these questions, and I’ll be honest, this entire scene bores me. Everyone's picking up on strange occurrences and whatnot before a rat9 waltz's in, his name's Duke, to ramble about how he's been seeing Chase in Echo before he actually arrived for this trip. This utter stranger to Chase does not get good vibes from his… foresight..? hallucinations..? whatever caused him to see Chase when he wasn’t there and decides to accuse Chase of being the reason the town has fallen into hysteria; that these events of hooligans wreaking havoc coincide almost too closely with the groups arrival at Echo, especially following hallucinations he’s had of Chase. A dead body is wheeled in, some hot bat and raccoon men show up with name tags for some reason, it’s a load of speculation and it honestly feels like this scene just doesn’t try to make it interesting to read, at least to someone reading this route earlier on. There’s an air of complicatedness to it all that had me lost while reading it so I just started to zone out. The Core 6 plus Daxton eventually just leave…
You’ll be reading this part at the end of my review of this route, but I’m actually writing this part first; the ending is quite possibly the most confusing thing in the world, but I think in the last hour of trying to figure it out10 I finally have a conclusion.
Let's cover what actually happens on Sunday first and then go back and theorise:
We start off in the car, trying to escape Echo with the main 6 and Dax in the car. As they drive they run into Chase's car shattered with Duke dead on the road beside it. Looming over the scene is “The Socket Man”, who swiftly approaches the car and stares Flynn right in the eye before suddenly disappearing. Everyone saw that, including Flynn, who said this thing couldn’t possibly be real in previous discussions about it. They start looping, the car continuously leading them back to the same locations, first of all to the same parts of the road where they move back to a direction they shouldn’t be going until they end up continuing to cycle back to the mines.
The Socket Man rushes towards the car, it hits the window and the team find themselves in the lake suddenly with Leo's car sinking to the bottom. They lose Daxton, but Leo goes down to save him and they all swim to shore. Most of the group, besides Carl and Flynn, run away to Leo’s house, with Daxton getting lost and joining them later.
Carl and Dax disappear within the blink of an eye and Flynn, confused, starts walking towards Leo's house, but finds himself moved to train tracks which then lead to a scenario shift to just outside the bar where we previously were nailed by Chase in The Smoke Room.
He enters the bar to find an adult Sydney, who converses with him as if he never died, seeming to show a scenario in which Sydney did not die and instead lived on to become a wrestler - if Sydney never died, the events where we helped Carl with his job interview would have instead happened with Sydney.11 The illusion is lifted as Flynn espouses the truth of what happened and Sydney moulds into an old spirit called Sam.
Flynn then walks towards The Smoke Room and enters, finding it to be more of a hallway than he expected as he keeps walking forward and the heat rises. He suddenly snaps back to reality and finds Carl and Daxton standing before him in the mines as Flynn burns before them. They run away in shock as Flynn tries to call out and confirm he is still there, but can’t as he slowly burns to death and his body transforms.
After burning to death he finds himself transported to several different events throughout history, including the murder of a fennec fox in which we choose to attack one of three characters, and including an event in which we stand in a young Jenna’s closet; a vision she previously described seeing the Socket Man in there, and also a moment in which the only thing he can see through the darkness is Dax’s eyes -a moment similar to a dream Dax described to Flynn where he saw him in the corner of his room but didn’t quite feel like it was truly Flynn.
In the “years later” scene, the duo meet with Chase who takes them to the mines to answer their questions and when they ask about Flynn, Chase looks dejected and walks off. As the journalist sets up the cameras he sees a visage of Flynn missing his eyes and mouth standing and staring at them hollowly.
…
So what is all of that?
Here's my understanding: Flynn is always destined to become the Socket Man - we just don’t see it in TJ’s Route because we never flipped perspectives to Flynn - as we drowned Flynn in the river on TJ’s Route Flynn probably became the Socket Man at that moment.12 In Flynn's Route, the hallucinations where he sees the adult Sydney fade to Sam which triggers him to walk to the Smoke Room, what is actually happening in reality is Flynn completes his “walk to Leo's house” which is actually down into the mines where the spirit has lit up a fire to burn Flynn in - since Sam couldn’t use Chase as a vessel to kill Flynn in this route, he takes over Flynn’s body and guides him there himself,13 which is why the perspective shift to Flynn happens in the first place.
To my understanding, Sam’s presence in the Socket Man never actually dissipates; in the scene where we see the dead fennec on the table, Flynn describes the movement of revealing himself to the trio as movements done outside of his own control. As I may have previously stated, I don’t know if I did yet, the scene where we’re knocked out of Chase's body reveals to me that we are playing as a haunted voice of Echo and not as some observer that isn’t actually a part of the story. This part of the story where we guide Flynn/Socket Man to move forth and kill the Fennec or Bear or whomever the third person was, shows to me that we are playing as Sam throughout the story no matter where we go.
As for what those scenes where Flynn sees these historical events is meant to be in the first place; they’re all instances of the Socket Man showing up - the Socket Man has always been Flynn in this nebulous paranormal form that has the ability to travel across all of time and insert himself to these events,14 which shows that Flynn’s death in this sense is inevitable and unavoidable.15 Flynn becoming the Socket Man is the soul reason he is never able to see the Socket Man until the Socket Man starts to merge with him; because all those instances described by Dax, Carl, Chase and Jenna are Flynn. And those moments when Flynn sees the Socket Man during the car loop section just happen to be the only times he decides to pay himself a visit16 - the moment where Flynn dies is the moment that the Socket Man is created as a physical manifestation of the evil spirit of Echo,17 Sam, but also of Flynn’s new-found integration with him.
This ending does not explain where Sam came from in the first place, though I get the feeling, knowing that The Smoke Room is intended as a prequel to Echo, that that VN may have been where I should have gone to find out.
Despite Flynn dying and such, I actually think this is kinda a good ending? A once wholly evil spirit that loomed over Echo now has a good side to it now that Flynn is merged with it.18 The Socket Man never seems like a malicious presence when he shows up to me in hindsight, instead he seems like a protective presence. When we pay a visit to young Jenna and Socket Man shakes our head when she asks if we’re real, it kinda shows to me that Flynn’s side of the Socket Man is a protective presence, since that response doesn’t come from our choice as a player and it comes off as an act of reassurance to the child before him.
So what do I think about this ending?
It’s a mess. It’s almost too confusing for it to be a satisfying conclusion and the amount of effort I had to go through to put any sense into it makes it a little frustrating as an ending. I think there should have been more crumbs left behind to make it a touch less sour on the brain, but after figuring it all out I think it’s just okay. It’s a less solid ending than TJ’s in my opinion, but it doesn’t leave a black stain on my opinion of the route as a whole - Flynn is still my favourite character by far and it’s not even close.
I started just kinda reciting the events of the route during this part of the review… I got kinda lost in that but my overall thoughts is that this route ending is a complete mess, but the rest of the route is very easy to follow. This is probably why I kept reciting it rather than commentating on it, but this route almost never feels boring and you can always feel the tension or warmth or sadness or disappointment or any other emotions that you might have felt throughout. Throughout much of TJ’s Route, this emotional connection to the characters was kinda missing and if I’d read Flynn’s Route first and then gone into TJ’s I worry I might have been much harsher in my review given the gap in preference I have between the two.
Here are some character opinions.
Flynn and TJ both break the upper boundary in terms of my opinions on them. The moment on this route where TJ finally stands up and says, albeit covertly, that Chase killed Sydney shows that he is able to stand on his own two feet unlike his typical character profile really usually lets him. Granted, he did also feel pressured into that, but usually in a highly tense environment his reaction is to just panic, and in this situation he brought the attention back onto himself instead of just letting Flynn unjustly feel the need to defend himself only and it is really beautiful. I think it’s the most growth I saw of TJ throughout.
This route really also explained everything with Flynn, at least in terms of who he is as a character, not necessarily about the Socket Man stuff. But his “outbursts” as far as I can tell now are generally not something he stands by and he only seems to have an outburst like that if he is overstimulated. Literally all it took for me to fully get why he did that thing at the lake in the prologue was playing through the start of this route. It literally explained everything and I immediately understood where he was coming from as a character.
Carl was also a weird standout. He was barely present in this route, but I really adored how he defended Flynn during that interrogation scene, it was really great.
The next route I decided to go down was also a decision I made at the end of TJ’s Route; remember how I noted that I was really happy to see Leo make a cameo appearance right before the climax of TJ’s Route? Well that was when I decided to pursue this route, and the conversation at Chase’s old home only made me lean further into it… time to actually go and read Leo's Route now…
Leo’s Route
Leo’s Route doesn’t actually start in the same vein as the other routes; the option you take to go after him is actually going after both Leo and Jenna. Despite this, it is not a route that follows both of them. Like, even slightly; this will come up again when I cover Jenna’s Route, but point is, you follow both Leo and Jenna, and it’s when Jenna is walking past that you interact with her briefly and decide either to follow her to where she’s going, or go up to Leo to speak with him.
The first major event on this storyline happens on the spot; you sit upon a rock looking over the river with Leo, which is the same rock we find during the Scavenger Hunt on TJ’s Route that Carl has etched into as a child - the inclusion of details like this set the tone perfectly for what you’re about to read. The conversation is as rocky as their seat; it’s in continuation of the conversation from earlier. It does not shift my opinion on Leo’s perspective, in fact it only reminds me of it, which makes my thoughts drift down again, though I remind myself that this route was chosen was explicitly to give him a chance. The end of this conversation details that we’ll be holding Carl’s party; something that’s consistent across all routes, and on Tuesday, we go shopping for just that with TJ, Jenna and Leo.
The shopping trip is quite packed. A lot of Tuesday events have an air of awkwardness to them, but through much of this route it’s like an average good day out. This is somewhat of a common theme across this route if you isolate the events from the context you learn later on. There’s a moment near the end where Leo and Jenna get competitive over who can run the fastest, but Leo injures himself on the runback and they all split paths there as we take him to his home.
On the way to Leo's place we meet Echo local and this route's main side-character Kudzu. It’s a minor interaction and we do not leave the best impression on him as Chase responds questioningly to his foreign name. That’s all there is to our interaction as Kudzu is left frustrated and we go inside where we get a small amount of Kudzu backstory about how Kudzu moved into Echo from Payton in response to unspecified bad acts committed by locals. After the brief discussion Leo moves things to the bedroom, but in a non-sexy way… kinda…
This scene is truly awkward as it’s the start of our downfall in this route. We observe how Leo is still living in a practically identical bedroom and he defends himself saying he doesn’t need the space as it’s only used for sleeping and watching porn. It’s a touch uncomfortable how happy he is saying this without even having to adjust to the fact the man in is room s someone he hasn’t met in several years, which works perfectly as foreshadowing… oh wow, he’s punched holes in the wall… what a neat decoration… oh! Leo, you have a new phone… oh you keep breaking them… hm… and a gun on the nightstand! Wow, this is a great first impression, I wonder how this is gonna pan out…
Leo wanders off to clean up; his injury at the shopping mall and tells us to watch over his computer while he does that. Instead of just being bound to waiting we’re going to do some snooping; we look at Leo’s search history following his comment about watching posts and this is not an optional event, so Chase is doing this out of pure curiosity, perhaps just wanting to look at hot men or something, because it reads as more innocent than “I’m gonna find something incriminating about him”. But this is the first true sign that Leo is not okay in terms of how he sees Chase - Leo’s bookmarks show two folders related to porn, one just being titled something along the lines of “gay videos” and the second one being titled “otterslutz”, which I remember vividly. We then check his search history and see that every search he made and result he looked at displays a submissive otter, leaving us to question if he could have just been a fetishist the whole time, and many having a dominant wolf, which alludes to his attitudes later on… We barely manage not to get caught snooping.
This undertone continues throughout the whole route and keeps us engaged even through moments of monotony. Each weekday on this route doesn’t feel as packed with content as some events on Flynn’s or TJ’s . There's the day of Carl’s party, which we know gets postponed because he is missing and he is found in the same place as on TJ’s Route. On this day the notable event is an argument with Flynn about Leo’s intentions and I admittedly had to do a few read-overs of this. It feels a little bit like Flynn’s his fire is a little off here; his probing is a little frightening like his lashing out at the lake where I feel like if we’re to base his usual acts of genuine concern on the time he talked to TJ both in the distance TJ’s Route and during the confrontation in his own, it doesn’t hit quite the same. His flirtatious swagger we know him for in his route is also slightly off-kilter, but having done a read over or two I kind of write this off as a weaker energy Flynn scene; the desired accurate-to-character undertone is there, it’s just missing the certain edge.
On the same day we go to the diner and interact with yet another side character on this route, Clint. Note that though much of this route is spent only with Leo, this allows more space for background characters to fill in the empty space where TJ, Flynn, Jenna and Carl might have been in if Leo was instead someone else entirely. Clint is a drug addict who has a lot of animosity towards Leo; a shared history of fighting which is seen as largely one-sided against Clint by most outsiders. Clint’s animosity ensues in an argument and Clint takes the opportunity to be homophobic about it. Leo and Clint get a bit more physical before Janice kicks them out and when Chase and Leo get drunk later and on the walk back home, Clint attacks with a crowbar. In comes Kudzu, who breaks us all apart and knocks Clint out. Kudzu takes issue with Leo’s behaviour towards Clint specifically and Chase finds himself hesitantly agreeing, likely a result of the earlier search history investigation making him more suspicious.
On another day we go to the train tracks to get footage for Chase’s project. Leo and Chase get a bit steamy on the railway and are interrupted by Kudzu. We then agree to play Football with TJ and Kudzu, which seems to be fun for everyone and we also get to have a conversation with Kudzu…
Kudzu is a great character; we finally get the chance to see Chase make up for his earlier mistake and we get some insight into his choice to move to Echo in confirmation of Leo’s previous recounting of it. He doesn’t state if a specific event drew him out, but it’s implied to come back up later; much of this route has set ups that are quite easy to catch and lead to satisfying pay-off when it gets brought up later, but this is a recurring one, coming up a total of 4 times, ultimately, and having a big reveal in the climax. It leaves you with things to think about as the route progresses and fully keeps you engaged throughout.
Leo takes us to the library on another day for research and Leo takes us back to our old school as a spur-of-the-moment plan that just dawned on him while we were thinking about what to do after the library trip…
Another sus event occurs, after the trip to their old school. By coincidence Leo leaves us in his room yet again to go and clean himself, leaving us in a familiar circumstance, but this time we’re given the choice to pry or not. This time, it’s at his text message history. As we look on, the reality is expressed directly and Leo has no way of getting out of this one. We see messages with the other 4 of our core 6. There’s a conversation with Carl where Carl asks when Chase will be able to hangout again. Leo did not ask Chase and instead lied about how busy Chase is. Later, referring to the “whim” of going to the school, he lied to Carl about Chase's availability again by stating Chase wanted to be alone at the old school with him, showing that Leo’s “spur-of-the-moment" plan was premeditated. Most damning though is the lie he told TJ; after the event at the football field with TJ and Kudzu, TJ extends an offer to do this again. Leo lies, stating that Chase is too distressed by Flynn’s antics at the lake, emotionally manipulating TJ out of wanting to spend time with Chase in the way that we know TJ is weak to following how Janice manipulated TJ in his Route, which felt like a call-back when reading.
Similar to TJ’s Route, this one has a lot of sequences of empty space; much of our time is spent centred on Leo. This time the tone of suspicion about Leo has been set to keep it interesting; this undertone shows Leo might not be spending all this time with us for exactly savoury reasons and this is an undertone we’re fully clued in on. In TJ’s Route we found out about this strange undertone later on as we heard Chase’s thoughts escalating, but in this route it’s Chase’s curiosity that revealed the truth to us early, or at least a suspicion of it. I think this contrast between routes is telling of how well-written this visual novel is as a whole; on TJ’s Route we take the perspective of the manipulator, while on this route we take the perspective of the manipulated.
Following this event we have a rough sleep. Chase decides on this day it'd be a good idea to take on his project, almost as a distraction while he waits for a moment to call Leo out on his strange behaviours. This gives us another interaction with Kudzu. This one is different from the last two though, almost sultry. It’s awkward to start, with them keeping a good distance subconsciously before Kudzu reminds Chase he’s welcome to approach. Kudzu’s friendliness is something for us to take great interest in following the ramped up suspicions from Leo, and Chase sees it too, taking the opportunity to check Kudzu out. Kudzu takes interest back and it’s implied Kudzu gives Chase a once over as he asks about his journalism, which leads to Kudzu helping us with it, showing a burgeoning mutual interest.
On the walk there, hundreds of seeds are planted to get us more engaged in Kudzu’s part in the story, serving as a perfect redirection from Leo to focus on building feelings for Kudzu. The key thing that underlines this section is comfort; coming out of the uncomfortable situation with Leo we enter a more homely one with Kudzu, allowing us to see Chase and Kudzu bond over their similarities in personality and especially biology, and we get a glint of trust back when Kudzu finally decides to get more specific about why he left Payton; someone he was close to was attacked and killed. Not only that, but in the build up to his story, Kudzu takes a moment to criticise Chase’s approach to the subject, and his advice comes out a touch harsh, but it’s not like Chase’s advice to TJ where it suggests TJ makes a diversion in personality, it’s instead a light suggestion about Chase’s method of approaching hard questions. It's advice with a warm glow and speaks more to Kudzu’s kindness that he not only gave good advice about how to tackle potential causes of conflict, but he also did so without judgement and still went on to trust Chase and answer the question with a deeply personal story.
They eventually arrive at the fountain and here starts a really bizarre theme with Kudzu; the boy is a piss enjoyer? It’s strange - there’s this moment where he says he’s gonna piss in front of the camera to give a warm glow effect, there’s another moment during the climax of the story where it’s Kudzu’s job to watch over us and he says Chase might find it’s a good idea to come and watch him while he pisses… y’know, just so they don’t get out of each other's sights, right? For safety? That happens a second time during the ending where we go to pee outside and Kudzu says he’ll watch over us from his door. It’s a strange little quirk of the story that shows up a few more times in this route… I don’t know if I’ve just ruined him for anyone or something, but real recognises real.
Anyway, Kudzu goes off to get a recharged battery for the camera when we hear a groaning from the distance. It’s eerie being left alone like this, but we follow the noise to quite possibly the most shocking part of Echo I had ever read through. I had to read through this bit like 4 times to actually understand what the hell was going on, but I got my head around it.
We see Clint hanging from a tree and writhing. He’s barely unable to touch the floor. He’s not dead, in fact he’s rather skittish. This seems intentional, but it’s almost not in Clint's nature to just hang himself from a tree like this. Clint tries to usher us away, but we come upon the situation by ourselves; there’s a bear standing behind us. Naked. And maniacal. This is our third side character, Brian.
Just so we don’t have to cover this ground too often, let me introduce him here rather than later; Brian is the worst character and discussions about Brian are largely where the gore and body horror warnings come in, so when he’s mentioned going forward, prepare yourself however necessary. Brian’s acts can’t just be written off as childhood innocence preventing him from seeing the consequences of what he’s done, nor could you possibly argue he just found the wrong moment, oh no; Brian is a drug dealer who will use his customers as a vice to get out his sadistic sexual desires. This act of Clint hanging from a tree was done by Brian and Clint is still alive because Brian wants Clint to suffer as much as possible without it going so far as to kill him so that he can do it again later. He sets up a stool under him to give him a few seconds to breathe and then kicks it out from under him to watch him suffer again, all while he pleases himself to it. You get the energy that Brian doesn’t fully get that this is wrong, but having read the whole route, I don’t think this is the case.
What I instead get the impression of is two things: that Brian doesn’t understand that he can get these tendencies out in a safe manner; his personality is very childish as he often drags his feet and stomps around when he doesn’t get his way. That, and there’s also a scene later where he has Chase captured and remarks that Chase, being gay, probably enjoys the relationship between a sadist and his victims just as much as he does. Brian’s gross attitude is implied to come from a place of internalised homophobia, like he can’t stand the sight of himself as a gay man, so he takes it out on other people in the form of sexual torture. But that’s not just some coping mechanism, it’s an entire worldview; like he believes that this is just what gay people do and he is doing what he is meant to do. This in combination with childish naivety combine to form Brian. There’ll be a moment later where Brian comes up again in this route (and in Jenna’s, just as a heads up from future Unny), but to cover my thoughts on Brian as a character, I’m a little unsettled by him. There’s an undertone that Brian is mentally ill or perhaps is regressed or deficient and I’m not too big a fan of this in general; where it’s either implied mental illness is a cause of evil or if it feels like it’s there to make them feel helpless. I feel as a character he could have been done a bit differently.
Later in the day we meet back up with Leo at the diner and we plan to talk to Leo about our findings on his phone. We ignore how erratic Janice is behaving for now and confront Leo. He grows flustered and seems worried about what Chase is going to do, but then we’re uninterrupted by Duke showing up looking for Chase alongside Brian. This is where the story devolves and gets crazy as when Janice tries to step in and stop Duke and Leo’s arguing Duke just shoots her and she’s dead all while Chase is hiding from Duke under the table. Chase eventually gets found and tries to escape, but Brian ends up catching up to him and Duke and Brian split Leo from us.
We wake up tied to a board looking up at a mirror on the roof of Brian’s caravan. Duke and Brian eventually stomp in and it becomes immediately clear that Duke keeps Brian at bay when it comes to sadism, actively warning him over and over about what will happen if he finds out Brian is lying about not doing anything wrong to Chase while he was unconscious, and we know he didn’t because Chase doesn’t feel any injuries about it. Two things do happen, but it’s with Chase’s permission; Chase hears him out on a demonstration of why Brian has a mirror on the ceiling and the other one is Chase decides to let him take out some frustration on him at which Brian slams his fists into his gut. It’s all very disturbing and they do state that Brian is deriving sexual pleasure from doing it which leaves Chase shook a little, but the way it’s written is like “curiosity killed the cat” and “what am I getting myself into” rather than Chase being too scared to stop it, though he definitely still is too scared and it is absolutely a misuse of consent from Brian.
Back to Duke though, on Flynn’s Route I mention how he was a really boring character because he just kinda had a long monologue that went around in circles. In the scenes we get with him in this route, he gives off less of the “crazed hick screaming at the sun” vibe and more of the “I am genuinely trying to protect the people I know”, if the undertone is still there. Duke’s theories, to what I can tell, are correct and in this route I actually feel compelled to listen to what he has to say. His involvement in the story was planted way earlier; there’s a moment where Duke questions Chase and Leo about it as a one-off and it sets in his anxiety a lot. Apparently Leo and Duke had been seeing visions of Chase in the lead up to his arrival a lot and where Leo saw these apparitions as “oh it’s Chase! I love him”, Duke sensed a more sinister implication and through much of the route, Leo seems to be hiding us from Duke knowing that Duke is likely to bring harm to Chase. Leo of course hides us from many more people, but hiding us from Duke is easily the most clear one reasoning-wise and it makes for a solid explanation for Duke’s involvement, though after seeing how Duke ended up handling it all once it was under his control, I can see that Leo had less to fear than we though. I’m still a little intimidated by Duke as an authority figure either way.
Some time, in the middle of the time we spend with Brian alone, he gets a knock on the door. It’s Clint.
Something I didn't mention earlier is that when Chase visited the railway, Clint randomly showed up and just kinda had a normal conversation with him. It’s confusing at the time whether or not Clint remembers attacking us with the crowbar, but I think the idea behind that is that Clint would not have tried to hurt Chase if Chase hadn’t stepped in to defend Leo; I don’t think he forgot he did it, I think Clint’s mindset just doesn’t depict Chase as a threat unless he starts defending Leo. In fact he kinda says it; he doesn’t mind Chase being gay, he just doesn’t get why he’s choosing someone like Leo, who has historically been abusive towards him. It makes Clint a fuller and more nuanced character which I really appreciate because it called more attention back to the time we found him hanging from a tree by Brian; when he shooed us away, it was to defend us and protect us, it wasn’t that he saw it as an invasion of privacy like it initially looks like.
Anyway, back in the present, Clint does see us, no matter how Brian tries to hide it and he yet again senses we are in danger. And so, later in the night, we wake up and see Kudzu peering in through the window, through which Kudzu helps us escape and lets us stay in his caravan.
This moment is really effective at drawing you in to Kudzu and it gave me the ability to form a solid narrative on where this route was going which turned out mostly correct. Kudzu actually shows care for Chase’s needs and puts in work to help him settle down and get to sleep, even sleeping in the bed with him just to give him some extra company. It’s in stark contrast to Leo’s treatment of Chase where Leo’s needs to feel protective and get back with Chase kinda sit above Chases need; Kudzu’s role in this story, where he actually takes Chase’s thoughts and feelings into consideration and tries to give him exactly what he needs, shows what makes a good relationship versus a bad relationship really well and I can’t help but say bravo to that.
After a short sleep, Chase and Kudzu decide to go looking for Leo to try and save him. They go to Duke's house to look for him, but lo and behold, stomping in comes Duke and Brian, leaving Kudzu and Chase to have to do a spy-like escape. It’s a beautifully tense scene, but also exposes weaknesses in Kudzu’s ways a little bit; Kudzu jumps out of a high window that Chase is unable to make and so his natural instincts kicking in and attempt to tend to Chase’s needs are shown to need adjusting to the fact that physical differences get in the way of this ability a to know what is the right move for Chase a little bit.
But it all ends up working out in the end anyway because despite us being caught, Brian drags us down to the basement where Duke is mid-interrogation with Leo and accidentally exposes that Chase managed to escape, which Duke was trying to keep hidden. There’s a bit of circling around this, kinda reiterating Duke's beliefs and such and it’s mid way through our breakthrough to Duke's psyche that Leo starts reacting to something going on behind us; Kudzu is yet again here to save the day.
I didn’t really call attention to this, but when we got caught by Duke and Brian, it was the start of the meltdown we see at the end of Flynn’s Route; it’s the night of that meeting at town hall where Duke has that really long dialogue with the mayor which I found really boring. That happens while we’re captured and Kudzu tells us about that meeting at Town Hall while we’re in his caravan. We actually did see him during that scene in Flynn’s Route, I just kinda assumed he was an unimportant side character, but I do remember seeing him in hindsight and if the side characters in other routes come up I’ll probably remember those too. In this route we obviously weren’t at the town hall meeting and neither was Leo; both of which were basically central to it. I think the only one of the main six who’s there on this route is Flynn and that's because it’s his job to be there.
Anyway, the point I was getting to: this hysteria event that is striking Echo here left the core 6 to split up and I believe this is in combination with Leo’s gaslighting the group out of hanging out with Chase and him. A lot of this segment after the moment in Duke's bunker is all about finding the rest of the group and this lasts all the way into the ending. We find TJ back at the motel; we originally went there to use Chase’s car to try and escape, but Duke slashed our tires and we decided to go in to try and see if anyone was there. It seems empty at first, but he’s hiding under the bed and cowering.
This section kinda exposes the logic of the haunted voice of Echo in a way19; everyone in our circle on this route is kinda just their normal self even considering Leo’s bad attitude, but Duke is acting himself, Brian is acting himself, Kudzu, Leo, Chase, Clint; all of the people we spend a good amount of time with on this route is as normal as they’ll get, but everyone else, including our friends who were shielded from us, are going crazy from the hysteria and my interpretation is that the effects of the hysteria are weaker with closer proximity to Chase. The exception to these rules is actually Flynn; he’s also normal, seemingly, which kinda hints at him possibly being immune to the paranormal or a central part of it. I think the reason is because of his suspicions about him and the fact he can see through Leo’s bullshit, but also has the capacity to see through Chases; he is no-nonsense and the paranormal activity is all-nonsense, so in a weird way, it feels like he sees through it and it can’t affect him. I think Echo’s hauntedness largely targets someone to make a secret with and the closer you are to that person, in this case Chase, the less it affects you. I think this is also why the core 6 go a little insane, but don’t fully devolve away like other characters we literally never meet or are irrelevant to the core 6; there’s that dead body that gets shown at the meeting and I’m pretty sure that guy is just a complete no-one to the rest of the plot. And in Flynn’s Route, the logic I had backing Flynn on this route is something I think applies to Duke in all routes; because he is suspicious of Chase being related to it, Echo sees that as potential to be a part of the story.
Anyway, I’ve distracted myself twice now, let’s stay on topic; we find TJ finally and we take a while to calm him down. He says he felt like he was being chased and ultimately took himself back to the motel to hideout. When we find him under the bed, he’s literally shaking and pissing himself. Like, literally literally, not the skunked form of “literally” where we actually use it for figurativeness or exaggeration - TJ has pissed himself and asks to go take a shower before they get back on the move.
We next go looking for a car at Carl’s mansion, which is the car we eventually end up using. We also find Carl there in his bed, but the hysteria affects him in a unique way where he is actually locked in a dream and it takes a good thrashing to get him to wake up.
All of this happens, we get in one of Carl’s cars and we take it into the climax of the story…
Alright, again, the ending is being written first, but you’re seeing it last, because of chronologically… This is the last time I do this.
This ending sequence is remarkably similar to Flynn's, but it’s all from Chase’s perspective. When I ended with Flynn’s Route I was on this understanding that Flynn is always going to die no matter what and that his soul is going to merge with Sam somehow. This ending throws that entirely out of the window. Everything that happened to Flynn at the end of his route happens now to Chase, but only up to a point; the loop sequence happens, the Socket Man leering over Duke’s body and Chase’s car, the shattering window and the sudden arrival in the lake. That is when it all changes; in Flynn’s Route the event at the lake leads the rest of the gang back to Leo’s house while Carl, Dax and Flynn stay at the lake before he starts getting lured away to the mines.
This time Flynn isn’t with us, neither is Jenna and in Dax’s place is Kudzu. Additionally, a side we don’t get to see in Flynn’s Route very often was Leo during this segment; he’s acting extremely jealous of the fact that Chase has taken a liking to Kudzu and has a disdain for how Kudzu is constantly able to take control of the situation and make the right decisions.20 When they arrive at his house for example they find Clint hiding out in his bedroom so Leo intimidates Clint by waving a gun in his face. When Kudzu sees that isn’t working he sends everyone out of the bedroom and handles it by himself by just having a decent conversation with Clint while everyone else waits outside and decides to wash their clothes from the lake water. When Kudzu comes out with answers (we should take stowaway on a train that seems to be running in and out of Echo), Leo is the only one dismissive of them and he grows so enraged by Kudzu's good thinking that he argues him out of the door.
Keep in mind that this is after we find all that possessiveness from Leo; the hiding Chase from everyone and the fixation on only watching porn that simulates his and Chase’s old relationship. What we’re seeing from Leo now is just a fully maxed out version of what he became without Chase and what he is struggling to come to terms with in this climax is the fact that Chase is moving on. And that’s what this route is all about. This also takes me back to TJ’s Route where Chase had similar attitudes towards Julian.
Leo's presence throughout the entire climax is not the comforting one we’ve been sold, but instead an intimidating one. His attempt at taking control of the situation isn’t comforting, it’s scary and grossly unfamiliar and you really feel it; every time he spoke I hated reading it, and that is a good thing actually because it pulls off the desired effect - the reader will not fall for Leo’s manipulation anymore, right? RIGHT, FURRIES? YOU AN’T POSSIBLY FIND HIM ATTRACTIVE AFTER ALL THIS?? RIGHT???
After the argument that leads Kudzu storming off there’s a few moments I don’t recall before Chase runs off after Kudzu, who, when he finds him, claims to have found Jenna. A confused scuffle later and yep, there’s Jenna, Kudzu’s intuition being correct as always. They go back to Kudzu’s caravan and they all talk about where Jenna’s been since Leo was isolating everyone and she talks about being concerned about Chase as his mind is spinning out of control. This conversation felt important, but I admit I don’t remember a lot of it; she talks a lot of what TJ had said was making his mind spin out of control and it’s like Chase can only think about the risk that TJ told Jenna what he did.
It’s just as Chase is about to piss and have Kudzu watch that Brian comes barrelling in and throws him into his truck with the promise that they’ll fix everything… For the first time in the entire story Brian feels like a real person… my instincts about him are clear and correct, but the story he tells us on the way there, about the visions he’s been seeing as he lived in Echo, is kinda telling of why he is the way he is though; that these visions gave him images of himself being sexually assaulted by his own mother on a UFO. Chase takes this moment to make Brian feel bonded with and keep the conversation going while he waits for a good moment to stop everything. None of this changes my thoughts on Brian, but it’s good back story I suppose.
Brian drives Chase to an outing and leads him down a hole, an apparent back entrance to the mines. Brian starts digging away at someone's grave, apparently an ex-partner of Duke or something? He tells us now the story of how she died, which is yet another bit of Brian backstory, though one that makes you feel a lot less interested in hearing him out; apparently this girl was willing to do sexual favours in exchange for drugs and she let him do “way more than what Duke did”… apparently he went too far and she was out of it during one of their encounters. I’m not entirely sure, but I believe this story lines up with the vision we get of the near-dead fennec on the table after we merge with the Socket Man on Flynn’s Route.21
During all of that the voice occupying Chase's mind, who we’re playing as, is becoming clearer and clearer to Chase, taunting him about how he’s on the brink of being killed and he’s just sitting there doing nothing to change it. Which is the point, of course; the whole solution proposed by Duke is that killing the fuel of the malicious spirit of Echo, which happens to currently be Chase,22 would free the rest of the town, just like it always did in the past. I do believe Duke and I think his theory is correct, but I think it only offers a temporary solution given hysteria events have happened more than once historically, so perhaps it’s not the best solution.
Just before Brian is able to kill Chase something strange happens… The description is not too far off the Socket Man, but as not to assume it is, something drags Brian away and leaves Chase in darkness. We never see Brian again after this so my assumption here is that Brian is killed off. It’s then that we move into some strange persons perspective, what I believe is Sam's as our perspective moving out is not actually that noticeable at first, kind of as if our perspective just drifted away from Chases rather than going. Suddenly we snap back in though and Flynn is with us trying to get us out. We expect here for us to burn Flynn and have him merge with Sam, but that doesn’t happen… he just leads us out and takes us back to Leo's place…
My assumption here is that, since Socket Man kills Brian, the malicious presence of Echo, instead of merging with Flynn, merges with Brian.23 Which brings me onto my theory; every killing that happened has their soul merge with the malicious energy over Echo. So, since Flynn is not sacrificed in this route, Brian is instead, the occurrences in Echo will simply continue and the cycle will repeat in however many generations. I would be saying that had I not seen the ending, but we’ll get to that.
We get back to Leo's place and apparently Leo has been hallucinating Chase again, who apparently assured him he loves him very much and will stay with him in Echo… we then follow through on Clint's train solution.
We all run to the train and just before we’re set to hop on, Leo stops Chase to talk, asking if he’ll stay with him in Echo… this is a new split off and the choice you make here is the first instance of a good or bad route. I chose no; to tell Leo that the relationship is over… Leo's face drops and we all hop onto the train. We’re the last on and we look out to see Leo isn’t following us… and Chase is overcome with guilt as he drops to his knees and cries at the thought of leaving him, despite his current negative feelings for him; that he should have stayed back and helped Leo during his psychological episode just as Leo would have always done for him… he gives a long string of fuck you’s to Echo, as does Sam, before he’s comforted by Kudzu, who relates to this all to well…
Kudzu tells Chase in this moment that the person he’d lost in Payton was his boyfriend… and this made me whimper like a lost puppy… Kudzu acknowledges that watching his boyfriend die isn’t quite the same grief as Chase leaving behind who was once the most important thing in his life, but he uses it as a jumping off point to relate to Chase. He brings Chase comfort, guides them to the rest of the group… and also Clint who apparently also managed to catch this train out of Payton, which is a nice little add-on to this ending, given it was several times on this route that he also tried to save us and just generally treated us like an actual person and not as someone to pursue. Kudzu promises Chase that they will come back for Leo one day. This scene is incredibly touching and the emotional baggage is hard not to understand even despite what Leo has put us through, all while we’re still set in on Kudzu being perfect as a secondary character in this route and his role in the story could not be better. I don’t think he’s going to be topped as far as side characters go, he is genuinely the perfect man, like omg-
We fade to black and fade back in on a Saturday two years into the future; the moment we come back to Leo. We meet him for closure and he’s back to being a normal, semi-respectable depressed person; not the ugly, unfamiliar thing we saw throughout the rest of the story (though, admittedly after that, it’s hard to trust it’s real). They walk along the tracks for a while, just catching up, but it's clear that everything will be okay. Chase and Kudzu are now boyfriends and they’re really happy. And Leo demonstrates an ability to move on. As they pick up to leave the story fades out and we lead into the credits…
This ending is fantastic and it’s the first ending I have played where it actually feels like everything was solved? I don’t think the spirit of Echo ever dies, but as we leave on the train and it monologues alongside Chase's it’s hard not to recognise that it has finally broken apart from the town. This ending feels like an actual ending with no repeat of the cycle, no significant character deaths, we all come out unscathed... Thing is, I can’t place why this happens or if I’m even right; what if there will be another hysteria incident? We can't say for sure there won’t be, but when Chase comes back to visit Leo for the first time, nothing strange is happening. Perhaps the evil needs to get ready for it or wind up for it, but somehow I don’t think so; this feels like a good, and rounded off, ending.
I also find myself content with Chase having a good boyfriend? In fact, I think he deserves it? Okay… what happened here?
Throughout Leo’s Route Chase is actually a good guy we can empathise and sympathise with? Here’s the thing; the hint that Chase killed Sydney is still a thing in this route; this is never something that is completely obscured in this novel, whether or not it actually becomes clear in a route will vary, but he always killed Sydney; this is not a question. Another non-question is whether or not Chase will let this slip; this is Chase’s secret and he will always try to hide it whether or not he is a good guy for our route. Whether or not a route chooses to portray this as underdeveloped childhood morality or an ever-present sense of justice is what varies, and in both previous routes it was portrayed as the latter. In this route it feels like Chase is on the former; I think all of the bad things that happen to Chase in this route is what makes him accept that this killing was bad, and it’s once he comes to terms with it that the story stops shoving bad things at him.24 I can’t pinpoint this moment exactly since this route is hiding the truth of Sydney’s death from us, but it’s clear the route doesn’t think we need to know, and that helps me align with this opinion even more; if Chase was supposed to be a bad guy here it would have told us somewhere along the line. Instead there’s just a hint that Chase has some skeletons in his closet and it stops there as if it’s not important, and perhaps in this story it isn’t.
Or perhaps it’s more sinister… since Leo has been outed as another fiend he can let the world be distracted by that. And also by Brian's horrific sadosexual acts. Perhaps by letting the world be distracted by these things, he has somehow been allowed to get away with it all. What if this incident at the lake wasn’t really what kept the cycle going in the first place? And somehow I have ended up defending Chase again… I don’t know how that happened, perhaps just because it’s not my true interpretation of the route.
Either way, it is the many interpretations of this that make it more captivating and worth talking about as a narrative, and that’s why this route works so well. I don’t feel stunted in my enjoyment by the information they choose not to give us on this route. This ending doesn’t feel as convoluted and I didn’t have to spend an hour trying to make sense of it. Despite this ending having perhaps the least amount of information of the three I’ve seen so far, it manages to keep my interest the most as I rattle these conspiracies around my brain.
Oh! One more thing; the bad ending. I did go back and read it.
If you choose to stay with Leo in Echo, as we try to jump onto the train, our foot gets caught under it and the bottoms of our legs are sawed off by the train. It is absolutely horrific as an ending, and I kinda just droned through it because it kinda had me on the verge of a panic attack, so I don’t really remember a lot of it, I just remember Chase survives this injury for a while and Leo is just acting like everything it's totally fine and Chase is so okay. There’s some spooning, but it’s not cute, it’s extremely distressing. This bad ending is a legitimately horrible ending and I can’t really deal with it sadly, so I could barely read it. It just made my legs ache and almost gave me a panic attack.
Here’s the character opinions for Leo’s Route. I am now starting to work the writing into these since my opinions on the characters on a personal level are starting to stagnate in their positions.
This is really what moves Chase closer to the centre; if Chase were real, my opinion of him would still be at -100, but it’s my ability to recognise the nuance of his character as written that lifts it to the more neutral position. His attitudes seem to depend on which route we go down, so to judge him as a whole requires trying to mash together contradictory versions of Chase.
As for Leo, it’d be ideal for him to be as high as back then too, but we haven’t seen as much Leo, so seeing the nuances is not as easy, though, in hindsight as I look at this graph, I could have been a bit more considerate of previous interactions where my opinion was boosted, like the conversation at Chase’s abandoned house; what if that was an act of trying to get better that I wasn’t considering while reading? Well, hopefully that will take root as we move on to the next route.
For the rest of the characters, it’s a little bit hard to judge since we were separated from them for most of it and by the time we’re reunited, they’re no longer the people we knew, but instead hysterical versions of them as Echo does its thing. The one other character we could talk about is Kudzu and you already know my opinion of him; he is by far one of the best characters in this entire VN so far. He is reasonable and charming, calm and colourfully lacklustre, which is not meant as a sarcastic jab or backhanded compliment in the slightest. Actually perfect guy, I wish he was real, I want to marry him.
The next route I decided to do was Jenna; she is a surprisingly rare character in this series so I thought it’d be good to actually get to know her instead of seeing her treated mostly as a side character by the companions we choose, because I have my doubts that Carl’s Route is going to have too much of her either.
Jenna’s Route
Jenna’s Route start is a lot more awkward than Leo’s. Almost out of character; I told you this'd come back up. We ride into the split between her and Leo by telling her that we think Leo needs some alone time, which she just immediately buys without much of any scepticism. It feels a little bit like Ren’py didn’t allow them to have more than 4 options available, but I’m also not entirely sure that’s ever been a thing?25 I'm pretty certain I’ve played Ren’py VN’s for years that gave me 5 or 6 choices before. Either way, for Jenna’s analytical-ness it’s really strange to me she doesn’t question our decision not to go after Leo harder than she does, but regardless, we take off with her.
Her route truly starts in the same place as TJ’s; we go to comfort him at the river bank, which is far less awkward. And the same thing happens at the end of this segment; TJ makes plans with us to go on the Tuesday hike, so we do.
This time it’s very different; TJ just charges ahead and Jenna is left to take care of Chase. They have what feels like the cusp of a deeper conversation we’ll have later and Chase eventually needs to pee… this comes up a lot again on this route; yet another route with heavy piss lean for some reason.
They even outright say it this time; there’s a moment later on where Chase goes out to piss because TJ is using up the bathroom and Chase is like “I have to be careful not to get piss on myself again, if it happens two times in a row, Jenna’ll think I have a fetish or something… water sports, why do they call it that” blah blah blah… I don’t know if the fans were getting suspicious so they leaked into Jenna’s Route or if it’s truly a writer’s barely disguised fetish, but regardless, I just spoiled part of the plot of what’s about to happen so let’s cover it now.
Chase goes to piss on a rock and he sees a flat face depicted on another rock in the distance. It unnerves him and we have a classic Chase freakout until he releases. In the shock he accidentally pisses on his legs and when he looks back at the rock on his way back to the hiking trail the face is gone… this is later related to by Jenna as an instance of the Socket Man she saw in her closet as a child, and it’s hard not to see why, but we get more details about it than we did in Flynn’s Route. Apparently he shows up whenever she feels distressed about something. She describes herself as not having these visions anymore and chalking it up to just hallucinations her brain would create to help her cope with stress as a kid, which we of course now have the foresight to say isn’t the case.
Speaking of foresight, as a side note here, on Echo Route 65, I chose to come out as gay to Jenna, and it feels like that came to fruition on this route specifically? In Route 65 they give you the choice of who to trust with coming out and I was wondering if that impacted Echo; Jenna actively mentions this event from Route 65 and it got me curious to if I just happened to pick the cannon choice first try or if your save file of Route 65 truly does impact your save of Echo, this idea mainly coming from an instance of this sort of thing happening in the Five Nights at Freddy’s series’ FNAF World and Ultimate Custom Night26. This is mainly because when I first picked up Echo, my Route 65 files were etched onto my Echo save data and it was confusing me at the time, but then seeing this now, it left me curious. I’ll have to ask my friend about that later, but for now, back to the story, which I’ve not finished reading yet by the way; I didn’t read the whole of Jenna’s Route before starting this so I’m kinda writing as I go here.27
At the top of the hill, there’s a lot of floating around the issues that the group has been through already, discussion of how Flynn blowing up fucked up the dynamics and shit, stuff you kinda expect a lot of in the early days of a route at this point, but the common theme, which is also weirdly present throughout this route, is how musky a creature Chase is. Jenna kinda slowly brings up the topic while she doesn’t think TJ can hear, so she gives him deodorant and he goes and applies it reluctantly because it’s girly perfume and not manly deodoriser, eurgh! This is in contrast to other mentions of musk in other routes; for Kudzu, for instance, it’s mentioned to help them bond more and Chase finds comfort in not having to hide it. In this route, Jenna encourages Chase to mask the scent, which I see as just a different and equally valid approach to the subject of how Chase should deal with it, which is another good example of nuance in this visual novel as it’s not imposing any beliefs or really treating unimportant differences as bad.
The spider prank happens again here. Did I mention this in TJ’s Route?28 I don’t even remember, but in both Jenna and TJ’s Route, at the peak of the hill, Chase gets pranked with a toy spider they got at the store before taking the hike. And both routes also take to the Diner after the Hike. In fact, now that I think about it, didn’t every route take us to the diner at the end of a Tuesday? And isn’t it always really awkward?
No, actually. On Flynn’s Route he has that moment where he’s overstimulated by the environment. In TJ’s Route, we meet up with Jenna at the diner and there’s a weird tension between Chase and TJ which makes it a little awkward, and then Chase has a meltdown in the toilet. In Leo’s Route, Leo takes us back to his house and that’s awkward because we look at his fetishistic search history, but in Jenna’s Route Leo also happens; after a brief text conversation with Leo, TJ ends up inviting Leo over.
Leo is imposing. It’s a clear gesture of control; he parades in and immediately sits next to Chase and is putting his hands on him like they’re just a normal couple at a bar; a statement of “this is my boyfriend who belongs to me”. Leo does this a lot on the early days of Jenna’s Route, and it actually all explodes the next day; since Leo couldn’t take us shopping for Carl’s birthday on Tuesday this time, he instead takes us on Wednesday, the day of the party, and we get it done early to make sure we can get there in time. Jenna and Chase are having a lot of banter and it’s working out really well for Jenna’s character, but it’s making Leo jealous of her ability to make Chase feel liked in the same way he did for Kudzu and Chase did for Julian, so when they split off to separate parts of the shopping centre, we and Leo go to the family friendly part of the mall. We find a good gift for Carl to win from a claw machine and as we try to do it, Leo sexually assaults us by dry humping us in the middle of a kids entertainment centre. There is the drop off of Leo. Chase tells him to fuck off right as Jenna and TJ catch him doing this, Jenna is extremely verbal about how it’s wrong to do and Leo smashes a nearby game as he storms off to the car. This whole event later gets him in trouble with the police, though where I’m currently at, at the time of writing, they haven’t caught him, so we’ll see how that goes (he should totally be arrested).
Jenna’s defensiveness over us here tips me above the boundary line for her. I think in previous routes her assertions come off inappropriate at times and it’s usually because she’s not filled in on all the context, I’ve realised; take Flynn’s Route for instance when the way he talks to TJ isn’t exactly making him feel better and she’s just kinda needlessly sarcastic towards him. What this event proves though is she is just really convicted - she stands up for everything she believes and it’s a really strong character trait. She diffuses Leo’s horrific acts in an instant and basically all it took was a stern look and pointing out it was wrong and it shows that she makes a better protective figure than anyone else does. I think that is glaring and also really cool.
Jumping ahead a little, each route has had a major storyline that we kinda slowly settle on and in this one it’s that Carl is missing. It always starts on this day; every time we have Carl’s birthday party something different happens. On TJ’s Route we find him in some hidden passage in his house with the clues for the scavenger hunt. On Leo’s Route, we don’t find him on that day because Leo is spending all that time trying to separate us from people like Carl and the major event that happens there is Flynn’s interrogation - Carl later gets found behind the scenes. On Flynn’s Route, he shows up with Carl in his car and Carl never truly goes missing in the first place. Well on this route, Carl goes missing and doesn’t get found on the same day. The evidence of him going into the crawlspace is still there, but he’s nowhere to be seen. All that’s left behind is photo evidence on his phone, which shows a horrid dog-like figure with red eyes peering through the darkness. Also on his phone are his contacts… It's probably weird of me, but my thoughts on Carl peak above the upper bounds on this day.
I think Carl is just the most relatable character to what I’ve seen of him and he’s just really chill and warm at the same time. We do a bit of snooping on all his devices to try and find any information on where he might be and he has us in his contacts as “some gay otter idk” while Chase’s last message to him was asking if he changed his name in his contacts yet. There’s also a lot of moments where we find out he’d recently looked at photos with the group. Carl’s character was always laissez-faire and almost like he doesn’t give a shit, but it’s clear he does care quite a lot and wants the best for all his friends. This route proves this most so far and I find him more relatable in these moments, funny enough while he’s not even here, but it’s enough information we can gather through these moments to tip me over the edge in a strange way. It’s not like he’s flawless, but previous events ring in the back of my mind, like the apology in TJ’s Route that I found really good.
Also during this day is more weird behaviour from Leo, of course. We argue with him about how it’s wrong to commit sexual assault actually, but Leo never sees the problem, instead questioning why Chase would ever say no to him. It’s really fucking gross, actually, and it shows that my instincts about him during the prologue were a hundred percent correct. He tells us about how the police are after him following security footage taken at the mall and he also storms off. Duke shows up outside the house, but Leo’s fury sends him pushed to the ground and running away in fear, so at least we dodged having to deal with Duke on this day.
Following the events at Carl’s mansion, we’re told to go find Carl’s weed dealer; Jeremy, who is also Jenna’s brother. We sneak up on them and overhear a conversation between him, a girl called Heather (who previously came up as TJ’s ex-girlfriend) and Micha, all people we know from our childhoods. These are our 3 new side-characters.
So let’s talk about side characters on this route. There are 6, to my understanding; the three I just mentioned plus Duke, Brian and Clint.
You can see Brian coming from a mile away; the second Clint showed up I immediately knew what to expect. As good as I understood Clint to be, trouble seems to follow that boy everywhere. Anyway, Brian, as you’d expect, is a minor antagonist on this route and he is actually far worse than in Leo’s Route, so like last time, I want to get all of the talk about Brian done as soon as possible so we don’t have to discuss him any further later in the route. In this route, he doesn’t just kidnap us, he is also found to have kidnapped Carl, which is why he is missing, and as he does kidnap us, he brings Micha, Leo and Jenna with us, holding us all captive in his caravan.
He first shows up when we go to confront Jeremy a third time, or rather when Leo does behind the rest of the group's back. We find Leo and Clint brawling on the floor outside of the caravans in the region where the drug dealers all work and everyone else is hiding at the time Brian shows up. When Brian sees his associate in a fight, he runs up to defend him and fights with them all. It ends up being Micha who manages to drag Brian away in a strange twist, though he eventually gets caught and Brian uses him as a lure to get Jenna, Leo and Chase out of their motel, which is when we end up waking in his caravan on this route’s Saturday. It’s on this day we get his “my mother was an alien” speech and he does it in front of the whole group… This is where the graphic shit comes in.
He pulls the stunt he did on Clint in Leo’s Route on Micha this time. A detail that went unmentioned last time is that the noose was laced with razor blades, so his victims can’t grasp at it to try and breathe better. This ends up being futile though; Micha’s a bat, so he can gain height, which he does, but we’ll get to that. The “pin them to the table” stunt he pulled on Chase in Leo’s Route is now what he’s doing to Carl and to Chase and Leo he does easily the most disturbing thing I’ve had to read; he stitched their thighs together with a suturing needle, and we get a long and painful description of that process that I just barely managed to keep myself reading. It’s while he’s doing this that Micha starts running out of breath and thinks to flap his wings to gain height and as he’s doing that, Socket Man crawls out of Brian's closet and just… throws him out the window. So Brian is killed at that moment. Mazel tov.
Duke in this route plays the same role as normal also. In fact, before Brian does his weirdo stuff, he still tells Brian not to do any sadistic stunts on people and then Bran just disobeys him on this route. Either way, when the hysteria hits, Duke does exactly his part as you’d expect him.
Clint, however, is totally different; in our last route, we got a head start on Clint and it led him to be our frenemy. In this route, that never happens and he remains an enemy throughout and I think it’s mainly because of Leo’s interrogation style which is just beating him up; he’s actually in on where Carl went. This comes out at the caravan, but Clint just walks in alongside Carl’s captors. He’s still clearly nervous or considering going back on it, but he is definitely an antagonist in this route and part of the operation against us, which is a really interesting side to Clint's character, that his relevance to us depends on what route we take.
So, the new guys. Jeremy is arguably the most important, background-wise. He is Jenna’s brother who is now a drug dealer - kind of like a through-line to Brian in a sense, alongside his two friends Micha and Heather. I’d say Jeremy is like our primary antagonist, or kind of a catalyst? I’m not sure how to describe it - ultimately the mastermind behind everything bad that happens is Brian and Duke, but as a character he’s sort of in the background and feels like he doesn’t have as much relevance to the story. Jeremy is what I’d consider the main antagonist because he is the one who gives Carl the drugs that get him in trouble in the first place; Carl getting involved with Jeremy is what got the bad eyes on him. When we go to Jeremy to investigate what happened to Carl, which is what I was talking about before I went on a rant about the 6 extras, he lies to us and says he hasn’t seen Carl in a while all while Heather is in the background having a panic attack or freakout. The second time we go, Jenna and Flynn come with us and they lie to us again, saying that he gave him whizz instead of weed and he probably just ran off on a bad trip.
Overnight, Micha then comes to us and confesses that what Jeremy told us is a lie and Micha tells the truth, but… wait… let’s remind ourselves of some context first...
When we initially go looking for Carl, one of the things we find as evidence for where he might have gone is a creepy picture on his phone, which is blurry and shows someone standing in the dark with the red eye effect. He kinda looks like a wolf just creepily grinning through the window.
Well that was actually Micha - one night he finds us in the middle of the night by sleepwalking. There’s some weird back and forth where Chase hears the voice in his head and repeats what he’s saying during the initial talk with Micha and Micha eventually trust falls backwards and it wakes him up. After this happens, Micha talks briefly about The Hum… I haven't talked about the sound design in this VN, but during dream sequences and hallucinations, they play a humming sound which sounds like a combination of a chorus of cellos and the deep buzzing sound a TV makes when it breaks down in the middle of you watching something; that’s The Hum in question and everyone in Echo can hear it and it’s arguably what causes the hysteria, in Micha and the gangs opinion. I’m going to call that group Tetanus Alley from here on out, after their place of work which is nicknamed “Tetanus Alley”. Anyway, not trusting parts of Tetanus Alley, Micha tells us that Carl is the target of a related gang which includes parts of Tetanus Alley. Jeremy told Clint that Carl was home alone at the time and Clint recruited Micha to go and scope the house. Micha looked through the window and wound up face to face with Carl when Carl took a photo of Micha which scared him enough that he started flailing around his house for a while before dashing out into the desert. He phoned Clint to tell him what happened, and that was the last Micha heard of Carl until we came to ask Jeremy about it for the first time on Wednesday. We can fill in the gaps of what happened after that, but the point is, Micha is now our sidekick, or at least a floating character in terms of whose side he’s on.
The last member of Tetanus Alley we need to introduce is Heather. Heather is the secondary antagonist of this route. She is the key figure at the climax of this route and the moment that everything is leading to. She is described as someone who slept around throughout her school years and even ended up dating TJ for a brief period. When we meet her she’s really kind and accommodating, but Jenna sees through it; she ruined Jenna's life at one stage by implying that she was seeing 5 different boys who she eventually called over to Jenna's house to get revenge on Jenna for no longer being able to financially support her. But in the present day, she comes off more like a traumatised person who probably had an awful growing up, so I’m kinda split on her as a character. She’s very well written though. She’s more important for the climax, so we’ll largely leave talk of her there for now, but it’s ultimately her inevitable breakdown that ends up being the big finish.
As for how these side characters compare to the previous ones, I think these are some of the most exciting and interestingly written. They almost have a whole side story which we don’t get to see during this whole thing unlike other side characters who remained mostly uninvolved until the hysteria. Micha is by far my favourite though, and is not far behind Kudzu in terms of who I liked a lot. When he’s not under all that stress, he’s a really funny character and that mix of being a character we can take both seriously and unserious is perfectly balanced. After the climax, we’re all sat in a bar with him and his wit is off the charts. You can kinda hear his voice in your head too, I imagine he has the kind of breathy voice and higher pitch from Whinnie the Pooh's voice, but with a more upward inflection and a different accent. I can’t talk about all my favourite jokes of his, but I remember not being able to stop laughing while reading the fall off - Jenna at some point mentions getting help after all the trauma the group has been through and Micha says he could get harder stuff. She asks about it and he goes off on a tangent about some old ice cream parlour and then tops it all off with “I also could get you some heroin” and you just can’t not hear the comedic timing in it. I think if you have a clear image of what a character looks and sounds like when they’re talking in your head as I do with Micha, you’ve made something pretty special and I get that for just about all of my favourite characters in this visual novel, so that’s a really big plus. Bravo!
Okay, what next…
Dream sequences and hallucinations. In previous routes I didn’t really bring them up because they weren’t all that memorable, but thinking about it after this route, I might need to go back and reread some of them because in this route I feel like I remember all of them and they are all very significant. This will also include talk of the ending of this route because it all comes up then as well and kinda gets explained there, which is what the whole ending is about.
I previously mentioned a sequence where Brian gets thrown out of a window by the Socket Man. So, this proves the Socket Man is a real thing, and so are all of the other hallucinations in Echo; if you let these hallucinations take over for long enough, they will manifest in reality. The Socket Man is one such example of this; he’s an entity that follows and protects Jenna throughout her life, initially starting as a comforting presence who lived in her closet, but twice in this route, the Socket Man shows up in the real world where she and everyone else is able to see it.29 Everyone except, seemingly, Flynn; the second time we see it is right at the end. Jenna has come to reason with Heather and talk her out of it and Chase has gone with her.
After a short while of doing this, Micha shows up and all three of us can see the Socket Man come up behind Heather and nearly touch her. Jenna sees what the Socket Man is about to do and brings it to a halt by intensifying her reasoning and slowly drawing Heather out of it. Flynn is also with us, but in the distance, prepared to shoot Heather if she gets too upset and seems like she’s about to shoot or make some other impulsive decision. The Socket Man actively looks up at Flynn in his position, yet when Flynn comes down from his perch, he acts like nothing was there. Generally when Flynn is disconcerted we can tell. Seeing something like the Socket Man would disconcert him, as it did at the end off his own route when it appeared on too of the mountain, and yet here it doesn’t. And when we think back to Flynn’s Route, he denies every hallucination talked about. So is he just immune? Probably. Perhaps that's why he’s targeted by the hysteria in two of the routes we’ve read so far; if he can’t be threatened by the town's secrets, why shouldn’t the town's secrets kill him?
Another instance of hallucinations is the Chase that Leo and Duke see. This phenomenon of Leo creating a doppelganger Chase is explained using the ancient Tibetan Buddhist being called the Tulpa. The Tulpa is a manifestation of ones own thoughts created through deep concentration and/or acts of religiosity. One who creates a Tulpa is a Tulpamancer. Leo is a Tulpamancer - remember that speech from Flynn’s Route which I found deep and emotional - how he hugs a pillow and pretends it’s Chase, imagines Chase sitting in his passenger seat and reacting to the music alongside him. Well he said this again right near the end of the story; we’re in another sequence which was a previous hallucination and also brings us some stark realisations about Leo which harms my opinion of him even further… *sigh*... and this time, knowing what we know about Leo, it’s far less emotional to me, but this is where it’s revealed to us that that’s what it is; Micha is the one to explain it to us, but Leo’s attachment to the hallucination he created of Chase manifested into reality and became a real, walking and breathing being.
Speaking of Tulpa Chase, we actually see him for ourselves in this route. First we see him in our dreams; we recount the events of a cheating prank Chase and Jenna pulled on Leo. Leo didn’t not take kindly to this prank and promptly broke Chase's phone out of rage. Chase describes this as one of the worst moments for him and Leo in the past and is traumatising to him. The second Tulpa Chase instance occurs before Brian comes back to kidnap us. Jenna and we have a small argument with Leo and Leo starts to regress. As he regresses the room gets dark and out of absolutely nowhere, a second, beardless Chase waltzes into the room and starts speaking to Leo with compassion and care. It’s really unnerving actually; every other part of this VN has been still images, but they had Tulpa Chase actually walk into frame with his really disjointed walk. It verges on uncanny valley.
Another two supernatural visions come from the past.
The first one comes in a dream which wakes Chase up in the middle of the night. It's a tragic car accident. Chase switches perspectives in this dream between an Otter driving a car on a desert road, and a fragile old man jogging along the same road in the night. This is where several previous paths converge, by the way, and it’s hard to describe so bare with me.
In the car sits an Otter fellow and a coyote lady who Chase thinks is probably Janice. The Otter is definitely not Chase - he looks familiar, but it’s not Chase himself. They’re talking a lot in the car, paying less attention to the road than they should be. The old man is a white wolf and he is running away deludedly from something - that’s not specified, but it seems to be the case. Janice and this Otter man end up hitting the old man when they’re not paying attention and try to save him while he’s still alive and stuck under the car a bloody mess. Their efforts fall through though and they end up accidentally crushing him under the wheel and they drag him to the side of the road and bury him.
The Otter is Sydney’s dad and the old man is Sam; the player character, and also the inner voice of Chase and also Flynn in his ending.
This all connects to a lot of things. The reason Sam is now in the head of Chase is all domino effect. When Sam was killed by Sydney’s dad, Sam's spirit haunted Sydney’s dad, the perspective switching telling us that when he did this, he had access to all of Sydney’s dad’s memories. When Sydney’s dad kills himself in front of Sydney, the spirit is passed onto Sydney, hence we can see Sydney’s memories in Flynn’s Route, and when Chase drowns Sydney in Lake Emma, the spirit is passed onto him. In Flynn’s Route, there's a moment where our perspective is moved out of Chase and we roam free for a while before reconnecting, showing that us not being connected to anyone is possible and it is entirely Sam’s choice to stick with whomever the next killer is, and the moment where our perspective switched to Flynn’s in his route shows that death does not have to occur for Sam’s spirit to be passed on; Chase’s experience in the closed off room is only a near death experience, and since Flynn caused that near-death experience and knocked us loose of Chase, it's Flynn we decide to haunt next. At the end of Flynn’s Route, we die in the caves and Flynn is merged with the Socket Man, and our perspective follows. This confirms my previous theory that Sam is the haunted voice of Echo… kind of…30 I think that theory was a lot more dumbed down, but using it to describe the essence of Sam’s importance to the story is probably accurate; a lot of our flashbacks and dreams come from events Sam would have witnessed, so his importance to the Echo story is impossible to miss; he is the one who created all the hallucinations in the first place by inhabiting the bodies of all these people and feeding them hallucinations in the first place.31
What this Sam theory doesn’t explain though is the Tulpa Chase, nor the Socket Man. I think Leo being a Tulpamancer is a separate truth and has nothing to do with Sam; I don't think Sam has anything to do with Leo and all of Leo’s hysteria comes from a mental breakdown following his implicit separation from Chase. The Socket Man though? That's definitely not a Tulpa; it follows Jenna throughout this story, but it has visited places that Jenna wouldn’t have a clue about and can be possessed by other spirits beyond her control, meanwhile Leo’s Tulpa only knows things that Leo could have known, and by virtue of that, things Chase knew about Leo. The Socket Man is not a Tulpa. We see his creation at the end of Flynn’s Route, in fact - when Flynn burns to death, his body becomes that of the Socket Man within which Sam now inhabits, and the Socket Man is able to time travel and manifest where needed… but Flynn also never dies that horrible death in most routes and the Socket Man always persists… so… does the Socket Man just get created in that fashion no matter what? And does it always get inhabited by Sam’s spirit? Probably; it’d be weird for the writers to decide “actually there’s another spirit in Echo that nobody considered”. So, is it just a waiting game for Sam where-... hang on… I’m literally getting this all lined up in my head and if I don’t write this down right now I’ll lose it.
The Socket Man is always created on Flynn’s Route. The Socket Man can’t just time travel, he transcends time itself; he can move between timelines. Flynn’s Route is the route in which Socket Man is created, and the Socket Man is able to transcend time and see what would have happened should some other event occur, like picking Jenna’s Route at the fight at the lake or like seeing what Sydney would be like today had Chase not killed him - this is why we hallucinate Sydney as an adult near the end of Flynn’s Route.
It took me a while, but we got there in the end :)
Okay, let’s tackle something else … Leo is worse than we thought.
One of the hallucinations we have is a flashback to the major hallucination in Echo Route 65; we get knocked out by a party goer while he’s arguing with TJ and we crawl out into the desert. We stop at a caravan on the side of the road, the doors swing open and out pours a barrage of spiders, thus giving Chase his worst fear.32
Near the end of this route, we find ourselves at the location of said caravan in the middle of another manifest dream and Micha and Leo have a shared history there… from the day of Echo Route 65, so this is right before Chase and Leo start dating. In Echo Route 65, Leo is trying to usher away a stranger that’s holding a camera. Said stranger is Micha.
While we’re in that caravan, Micha and Leo recount what they did in here. They “fooled around” in the van. This makes Chase question the start of his relationship with Leo, first and foremost, which is a painful thing to read as it makes him question the very foundation of his first relationship, but Jenna is off having her own, separate realisation… If Leo is currently 24 and Micha is currently 20, and Leo was 17 on the day Chase and Leo got together, how old was our camera-wielding Micha?
Worse still, in this hallucination sequence, there’s a camera set up aiming at the area where this would have happened… so it’s kinda implied they, likely Micha, also filmed it, and Leo, functionally the adult in the room, was just fine with engaging in the first place, but also with Micha filming that… Micha clarifies it was all wilful and he doesn’t feel victimised by it all, but as Jenna points out, that doesn’t make it any better on Leo’s end; he should have known better, and if he did, then… ewwwww... Leo’s reputation with me is irredeemable at this point, I'm sorry, you literally cannot explain this one away.
Okay, let’s talk about endings… I actually need to go and read the bad ending real quick, so before I do that, let me talk about how we decide which ending we’ll get.
It's actually a lot harder than on Leo’s Route; there we just had to make a choice right at the end of his route and that would give us a good ending if we abandon Echo and a bad ending if we don’t. In this route, it’s pretty hard to get the bad ending on your first playthrough as it requires two correct choices right in the middle of the route; if you choose one correctly and not the other, you will get the good ending, and they are not hard choices to disregard either. If you were to choose these choices at random, you’d have a ⅙ chance of going down the bad ending route. Here's the context:
In the middle of the night, Chase and Jenna go out to a town called Jasmynn, the place that’s nicknamed Tetanus Alley, to look for Carl directly. On the way there, we have a conversation about the cheating prank we played on Leo; Chase has felt guilty about that a lot recently and Jenna laments the following:
“Well, usually I’d recommend expressing this to Leo… if I didn’t think that your attempts at reconciliation would be perceived by him as you trying to get back together. We did already apologise for this years ago, but if you absolutely must, maybe wait until we’re back at Pueblo? He’s clearly got some issues to sort out right now., and you’re under absolutely no obligation to try and solve them. Especially considering his recent behaviour. It’s incredibly difficult to help people that don’t want to be helped.”
Here is choice 1; agree or disagree with the assertion that the best move when deciding to apologise to Leo is to wait until we are in safety at Pueblo because it is hard to help someone who does not presently want to be helped.
I did choose to agree on the first run through, which is the first correct answer when choosing the bad ending. The second choice is what’s more difficult to pick correctly though.
Later on the same walk, we stand in the middle of Tetanus Alley and Jenna laments about what a great person her grandmother was. She would help the lonely and even had a raid of them show up at her funeral to thank her for her good deeds, including one rat character who felt her impact on his life so hard that he couldn’t help but address her at the funeral as if she were still present. This is a jumping off point for her to talk about how lonely it is in Echo in general and asks the question “What is it with Echo and taking away all that’s good?” Chase doesn’t know how to answer this. He considers reaching out to her for a hug, but thinks it too bro-y of him. Here is your choice:
Be honest and say “I don’t know how to answer that”, be sentimental and espouse “we kept each other sane” or be pessimistic and claim “This town breaks people”.
My choice was to be honest with her, but the bad ending’s answer is “this town breaks people. Your answer to this question will make or break her decision to talk Heather out of flooding Echo at the dam.
The first choice, to agree that apologising to Leo should wait, influences a decision not to help the people of Echo, who don’t want to be helped. The second choice, to state that there is just something in the water of Echo, reinforces that Echo is irreparable and may as well just be destroyed.
This does actually change parts about the story that previously went a different way. If you went through the good ending route, on the second visit to Jeremy, Heather says that her and Jenna’s old spats were quite silly in hindsight. Jenna would usually not have much to say about that, but in the bad route, she actively interjects. “Your behaviour throughout high school was utterly abhorrent toward me, and I think you know that”.
The second difference is when Leo brawls with Clint. During that day Micha pulls us into a nearby caravan and we devise a plan to get Leo to stop acting irrationally, which will eventually lead to more escalation and being kidnapped by Brian. In the bad route, when Micha pulls us into the caravan, Chase adopts a less positive attitude and Micha gets annoyed at him for it.
And there ends the differences before Sunday, so now let’s get back on track for Sunday.
Sunday starts after we escape Brian's caravan. While we were in Brian's Caravan, Clint and Jeremy were instructed to take Carl to a secure location, so he is still not considered “found” nor is he with us at this point in the story.
We go on a short walk and then we rock up at the caravan hallucination, you know, the one where we find out Leo probably committed statutory rape on a 13 or 14 year old. When we leave that scene, on the way out of that sequence, Chase gets an instinct to start digging at the side of the road, not knowing why, but knowing that this is important for some reason. It’s actually because this is the site of that dream he had where Sam is hit by the car and, sure enough, when he digs, he finds a mess of bones, torn clothes and Sam’s ID. We actually encouraged him to dig there, so we quite literally just convinced Chase to dig up our own grave. How very fun.
We then discuss what we’ll say when we meet with Heather at her house; we go there next because we figure out that that’s the most likely place that Carl was taken to. Flynn has a gun, so we decide he’s going to shoot if Heather gets too erratic. We must either allow Jenna or Micha to talk to Jenna when we get there and, to my understanding, this is not important for an ending. I chose Micha anyway, but I was curious about picking Jenna so I’m going to cover both scenarios here.
When we get there, we do find Carl who’s traumatised, the poor guy, but also Heather barges in with a gun and we notice she has a dead man in her closet, who it turns out is her dad. If we choose to let Micha reason with Heather, he’s unsuccessful. They run around in circles and she gets incensed and ends up shooting him in the wing. He’ll survive though, don’t worry. If we choose to let Jenna reason, she is also not exactly successful and Heather still shoots, but Micha’s is not there and she ends up shooting the wall instead and it comes off as a misfire. Either way, Heather will pick up a permit from the floor that will let her into the dam and she runs off before Flynn can get his aim right and shoot her.
Then, we travel to the dam, follow Jenna into the operating room where we find a skittish Heather, we see the event with the Socket Man and Jenna's defusal, and we look down at the town before we fade into another day. The gang's all here with Micha at a diner with their shared trauma, Micha has his funny quips that make me laugh, as we all prepare to leave we stay behind with Jenna and cannot have an active decision in which music gets played and roll credits…
I didn’t realise before covering this how much of that we’d already covered…
Okay, bad ending time…
The events at the caravan are the same, so let’s get back to the scene where Heather runs off.
The difference here is not in the choice to let Jenna or Micha diffuse. What’s different this time is Flynn actually does shoot Heather at the house; it’s right before she’s about to run to the dam and he does it through the window behind Chase. Jenna kicks her and calls her a bitch, which is just rude honestly, but we’ve established this is the bad ending and Jenna’s pessimism is taking over the situation now. Jenna tries to take credit for Heather's killing and Flynn is not having it; he hates that he just did that and Chase finds this unrecognisable. Jenna is dismissive of Flynn’s feelings though. Micha isn’t having any of it either; Heather was his friend, so he's rightfully upset, even if you go down the route where she shoots his wing. Leo tries to stop her too, but he is also dismissed… Honestly, yeah! Fuck that guy!... ‘scuse me…
As everyone leaves, Chase stays behind and sides with Jenna, blaming everyone's speech on delusions caused by the hum. Jenna wont even have that…
We all leave without Jenna, “she has to do something”, and we’re driving away from Echo. We look out the window down at where the town is and all we can see is Lake Emma. Roll credits…
That’s it. The core 6 have all survived and we’ve brought Micha with us… yippee… obviously, that’s a bad ending. It’s an ending in which Jenna is knocked out of character and becomes Jennacidal… I-... I’m sorry…
Look, this route was phenomenal. I had so much fun writing this review and I certainly was not expecting this route to be the source of so many revelations about this story. Jenna’s character opinion graph went off the charts and then off the charts a second time… as did Leo’s, but that’s because he’s shit…
This route gave me a higher appreciation of the writing too. Not once on this route was I bored, which can’t be said about any other route. I was kept curious and I learnt a lot more about our cast on this route than on any other. If I was advising someone on how to approach this visual novel though, I certainly wouldn’t tell them to pick this route nor Flynn’s Route first; as great as they both are, the implications for the greater story would definitely leave a lot to be desired and it would leave a new viewer deeply confused for certain.
Okay, now for our Character opinions…
I think my thoughts on Chase on this route are really mild. His involvement is far lesser in comparison and he’s spending a lot of this time agreeing with Jenna’s position. This issue at the lake is hardly tackled, so there’s no real reminder of what he’s done in this route and we’re left to put out concerns to other areas. This route is definitely more centred on Jenna than other routes are centred on their main pairing with Chase, but it’s also not really focussing on Jenna’s story or giving her the complete arc, it’s more showcasing how Jenna an help others’ in this regard. I was kinda expecting this route to be a bit more Chase forward in terms of focussing on his healing and coming to terms with what he’s done, since Jenna is studying psychology and can perhaps help to explain the principles to him, but instead this route is more focussed on other people with occasional discussions of Chase’s distresses, none of which are at all directly related to his sins. It’s strange.
Jenna is brilliant on this route. There are other routes where I have some disagreements with her, but I can’t remember moments where that happened on this route. My opinion of her kept rising throughout this route and when it came to making an opinion on matters, she stood very firm in what she knows is right. She holds people accountable for their behaviour perfectly and although in other routes I found some of the times she did this a little unbalanced in terms of her approach, in this route I feel like she pulled out that approach exactly where it was needed and I think that shows where Jenna’s convictions lie really well.
Fuck Leo. I hate him now. My opinion is gonna stop moving on him from here on out. Every time I see that character now he leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I question if he was ever even good in the first place, even back in the day. He seems like he just plays people to get what he wants and I think he’s an unruly and gross character.
And for the other characters, I didn’t touch on Heather as much as I thought I would, but she is also another very strong character who does leave a great impression. I think she is truly a sick individual and I can't help but find her character makes me a little sympathetic even despite what she does on this route; I don’t see her hysteria as drawing true colours out of her, I see this as her slowly being driven insane and she’s kinda left on this level where she cannot trust anyone and sudden movements lead her to make impulsive decisions in self-defence rather than her just being an evil individual. You can really see the heart in her character, she’s beautifully written.
Alright, last route. I think after this I’ll play Arches. Fun fact: at the time I’m writing this part, Arches actually got completed just 11 days ago! That’s pretty cool! I have downloaded it already, along with what currently exists of The Smoke Room. I’ll give that a read after Arches. I may take a break between each one though.
Anyway… the last route we have on Echo here is Carl’s. This will hopefully round off all the gaps we currently have, so this better be good…
Carl’s Route
This route blew me away.
Okay, so the events up until Saturday are kinda just normal and mostly stuff we’ve seen before, but some stuff is, of course, different. I mean, it’s a different story, as expected.
First of all, Carl never goes missing. We’re with him the whole time and we stay over at his house on the night that’d usually happen, so he’s able to show up for his birthday like in Flynn’s Route.
Much of the build-up in this route is learning about how Carl lives his life. He lives massively in solitude, he doesn’t like to leave the house and just about the only person he actually hangs out with physically is Flynn. He deals with a high level of stress and gets high to numb said stress. He wants to have a life, but he gets nervous, he has panic attacks and he simply doesn’t. He also says his house is haunted; he can hear scratches and screeches in the night, voices ringing in his head and he sleepwalks, finding himself in the crawlspace… that sounds familiar… not the haunted house thing, I mean the solitude thing; not leaving the house, getting stressed and using some medium to relieve stress… wait, no, I don’t do drugs… I mean something else… this is a terrible way to express this…
Well here’s what happens the night he’s meant to go missing; we wake up and find he’s not in the room with us. We go downstairs because we hear a thumping and we find him stuck in his crawl space and when we get to him he’s confused about how he got there; he sleepwalks to the crawlspace.
Another common event across routes with this one is Carl’s job interview. Instead of Flynn helping us we now have Raven, our side-character for this route. This guy is honestly a little flavourless as a character, he’s just overly jubilant a lot the time and there’s a lot of points where he’s really forcing it for the sake of our situation. He doesn’t really have a lot to him as a character, he just kinda feels like an accessory to our time here, kinda like Julian from TJ’s Route, but kinda better because his existence doesn’t feel in spite of anyone; it almost feels like Julian was only a character so that Chase could be taunted, but Raven feels like he’s here to help Chase separate a conflict that will happen later in the climax. More on that later.
Throughout Carl’s Route, Chase is actually quite the protagonist for a change. He’s never really that suspicious as a character and the worst thing we see him do is be a little bit unempathetic to Carl’s struggles, but this is not something he ever says out loud, he keeps it in his own head and does at least sympathise, which is good. I found myself at several moments really confused about how Chase can’t relate, but perhaps that’s just because I have basically the exact same problems as Carl. And that’s where I find myself enjoying the first strain of Carl’s Route - I just relate to him. But Chase’s whole purpose in this route is to be there for people; he is the one who’s actually trying to make things right and he does a really good job of it. Perhaps he just has a way of talking to Carl, but it also brings attention to why Carl likes Chase so much; despite Chase insisting in his own mind that he doesn't quite understand Carl, Carl seems to think Chase just gets him. Chase knows that Carl doesn’t like to be the centre of attention, and so Chase tends away from making things about Carl. His advice to Carl is also actually good advice, not influenced by some kind of motive to hide the truth about himself unlike on TJ’s Route and not influenced by some kind of self-protection like on Leo’s Route - his advice on this route is all about the person he is giving advice to and I think that holistic approach is really cool to see from him.
This route is also the most focussed on Chase’s project. When we first talk to him about our project at the lake, he brings up the fact that his mother used to research family history and they have a load of historical artefacts in their crawlspace. Carl's family has its route back to the origin of Echo as a town in the 1800s. For the other routes, when I’ve brought up Chase’s project it’s been kinda brushed off because he spends more time being distracted from it than actually working on it because it isn’t important to it. In this route it’s very important. There was a brief part in Flynn’s Route where we get some information from the town hall because he works there and his auntie is the mayor and we get some brief insight about Carl’s family then, but it’s kept quite cryptic and isn’t quite sold to us in a way that speaks to us as that important. In Carl’s Route it’s actually very important, especially towards nightmare sequences that happen with relevance in the modern day.
The historical texts tell of James Hendrick’s, an ancestor of Carl’s, and a native of the region from the time called John Begay, who we know shares a surname with Jenna, but we aren’t sure if they’re related by blood yet and we dance around gong to ask her about it a few times, but we don’t until the climax. The story, as far as we know it, tells of the two being lovers and the two were accused of sodomy, to which James fled to start an ice cream business which persists to Carl’s life today, and John was lynched for the relationship. Thing is, though, there’s also a lot of missing passages in the files and the whole story is incomplete. We also see during moments that Chase decides to research that something keeps messing around with these artefacts and moving them around and every time we look at them they’re never quite in the sorts we left them in.
Another big part of this route is sexuality experiments; Carl reckons a part of him deep inside is attracted to men and he wants to try and figure that out, which we have a few opportunities to do on this route. This is incredibly important to the route, and it doesn’t quite look like it right until the end. All of Carl’s personality is related to stuff that builds up in the end, but it’s all completely subtle right until the end.
But it’s actually really sweet stuff. There’s a night where Carl gets drunk and starts coming on to us and is sheepishly (ba dum tss) asking if he can kiss us. It’s kind of juvenile, but we have the choice to indulge and he’ll get tired and fall asleep on us. There’s a lot of moments where we allow him to experiment on us and even start falling for him, it’s really wholesome stuff and it does feel warm. This is by far my favourite image in the entire VN.
This is also by far the most different route to all the others. There isn’t even any clear allusions to Chase being Sydney’s killer or anything; there’s a scene where we watch old home videos with Carl and Sydney shows up on the screen, and there’s a dark turn as we hear Carl's dad, who’s recording the video, start being a little bit bigoted towards Sydney’s religion. The events in the climax are really different too, which we’ll get to in a bit. We won’t spend too much longer dawdling on this leadup section this time because the climax is by far one of the bulkiest segments in the whole VN.
Jenna is another stark difference. She’s not herself in this route; she’s cold and mean-spirited, particularly towards Carl. It’s really bizarre, but you can sense something is off. It first becomes apparent at Carl’s birthday party; Carl runs off because he doesn’t like the attention and we go after him and find him outside. He’s elated to see us knowing we won’t draw attention towards him or force him to go back to the party, but then Jenna comes out and demands he goes back - it’s his party, he has a duty to be there. She gets really annoyed at him in a way we don’t see in other routes. It’s a hatred, even.
Let’s finally talk about a dream sequence from before the climax and use it as a jumping off point. The big one, at least in my opinion, is the flashback to the water balloon fight; it starts off with us chasing TJ with a water balloon and the scene is interrupted by Clint and Jeremy shouting at Carl and attacking him. We and TJ go and hide and we tell TJ to go and get Leo and we just sit and watch as Carl is kinda just ganged up on and tortured. Leo does eventually come and the scene of him fighting off Clint and Jeremy is actually kinda gruesome - Leo’s very much overdoing it. Carl runs away and Chase goes after them while everyone else is distracted. That event gets brought up later as a description for why Carl is the way he is and why Carl seems to truly perk up while we’re around, but I can’t get into that without discussing the climax here.
So let’s finally talk about the climax. This will take a while, so if it feels like I’ve been paying this route less mind than the others, it’s because we haven’t even started yet - this route is such a slow burner.
Leo brings us to the diner to discuss meeting up with the core 6 at the lake for closure's sake, which we do. It’s the same day as Carl's job interview and he has that panic attack outside of the place and that’s when we decide to go off into this other undoubtedly high-pressure environment.
When we get there, everyone is sort of looking away from each other and on our arrival, people try picking the conversation up. Flynn picks up, which of course sets off Jenna, and when they start arguing, Leo butts in, and then that makes TJ upset, so Flynn is now mad at TJ, and Carl and Chase are kinda just sitting there, freaking out. Chase then stands up, strips to his underwear and valiantly runs to the lake and jumps in. And people follow him. It's a really sweet moment, and the inner monologue he has is, yet again, just right; to move on from the shared traumatic life event, you don’t talk about it. There’s nothing to talk about because they’ve all experienced it, they all have their own feelings towards it, which may differ and the situation is drastic enough that, though a discussion would help us to acknowledge the difference, it’s not like we don’t already understand the differences intuitively, so there’s no reason to go over it all again because we’ll just get nowhere. Chase finally feels like a protagonist. Chase runs to the lake because to get over the event, he just has to turn the experience at the river into something new. To move on is to create a new memory, and by starting a good time in the river, he is doing just that in a way that acknowledges old tragedies…
Then Echo hits them all at once. He sinks to the bottom of the lake and peacefully lays there, until he realises he can’t move anymore. He lasts more than the amount of time he should be under there before his body starts needing to breathe and he slowly passes out under the water. When we wake up the air is sour again, and once he shows himself to be safe, a fight ensues. Flynn is attacking TJ, Leo is defending TJ by attacking Flynn, Jenna is protecting TJ by using Leo to distract Flynn and bringing him to safety and Carl is having another panic attack, just watching as he tries to keep us from using too much energy. Chase turns to him, reassures him and stands Carl up to leave. And so they do, and Jenna just watches as we take off.
We arrive at Carl’s mansion and he rushes inside. We’re greeted by Raven who’s asking about the interview and Carl is just storming away. We try following Carl, but can’t find him, and we eventually find ourselves wandering into the crawlspace. We enter and there’s a secret passage that we didn’t see there before. We follow down the dark hole and our consciousness slowly fades out into the darkness, and when we wake up, we take a few steps forward and fall into what looks like a portion of Carl’s mansion, but there are no windows, it’s just a hallway with a bunch of doors to rooms that lead back into each other in some instances and no way of escaping. We sprain our ankle on the fall and subsequently are left with a limp throughout the rest of the story.
We do find Carl here and he claims to have no idea what this place is. He helps us to get up and is supportive to us while our foot is injured until we hear a screaming in one of the rooms. We follow it and hear Raven screeching about seeing smoke and a strange presence within the smoke which we can feel is there ourselves, but when we save him and jostle the door open, the smoke all vanishes and he’s just kinda cowering on the floor. We start rushing to find a way out, but find ourselves in a loop situation. There is another door we try to enter, but there's no light in there. What we can see in there is a noose attached to the ceiling and Chase gets the smell of a rotting corpse through the door, but when Carl opens it he claims there's nothing in there.
But that’s the strange thing; Carl is the one fronting here. He’s the one taking a stand and he’s the one drawing attention to himself for answers. His feelings towards Chase are also stronger than ever and he feels he has to protect him through and through. There are more sexuality experiments in the climax than in any other part of this route and they go even further than anywhere else. You’d swear Carl was just fully gay and all his previous mentions of anime girls is just a lie. One other thing though is Carl is acting very differently overall; he’s not quite himself anymore, though we can definitely still see a small part of him which comes to the forefront every now and then, but it's as if another person is living within him and influencing his decisions.
And then, after we go to sleep in the bedroom, we wake up to find Carl sitting on the floor with the bed sheet over his head. His horns look bigger under it than they should be and when we peel it off, he wakes up with it, and he looks to be back to normal, but he’s confused how he got on the floor just like he was confused at how he got in the crawlspace that one time in the middle of the night. He tells us of the dream he had last night, about how his ancestor we mentioned earlier, James, was talking to him. Apparently James needs us to clear up the truth, and by doing that we’ll be able to escape the sequence. And so we start to follow James’ advice. It starts to ring into our heads why Carl has been experiencing hauntings and major bouts of sleepwalking lately.
Anyway, following James’ advice, we find a note which is a letter from James to John. It’s a love letter talking about some kind of accusation before telling them about how they’ll meet again and- wait, why is Carl suddenly reciting this? The words just fall out of his mouth like he wrote it himself and he ends his recital by kissing us on the nose. Raven is watching that happen and as Carl snaps out of it, Raven’s like “aww that was so cute” and giggling and shit and he was starting to remind me of a friend of mine, so I started giving him a little German accent in my head.
Anyway, just as we’re about to test what we think of the exit door, Jenna arrives. She came to Carl’s house looking for TJ. All of the group, Leo, Flynn and TJ has gone wild and out of character, with TJ even going as far as to attack Jenna, which she shows us the scar on her arm. This is how we know the hysteria event has begun - if people outside of those presently in close proximity to Chase are going insane, we know that the hysteria is in effect, according to my theory at this time.
Jenna’s animosity towards Carl is also still present. In fact, it’s kinda growing and she’s described as not even talking at the usual cadence. All this growing tension between Jenna and Carl starts to unravel and we suspect that just as James Hendricks has been taking over Carl’s mind, John Begay may be taking over Jenna’s. But the two were lovers according to the relics, so this animosity is starting to make even less sense when we consider this prospect, but we keep barrelling forward.
We now enter a log cabin. And outside of the cabin is a bonfire with some shadowy figure dancing around it to a drum beat. We are now at what we believe are the early tribes that lived here before Echo was colonised and we find a newspaper segment. We have Raven read it and it’s something about Native boys going being kidnapped, but it quickly burns in his hands and we don’t get to read the whole headline. Carl initially blames this on Raven, thinking it caught on a nearby candle, but Jenna insists it wasn't Raven, instead implying she thinks Carl did it, making herself more angry.
This segment in the log cabin also comes with a lot more sexual experiments with Carl. There’s a really sweet moment where Carl is spooning us and we can feel his… tension rising. Aaand Jenna comes running in attacking Carl. Like, physically fighting him, screaming about him, telling him he needs to not fuck “the otter”, as if she doesn’t recognise us.
I remember theorising at this moment as I went to go get a drink. It was like 9 am at this point and I’d stayed up all night reading this, but I remember standing at the fridge and filling up my bottle and I was so impressed by my own thoughts that I wrote it down in my little note book with my character graphs. I had this theory that the John living in Jenna was a malicious form of John that may have come to existence after he was given news that James had cheated, which is why Jenna was so against the idea of Carl and Chase getting it on - because that event was meant to mirror one in which John finds James sleeping with another man. Obviously, from the tone I’m writing this in, you can figure out I know I got this horrifically wrong in hindsight, but my big theory was that Jenna represented a John that was in denial of James being a good person, where Chase, who isn’t infected by John at all, is meant to represent to James a John who either knows the truth that James didn’t cheat or unconditionally loves James regardless of whether he did or not; because Carl/James isn’t holding this animosity towards Chase, but is still treating him like he treated John based on the letter we read. I thought that was really a cool theory, but it's not what happened. It was funny to look back on right now though.
Anyway, all this fighting between himself and Jenna and the implication that Jenna has become John has Carl doubting the now present voice in his head and we come to a fork in the road. I mean the story path; this is another route with a good and bad ending. At the time of writing I actually haven’t read the second ending yet, so we’ll just stick down this path before we even consider the other route.
Carl will now listen to us; he is suspicious of James’ voice in his head and he knows, based on the fact that a small part of him is still present, that Carl can overpower James, but a small part of him does think James is leading him on the right direction; he did get us to the new location, which feels like progress. So, here’s the choice; should Carl allow James to take over, or should he fight James’ presence and work with his own mind.
I chose the path of asking Carl to follow his own intuition. I didn’t really find myself suspicious of James or anything though, I just thought that the real thing that would take us out of this scene was Carl’s intuition and it’d make for a more compelling narrative. I thought it would be a good move from Chase to actually encourage Carl to trust his own intuition and that his own intuition might be better for getting us out of our situation - when Carl made decisions on his own accord before, they seemed like good decisions and so I trusted that, though James’ senses were helpful, Carl wouldn’t need them.
Cutting forward a lot, we get to a moment where we hear Jenna grunting and we come downstairs to see her fishing around in a stove for a letter she’s found. The smoke demon that’s been haunting us throughout this section starts to try pulling her in, and we pull at her to try and help her not get dragged into the stove, but it proves fruitless until Carl comes in and proves to be stronger than this spirit. And then after all that effort to pull her out of it, she goes to burn the letter. It takes pinning her down, looking her square in the eye and asking what the hell she’s doing for her to snap out of it.
This letter is weird; in this one James tells John of accusations being made about him and that the alleged source of said accusations were John himself. The accusations involved the aforementioned native boys going missing too. He tells John to meet him at his mansion, which is Carl’s house in the modern day. Notably, we found nothing that pointed to John sabotaging James politically while researching for Chase’s project, so this is a strange one.
We barrel forward now and unlock the door to the next scene we stumble out into the dark and find ourselves… back at the first level in the mansion. We have not made any progress. We enter the room that smelled gross earlier and find Jenna hanging from the noose. As we try to pull her down, she seems limp, but Carl comes back in to save the day, of course and she’s pulled back down and she comes back out of her unconscious state. Carl finds himself doubting his own instincts now, but Chase finds himself pushing Carl even harder, which made me feel nice to know that Chase and I had the same idea about letting Carl do the talking.
We go back through the door that led us to the cabin level and enter a new nightmare sequence…
We’re back in Echo in the nightmare world we’re so familiar with. The dream focuses on a noose at the foot of the mountain and when we climb the mountain we focus on Carl’s mansion, which is huge now, like it would have looked back when it was built in the late 1800’s. And we wake up in Carl’s parents’ bedroom. We’re fooled by it for a moment, but it turns out to be the next level of the nightmare sequence. We tell the group about our nightmare and Jenna leads the way to the foot of the mountain where we say the noose was in the dream.
Hanging from the tree is the rotting corpse of John Begay. As we approach to pull the next letter from John's mouth, we pass out. We hear an argument between John and James first about who’s message should reach “the otter”, so apparently we gain some insight into the voices in Jenna and Carl’s head for a moment, before falling into a flashback… remember back in TJs Route when Chase recalled hallucinating the dead fox hanging from the tree? The way I called attention to it was very much in passing, but it was mentioned, I promise… well, this is it; we flashback to that very forest where a young Chase hallucinated the dead fox.
When I previously said that I was hoping this route would fill in the final gaps, I didn’t actually realise what those gaps were, I was just kinda saying it. I’d gotten so immersed in the stories investigated by Duke that I kinda just forgot about outsider events, so all of this slowly coming back was a really nice touch and I was left feeling like the order of routes I took was quite well chosen. I think if I was to personally suggest an order to read these routes in, I would have suggested to start with TJ’s, move on to Jenna, Leo, then Flynn and then Carl.33 I can’t express the full reason why at the moment, but the key influence to this idea is going in order of which endings are easiest to hardest to understand - TJ’s ending is clear in it’s meaning and so is Jenna’s. Leo and Flynn both have similar climaxes. I would suggest Carls’ last because it is such a wild change of pace from the others and it kinda handles an entirely separate story from the rest of these routes and I find the idea of ending it on such a different note could be really compelling. Anyway, back to the story.
While we were stuck in a flashback, John’s dead body apparently ate the note. We find a newspaper clipping in his pocket and read it. This is a recent one; it’s an article about research conducted by Carl’s mother. In this one, the thought that James was being falsely accused is backed again; she states that she believes it was actually John who was causing the Native children to disappear, dubbing him a serial killer, and that the true reason they were later persecuted is not because they committed an act of sodomy, but because James was in a relationship with such a violent criminal. James claimed later that the crimes were sexual in nature, but as we read about that, we find ourselves at the bottom of the page, which has been torn.
And then Jenna rips the newspaper clipping even further and tries to kill Carl with a knife. We, of course, separate them again, and we follow Carl to a boulder some distance away. And then he just walks off giving us the “I just need space to think”. We try to follow him some distance, but we can’t keep up with him and our surroundings fade into the grounds of Pueblo University. We hear Chase’s voice all around us and we come to a bench which replays to us an old conversation between us and Carl, which doesn’t sit in Chase’s mind as a good memory, so we get away from that and go into the university until we enter our dorm room. We find Carl on the bed and we talk.
This moment is beautiful. Carl is at peace here. He’s had an epiphany, not just about why he is the anxious person he is, but also about why he has been so attached to Chase. He says he was relying too much on other people to live. He says he used to hold it against Chase, leading to the conversation at the bench that we just walked away from, but he realised that wasn’t fair. He realises that he isn’t that important, but that is a good thing. He likes his life of being unimportant, but he doesn’t want to rely on others anymore. And making this decision gives him life's greatest comfort. He loves Chase and his friends, but what’s more important is that he is comfortable in himself. He’s thankful to Chase for helping him to pull himself together, and when he heard Chase was to come back to Echo for the week, Carl thought that maybe Chase could pull him back together again this time, but in doing all of this, Carl managed to pull himself together.
And then he pulls us together; Chase says something about what to do when they get back to Echo and out of this nightmare world they can’t escape and then Carl points something out about the dorm; it’s shaped wrong, like it’s elongated. So we’re not in the dorm and we never were. This is the diner. We never left Echo in the first place, actually, we were always in Echo. This whole inescapable dream sequence was just us falling victim to Echo’s mass hysteria events…
I could not recreate my reaction to this. This is what blew me away about this route; we spend all this time playing this game and not being affected by the hysteria at all. Remember earlier when I said that TJ going feral is what proves the hysteria is in effect, and how I said that proximity to Chase determines how much the hysteria will affect you? That’s not a consideration I had while reading and I felt stupid writing it into this recounting, but it shows why my reaction to this part of the route was so strong - I had this perception that Chase could not be affected by the hysteria because he is such an important figure to a tragedy in Echo’s past, and so coming into this, I hadn’t even considered the possibility of being in a route where we get to experience it ourselves in full force for as long as we did. It never dawned on me that this endless maze of mansions and log cabins could have just been hysteria, and so the hysteria managed to fool me, the reader, despite having learnt what I thought was everything I needed to know about the hysteria, and that is the biggest reason I have to argue for why Carl’s Route should be read last. Now, granted, I can see good reason to choose the other 4 routes last also, however, the change of pace that is this route makes me so grateful I picked this one up last. I was absolutely dumbfounded by this part of the story and it hit me like a fire engine, knocking me to the ground with how stupid I was for not seeing through it and then taunting me by spraying water all over me.
Okay, we need to finish this ending.
We rush back to Carl’s mansion to pull Raven and Jenna out of their nightmare, which they’re both still in. We find Raven tied up in Carl's gym and he tells us that Jenna, or John, keeps running back down to the crawlspace to get “letters of truth” so Raven can see what really happened to John and James. We separate from Carl to go looking for her and we find her with a knife. She chases us with it around and out of the house. We get the idea to locate the rough location where John's hanging tree would have been from the delusion and we dig into the burrow hole underneath. In there we find a final letter as Carl arrives. As Jenna’s about to lunge towards him we start to read the newspaper clipping; it’s the second half of the clipping about Carl’s mothers research; where we last left off, she was telling us of how James had been accused of atrocities instead committed by John, but then she describes next finding evidence that it was the other way around in the form of jail letters; that James had in fact committed those atrocities and was now framing John. That catches Jenna/John's attention and we finally pull Jenna back into reality. She immediately becomes fraught at the fact she was just in the middle of trying to murder her friend.
We fade into black and hear Chase’s monologue about the truth that history is more subjective than we think and that we don’t know the true culprit of the kidnappings and probably never will, but Chase opines that James is like the culprit, and that’s his subjective opinion on the truth of the matter. This is the end of Chase's report. We fade back into the dorm room and it’s real this time. Carl enters, and there's a short mention about how the relationship between Carl and Chase being attractive to hiim was unfortunately probably just another thing that James had influenced, and that their friendship is left unmarred by the way things turned out. Here ends the route.
This route was beautiful and it did truly feel like the final piece to the puzzle. I may not have come in knowing what the final piece would look like, but I feel satisfied with how this story panned out. That said, I still haven’t read the bad ending, so let’s rewind a bit - instead of instructing Carl to fight James’ presence, let’s now instruct him to accept it; James just wants to be heard out, right? So maybe he’ll let us go once we do hear him out? Alright, let’s go…
This time, instead of Jenna finding the note on the stove, it’s Carl - James probably put it there in the past, and so that’s where we find it now. Carl can’t reach it though, so he makes us get it. And very forcefully too. We feel the smoke monster's touch, but it doesn’t try to drag us in like it did Jenna. It’s clear to me immediately that that smoke ghost is James. Jenna tries to take the letter off us and we have a small fight over it - this will be her trying to burn the letter again. It dawns on me now that all these hidden letters were the jail letters Carl's mother mentioned in those articles. Carl fights her again, even more aggressively, and then when they get separated, Carl’s bad mouthing Jenna in a way we've never heard him talk before. To me it’s hard not to see it as James being the culprit of the kidnappings, but we’ll continue.
In the sequence where Jenna is hanging, Carl doesn’t come to save the day this time, it’s instead us. Carl used a knife in the previous run, but this time, it’s Chase that thinks to do it. When Carl comes in, he hesitates rather than rushing in to help.
The next big difference is the knife fight; when Jenna tries to kill us after reading the article, she pushes us out of the way and immediately guns for Carl, who isn’t fighting back, but dodging excellently and taunting her for missing. And when we separate them, instead of wandering off to sit on a rock, we take Carl back to his mansion.
Carl is totally gone at this point and it’s unmistakably just James that we are with, but Chase is still half-deluded about this. The earlier moment in the log cabin where we “feel Carl’s tension” comes back up and now Carl is stroking our shit in a rizzy and skillful way that no anime fan should ever be capable of. That might be the worst thing I’ve ever written, I’m so sorry you had to read that sentence.
We then get a dream sequence where we follow a young fox down to the crawlspace and the dream cuts out as Carl kidnaps him to which we wake up and hear Raven screaming. We enter Carl’s gym, there's blood on the floor and we’re forcefully hit. We’re tied up in some dark room, which is probably the caves, Carl is with us. He tells us he has killed John and “the husky” with a knife and goes off looking for something. A group of small boys comes to us but runs away when Carl approaches again and Carl dumps the historical artefacts under us from the bins before covering them in gasoline. He tries to set us alight, but his restraints aren’t tied well enough and we can escape as he makes a mistake. Carl runs off and we run after him, but we’re pushed back and the façade of the mines dissipates, finally snapping us out of the hysteria as we’re covered in flames. We shout to him and he comes back. He tries to get us out, which he does and he takes us out to the desert. He looks back at his now burning house and the credits roll.
So… much less satisfying ending, as all the bad endings are.
And that’s it!
Or is it?
Nah, of course it isn’t.
There’s More!?
So, I actually missed a few endings across all these routes, so before we do a final character journey for his route, let's cover how I discovered this and what this actually is.
When I went looking for alternate endings to Carl’s Route, I came across several Reddit posts where people were talking about the endings instead of just telling me how to get them, as Echo posters often seem to do. Anyway, one user said something like “I don’t know how to get different endings, but I just know this ending where Jenna stabs me is not a good one”. Now, obviously, hearing that I was like “goddammit, they just spoiled the bad ending, but then in that recounting I just did, such a thing never happened. So where is the “Jenna stabbed me” ending I was promised!? And did I miss any others?
Luckily, I found a route chart that tells us this; it’s missing pretty much all of Jenna's Route, probably because of the key differences in that route which I’ll bring up first, but besides that, it has every single choice you have in this game across every other route and what it will lead to. If they lead you to a unique choice, the route branches off into something new. So, following this chart, here’s a few changes I missed while playing…
So, first of all, in Jenna’s Route, if during the prologue you reiterated your sexuality as “bisexual” instead of “homosexual”, there will be some differences in Jenna’s Route, including rising tensions between her and Chase, some scenes where Jenna touches Chases arm and such have added “omg a girl is touching me” energy, and there is also an added sex scene with her.
Now as far as actual endings are concerned, we missed two; one in Leo’s Route and one in Carl’s Route, both of which surround combat decisions.
On Leo’s Route, when we are in Duke's basement and Kudzu is about to save us, we’re given the choice to either help Kudzu or go for Duke's gun. I went for Dukes gun last time and survived, so if you go and help Kudzu instead, it is the wrong decision and Chase will die. Like, really abruptly too, we turn around and just get shot.
On Carl’s Route, at the scene where Jenna tries to kill Carl with a knife on the good ending route, you are given the choice to push Jenna away from Carl or grab her and pull her away. Pushing her is the correct decision, but grabbing her will have her falling back on top of us and jamming the knife into our chest. We then slowly and painfully die.
Carl’s Route Final Thoughts
Okay, that out of the way, here’s my thoughts on Carl’s Route.
Overall, the writing on this route feels new; there’s a certain air to this route’s first section that gives off the impression that they haven’t fully settled yet, especially through Raven’s inclusion, who just feels like so much less of a character than later side characters we get. I barely mentioned him in my discussion about this route because he’s just feels that irrelevant and it feels like he’s just there to help Chase break up fights between Carl and Jenna because other than that all he does is be inappropriately happy considering the situation we’re in.
The actual interactions between Carl and Chase are actually really sweet for the most part. Carl is not at all an unlikeable character like I initially found him to be way back at the start, which is kinda saying a lot. If Carl didn’t turn out to be a homosexual by means of possession instead of by actual natural homosexuality, they would actually have made as great a couple as I think Kudzu and Chase were from Leo’s Route. I think this also speaks to how varied Chase’s character actually is - more on that later though, lest we go off topic.
When I tell you that moment the hysteria dissipated blew my mind, I am not kidding. I remember when I read that at the time, I threw my hands in the air and went “OHHHH” and then sat there laughing at myself for about 5 minutes straight because I felt like I was being overdramatic. When I say it hit me like a fire engine, I mean I actually felt my chest give out and I had to take a minute to process. But thinking on it harder, I might have had that same reaction had I played TJ’s Route last… again, this is something to consider when we conclude our thoughts on the whole novel put together, but it really does speak to the writing that you can always be left with a chills-striking ending no matter where you go. But back on this ending, Carl’s Route letting us see into the hysteria instead of being an outsider to it is kinda really cool and I have nothing but praise for this.
But it is hard not to look back at the rest of the route and recognise that the build-up to the climax is of lesser interest than the other routes’
And so, here concludes my thoughts on Carl’s Route… let’s quickly touch on some characters.
In both the relationship with Carl and Kudzu, one half plays somewhat as a caretaker and the other as cared for, and Chase is in a different role in both; he is cared for by Kudzu, and takes care of Carl. Naturally this should feel unbalanced, especially with Kudzu, but because it is only the start of these relationships we’re seeing and the situation is very dire in Kudzus, it feels very okay, ultimately these are just early stages where they’re just kinda showing affection. Then, the relationship with Leo is even more different. I think Leo is treated kinda like a caretaker of Chase whenever they are/were a thing, but I think their relationship is more of a co-dependency. Back in the start of their relationship this may have been less of the case, but in the present day, when we follow along with a relationship with Leo in the start of his route, it is undoubtedly a strange form of co-dependency until we find out how manipulative he’s been.
I really appreciate how this route was so Carl-focussed and managed to give us some Echo lore on top of that. This whole thing was all about Carl’s character development in a way that other routes weren’t for their respective characters, and I really appreciate what we do see of that. My one comment is that we could have had a bit more Carl in other routes. What we do see of him in other routes is not that distinct from what we get in this route, and it only happens substantially in Flynn’s Route. I mostly just think that it’s a little unfortunate that half of his personality isn’t even his own and is actually that of a distant ancestor. Outside of that, he is a really endearing character.
Raven though? I mean, he’s adorable and he does remind me of that friend, but they really do not try to involve him with the story in a way that’s meaningful or relevant. As much as I love how this route changes tune and flips the hysteria onto us, it does feel a little bit like it left the characters out of the story in a way, with Carl and Jenna not being themselves and Raven not being given much of a chance to show off his identity outside of his jolliness. Carl and Jenna not fully being themselves is also part of the reason I’m not changing my opinions on them much in this route, to be clear, especially when as they snap out of these personalities, they regret what they did while under their influences.
Alright, that’s every route now done. Let’s get to talking about things as a whole… wait… what do you mean WE’RE STILL NOT DONE?!
Side Stories
I was just in the middle of looking into which order the big routes were written in on the Echo Wiki for a later part of this review where I review the characters individually and give my perspective on why some of the side characters feel more fleshed out than others and in doing that I was actually proven incorrect in my initial theory that it was just because they were the earlier or something.34 Anyway, in looking for that, I found out there’s even more story content tucked away in the title screen.
In addition to the bulky main 5 routes of Echo, there is a list of 7 short stories. To find these, quit the title and click on the lake from the selection screen. This brings you to the gallery, and in the bottom right corner of the gallery you can click on the broken window frame. This will bring you to a list of days, allowing you to restart a route from the given day; say you want to go back to a particular event in the story, but didn’t have a chance to save on the day it happened. This is how you quickly access that part of the story again.
At the bottom of this list is an extra 7 stories labelled with the sprite of Chase. These are titled Date, Runaway, Lights, Phone, Party, Metaphor and Trip. These stories are all set between the events of Echo Route 65 and Echo. Additionally, the story “Benefits” was published as an external side story, as in, it requires a separate download. This is nicknamed Story 5 and fits in line with the other side stories and the main plot of Echo overall, so we will cover this story here too, but we’ll cover it last since they ended up making it a separate visual novel.
Okay… here we go…
Date
In Date we follow the perspective of a 15 year old TJ in January of 2010. He is going on a date with Heather. They cut past it all and just lead us straight into a scene where Heather takes him up to his bedroom and tries to initiate something, but he stops her and claims he’s not ready for it, which is apparently true, but he is also evading the truth that he does not actually like what she’s doing. He then calls Chase to ask how he figured out he was gay, to which Chase redirects him to a gay porn website and hangs up when Leo starts getting freaky in his car. It ends on the note that that made TJ hard.
This feels like it’s mostly here to get rid of any ambiguity around TJ’s sexuality; it was left ambiguous on TJ’s actual route, but in this route it is made absolutely clear that TJ is at least still questioning or has some leaning towards men - Heathers advances do nothing for TJ and when he asks Chase about it, it’s also made clear that other parts of female anatomy don’t really speak to TJ’s tastes either, but when he overhears Chase and Leo being passionate, he is aroused, either implying TJ could be gay, or demisexual and just didn’t have the rapport with Heather that he does with Chase and Leo. It is still left ambiguous, the extent of his sexuality, but some insight is given in this story.
This is a cute story, but it feels like the most of its meaning comes out in the form of recalling events from the story and thinking “ah well that explains that”. For instance, in TJ’s Route where they're at the top of the hiking trail and Chase removes his shirt, TJ can’t take his eyes off it; at the time I wrote it off as him awkwardly looking out of discomfort or even a morbid curiosity.
Runaway
Runaway follows a 17 year old Jenna in May of 2010, which is before a name change, so she is addressed as “Jasmynn”. On the day she leaves her home, unbeknownst to her family, she has Chase drive her to Pueblo where she will start her course in Psychology. Along the ride, Chase questions why she’s doing this, implores her to consider staying behind and spills about growing tension between him and Leo. When the story ends, she hands him a university brochure and he is seen considering it.
This story is great and it speaks to Chase's good side. We get a surprising amount of backstory in this actually, including the consensus about James and John and how it’s impacted Jenna’s parents’ thoughts on Carl and his family. We’re also told why she changed her name to Jenna, which is because it’s the name her parents spiked and not one that truly represented her, and we’re also given some minor context of what got Leo and Chase’s relationship declining. Runaway is a surprisingly packed story for how short it is and I learn more about Jenna here than I felt I did anywhere else.
Lights
Lights follows TJ at a Christian get-together in November of 2010. He’s on the verge of a panic attack following an awkward lift from Chase and Leo where they seem annoyed that TJ is having them drive out all that way, and he is avoiding a girl named Sarah who invited him to the party in the first place and now feels bad about not keeping her company. He dances with Sarah for a short while, which is kinda romantic and TJ comes out of it aroused. He goes out looking for Chase and Leo and finds them in their car, initially looking like one person from the silhouettes, but when Chase separates from Leo and sits in the passenger seats it immediately becomes obvious what they were doing (not to TJ). TJ tries to include the others with the party, to which Chase says the Christians probably wouldn’t take too well to the gays invading their dig, which TJ is offended by and storms off over knowing that members of his Church aren’t so harsh. TJ then has a paranormal experience where he feels watched and sees the silhouette of the Socket Man before the story ends with Carl finding him wandering around on the street and driving him back to his place.
This story doesn’t feel too substantial besides making TJ’s sexuality even more ambiguous again. It speaks to Carl’s kindness that he was so willing to drive TJ back to his place simply for seeing him distressed. I think it also speaks to Chase’s less good sides that TJ has a history of facing negativity from him, which we already knew about just from the main story, but given how quickly TJ assumed Chase was bashing his religion and how quickly it seemed to be proven correct goes to show their histories discussing this topic.
I don’t really have as much to say about Lights.
Phone
From a 21 year old Leo’s perspective in May of 2012, Phone tackles the cheating prank Jenna and Chase pull on Leo; Leo is having a bad day and they meet at a diner. Chase goes to the toilet and leaves his phone behind as it starts to ring. Leo picks up and answers to “Jared” who then immediately hangs up. Chase comes back and Leo explodes at him. Jenna shows up, bragging about the prank, which makes Leo more upset and as Leo is about to storm off, he throws Chase’s phone to the floor and breaks it unthinkingly. Chase blurts out that he will move to Pueblo and leaves, upset at the broken phone. Jenna moves to apologise before following Chase out and the now depressed Leo starts to drive away as well.
His prank is less dramatic than I was expecting, but it’s still very much not okay as a prank to pull. The way Jenna treats it was especially bad, acting like Leo should have simply not reacted so hard instead of understanding why it’s such an upsetting prank to pull throughout most of this and only seems to actually get the problem with it whenever the phone breaks. Chase was in on the prank too, of course, but he treated the situation with a lot more care.
What this story does do is clears up Leo’s intent; how it was sold to us in Leo’s Route was as if Leo broke Chase’s phone with full intent, but then this scene clears up that it was a moment of blind rage where he just forgot what he was holding in his hand. Seeing a story from Leo’s perspective also adds to Leo’s character a little bit, cleaning up some of the mess around how good or bad he actually is, which I appreciate.
Party
Party follows a 19 year old Chase in October of 2012 as he prepares to go to a party for a wolf named Vincent, a friend of his from Pueblo University. We’re in the small period where Carl went to the university with us. They game briefly before we fade into the arrival at the party. We enter and it’s not long before Vincent and some girl start passing around some blueberry muffins which are edibles. Chase tries one and is such a lightweight he passes out. He wakes up back at the dorm and Carl takes care of Chase.
This is kind of another nothing-burger honestly. There's a brief mention of Leo when Carl asks how he’s coping with the pseudo-break-up given this takes place just a few months after Phone, but the subject is not tackled in depth or anything. This story feels more like the writers just wanted to experiment with writing what it feels like to get high.
Metaphor
Metaphor follows Leo and Flynn about 6 months before the events of Echo, in September of 2014. We aren’t following either of their perspectives, and this is instead written in the third person, which I think means we’re playing as Sam disembodied from Chase in this instance.35 Flynn is packing boxes into a truck and goes for a break where we find out he likes to eat cigarettes. Leo approaches and they flirt briefly before the reunion in the events of Echo are brought up. Flynn warns Leo that things might not be the same when the reunion happens and they go over their own terms for a short while; given that they’ve both gotten freaky with each other since Chase left, they discuss how to handle that by the time of the reunion and settle on just being good friends. It ends very abruptly.
This one is good. There’s a suggestion that Flynn and Leo did a little bit more than just fuck like Leo said they did during the speech on Flynn’s Route at Chase’s old house, which I didn’t think that deeply into at the time. Flynn is also uncharacteristically happy around Leo in this story and you’re left wondering what Leo actually means to Flynn at the end as he’s almost disappointed in the result. As with most of these stories that explore dynamics though, this sort of thing is kept ambiguous. I honestly wonder if it’s a little bit of fanfic bait.
Trip
Trip follows Carl’s car accident in October of 2014. We start in Jeremy’s caravan and he has given us Lucy to try. As Carl grows more anxious about what he’s injecting, Jeremy puts on an old cartoon that’s gone through years of generation loss and as Carl starts to feel the effects of it, he feels taunted by the cartoon. He escapes the caravan and finds himself having a panic attack as he tries and fails to unlock his phone. He gets in his car and tries to get it to navigate him home, which he has set at Pueblo University. Suddenly, he starts seeing Chase in the car with him following something jumping over his car which is implied to be the Socket Man. Suddenly, his sat-nav is taking him to the correct home and on his way there he crashes into the lamppost. He then runs all the way home, remembers the creature is still out there and passes out thinking he’s killed Chase.
Jeremy, in this scene, is uncharacteristically quite a good guy; despite the fact he’s giving him drugs, everything he does to prepare Carl or unsuccessfully cool his nerves seems like he’s genuinely trying to help even if it doesn’t work, which does all dissipate when he doesn’t try to help him out when he leaves, exposing he’s cares a lot less when he can’t see the problem. The Chase in the car feels like it’s supposed to be the Tulpa Chase, which could mean a few things; either that Leo’s Tulpa Chase got so out of hand that others could manifest him, or that both he and Carl’s willpower combined created this false Chase. What this really speaks to though is the dependence on Chase that we know Carl to have after reading through his route.
And everyone else, for that matter. Despite Leo being the group leader, a lot of these Side stories touch on Chase a lot. It’s heavily implied Jenna has a crush on Chase several times and that brings me back to the end of Jenna’s Route where she says that the reason she’d been so mean to Leo in the past was because she was jealous growing up that they had experiences that she was not afforded. I think now that that experience was actually those shared with Chase. TJ is implied to have this crush too, and if Carl is also creating a Tulpa of him, that speaks to things a lot too. Which, in turn, may speak to Chase’s manipulation, if we want to draw a more sinister interpretation.
Oh right, there’s another side story.
Benefits
Benefits is an NSFW spin-off visual novel intended to be the fifth side-story which follows Flynn at an unspecified time. Some commenters on the novel's Itch page claim it takes place after the events of Echo, but as far as I can tell it takes place after the cheating prank shown in Phone, thanks to mention in this story of “what happened with Chase and Leo.”
Okay, now the synopsis; Benefits starts with Flynn getting raw-dogged in his bed by a hunky canid called Ryan who is really good in bed… y’know, one day I would love this essay to be a YouTube video so I should really tone this down…
He’d met this guy the previous night and, uncharacteristic of Flynn, he decides to get his phone number for a second hook-up the week after. After they get frisky, Carl calls him asking him to come over and he goes. They have a quick conversation about where Carl’s life is going which is upsetting for Carl who then storms off to his deck. Flynn feels a little guilty and follows him to where he went. They sit and speak for a moment, Carl admitting Flynn was right, and then they stare at each other for a while… Carl puts a stop to that by joking about how gay it is and they go back inside to play a fighting game and get buzzed. Flynn starts to notice that Carl is getting a little handsy and Carl sheepishly brings up the subject of experimentation, coming to the conclusion that if he ever wanted to test the waters, he would do it with Flynn. And so they 69 and Flynn goes on to cancel the next meetup with Ryan.
This is meant to display the dynamic between Carl and Flynn following how they were written in Carl’s Route; I didn’t call too much attention to it, but when we first arrive at Carl’s Mansion, Flynn and Carl have a bit of tension which is implied to be sexual. Even outside of that, it’s clear the two have a very close bond, to the extent that Carl is willing to defend Flynn on statements the rest of the room considers to be wrong and unjust. I like this story a lot, it’s a lot of fun.
Okay… now that I’ve finished every bit of story, let’s cover the story as a whole
The Full Thing - Preface
We’ll start by discussing the characters individually and then move on to talk about the actual horror element of the story. I then want to rank each side story and route and then promote an order in which someone should play each of the main 5 routes as I give my concluding thoughts.
The Full Thing - Characters
We’ll start by looking back at that character list from the very beginning of this review.
When I set up that list, I set myself a rule; no decimals and no breaking the meter.
Anyway, let me remind you what I wrote without the context and then fill in the gaps for you. We’ll start with the main 6:
On Chase, I said: The main guy is a journalism-student otter. When I read this, the voice and mannerisms I gave him in my head were basically the voice of Brian Griffin, weirdly enough; very normal male voice, he’s kinda just average when it comes to how he puts himself out there, but the character is largely found inside. 5/10
This rating comes from just how adaptable he is as a character. Let us remind ourselves at this moment that we are not playing Chase, we are simply a ghostly presence living in his brain, Sam, that he occasionally may be interrupted by if he takes too long to make up his mind, in which case, we give him a little whisper and he just follows suit. On some routes he has an easier time making decisions than others, which leads to matters like on TJ’s Route where he takes control through most of the route because his one goal is to make sure his secret is safe with TJ, or on Carl's Route where, despite him not fully understanding Carl's mentality, he seems to just know what to do. Conversely, on Flynn’s Route, the concepts of the things that Flynn wants to do seem foreign to Chase and he seems to rely on Sam’s voice to catch up with Flynn’s antics because he seems to be making better decisions than Chase is, and if that’s the case… Well, let’s just say I think Sam and I would be good friends.
That’s the easy way to demonstrate it, but something I mentioned earlier also explains my thoughts on Chase: his sense of justice around Sydney’s death is kinda ambiguous? I mentioned this in Leo’s Route, but it’s also largely true of Carl’s and Jenna’s; they may drop hints about Chase’s role in Sydney’s death, varying in subtlety throughout the route, but in some routes he is portrayed as being evil for it and in others treated like something unimportant to his character like it’s all just in the past. And I believe this is all down to the hysteria - in TJ’s Route, Chase is convinced to kill Flynn because Flynn now knows the truth about Sydney’s death and “Echo needs to have secrets”. He welcomes this takeover in this route. But when it comes to other routes, Echo seems to focus on other secrets it wants to keep; if you go for Carl’s bad ending, it’s the truth about the incident in the founding days of Echo. And so Sydney barely even crosses Chase's mind on Carl’s Route and when it does, Chase manages to navigate the core 6 past that tragedy in a way that doesn’t scream malice, but instead acceptance and guides the group to move on in good faith. Chase is a deeply complicated character and though he may passively accept the hysteria into his mind that might lead him to accepting he “just has to” do awful things to keep his secret safe, if his mind is left alone he seems to do a good job at tackling it. So we keep him at the middle point.
On Carl, I said he is “kinda like a spoiled rich kid ram who is facing the consequences of being a spoiled rich kid. His character profile is kinda gifted-kid energy, but also not? 9/10”.
“Gifted kid” isn’t exactly the right way to describe Carl, but I think the way he lives is not far off. He’s certainly not far off how that energy has affected myself anyway - reliant on the people he lives with and just waiting for the opportunity to catch him by, in Carl's case that would be Chase arriving at Echo. He’s relatable.
Carl’s growth arc is beautiful in his own route and that is almost unmatched to other characters. To be comparative for a moment, Flynn is by far my favourite character, but his arc in his route, and all the others for that matter, isn’t really one of growth, it’s one of him just kinda being on the right tracks to the truth until it eventually just gets him killed for being enlightened, or pushed aside because his behaviour is seen as too aggressive to be taken seriously. Leo experiences growth in his route, but we only see it 2 years after the story ends and it’s difficult to fully trust. TJ doesn’t grow at all because Chase holds him back and Jenna does grow by the end of her route by admitting she could have been a little less aggressive about Leo and Chase and that her decisions were driven by wanting things she wasn’t afforded as a child, but this growth is ultimately just accepting that she was wrong in certain acts and apologising for it, meanwhile Carl has an epiphany about his entire life which helps him to overcome the hysteria and have a complete change in attitude that we get to see the full impact of in the epilogue. The moral of his story is powerful and you can pinpoint all the events that caused him to get to this place. It’s beautifully handled. I just wish he was highlighted a bit more in other routes.
I said Flynn is “a lowkey neurodivergent clerk lizard. He’s kinda like the group's brute, but he’s socially awkward and his words come out with spines. He is also hot. 10/10”
Okay, he is clearly my favourite character. Flynn is pretty much everything I wish I was - confident, firm, flirtatious and living the homosexual lifestyle of my dreams… okay maybe TMI, but it’s true; I think he is an outstanding character who knows how to make the most out of living where he lives. As selfish as his attitude towards the events around Sydney's death are, I think he isn’t wrong to want to get some answers. This is of course backed by the reader's knowledge of the truth, but I don’t think he is without the right to say “hey listen, I still think we need to resolve this” because that is his ultimate goal with this. He also stands his ground when he is made uncomfortable and he isn’t scared to put up boundaries where they belong - that’s how I came to understand his aggression at the lake; he wasn’t ruining the groups vibe just for the self-gratification like Jenna seems to imply about it, he was doing it because he felt his discomfort was not being listened to. He got a little too personal about it, but he felt personally ignored. That doesn’t justify it of course, but I think the group should be trying to understand Flynn on a deeper level instead of simply rejecting him on these things because they dared hurt their poor adult man friend TJ.
Flynn is always right, I fear. He’s a little blunt, but once you understand the way that he is, it softens the blow a lot and I really adore that in the way he was written, hence why when on his route he tries talking to TJ but is met with resistance from Jenna I found myself opposing her actions; Flynn means well. We meet people just like that everyday, but our inner drive to see ourselves as the protagonists gets in the way of seeing them as a real person, and that’s what I think caused my initial reaction to him at the lake and explains why my opinion changed so quickly; he was a stranger to us, the reader, when we first met him, but I saw one thing that might suggest he was right all along and fell down the Flynn rabbit hole head first. 10/10. Outstandingly written.
I said Jenna “is a psych-student fennec fox. She’s very logical, but also values emotion in a weird way. You’d probably expect that out of a psychology student actually. 7/10”
Jenna is generally someone who can see nuance, but we can see where her biases take over. In some cases this aides her; being biased against manipulation is a good thing, and so is having a bias against assault, but being biased against Flynn on the foundation it’s typical for him to have what she perceives as an overreaction to certain things is not a good bias to have. And that’s okay; she’s not villainized for this, it’s just treated as the difference in opinion it is. She doesn’t think the lake incident warrants further discussion and Flynn is an active opponent to this. And for a large amount of a few routes, she let’s that dominate the way she behaves and it leads to some unjust outbursts back at Flynn, but in getting to know Jenna we recognise that she means well too and is only defending TJ knowing that perhaps Flynn isn’t doing the best job of reading TJ’s reaction, which she could easily interpret as malice given what happened, but it’s easy to reject that when we don’t consider that she hasn’t seen what we’ve seen of Flynn. Still though, her strong convictions can lead her astray at times, and this is such an example. She’s not someone I’d like to get into an argument with and I feel like if we knew each other and got into any disagreements, they’d go unresolved a lot.
Jenna’s also very good at what she’s studying. Though in her route we find her pushing her project to the side for the sake of helping to find Carl, we do see many instances of her catching on to what she’s learnt and using it to help explain why Chase feels a certain way about certain things. We see a lot about her relationship with Chase on these routes, proving just how trustworthy she is as a character and it’s implied that she’d make a much better group leader than Leo.
On TJ, I said he “is a student lynx in some kind of sports field - I forget the exact details, but I know he has good knowledge on fitness to a holistic level. He’s very sensitive and spiritually Christian. 7/10”
TJ is a little bit of a heart breaking character in that he’s always being manipulated. Whether it's doing some garden work for the local server, or doing something as drastic as helping to cover-up a murder, you can’t help but feel bad for TJ. On top of all that, his friends don’t seem to treat him like he’s an adult, opting to protect him from something even as simple as coarse language? It feels like his growth is continuously stunted by the cast and it makes for an interesting character, but also a frustrating one in that we can’t really do anything to help him. The only person who isn’t giving in to this trend is Flynn, who for what it’s made out to be, is easily the one making the best effort to help TJ, in my opinion, even if it’s not comfortable. And it works out; in the scene where TJ is actually required to acknowledge it and starts to feel the guilt of just letting it sit in the air, he actually puts his foot forward and experiences the growth of being able to break free of Chase's chokehold. Granted, he makes it vague to avail himself of some of the responsibility of snitching, but he still managed to do it.
The rest of TJ’s personality is just plain cute though. He’s shy about showing off anything he has going for himself, such as in the moments where he brushes off his sports medicine knowledge and gets embarrassed when Chase points out he’s good at it, and he also probably has the most realistic reaction to the hysteria; just kinda has a panic attack, gets a little nippy and literally pisses himself. I know that his innocent personality largely comes from wanting to repent for witnessing what he did, but I do wonder if his youthfulness is also from some kind of regression; he watched a close friend kill another friend mercilessly and was gaslight. Of the whole cast, TJ is probably the one most affected by what happened to Sydney and he’s being successfully held back from growing past it. Either way, it’s hard for me not to adore TJ. I think he is brilliant.
And Leo. I said he “is a mechanic wolf. He’s heavy-handed, sensitive, protective and strong. 1/10”. I later used a similar description for Kudzu, but gave him a 10/10 which I thought would be a funny little touch.
Anyway, Leo can go fuck himself. He is so awful that I don’t even fully trust the growth that he does end up having 2 years after his route closes and we revisit him with best boy Kudzu. What makes it worse is then going into Jenna’s Route right after that and being sexually assaulted by him and then going into that caravan and finding out he probably took advantage of a 13 year old while he was 17, and that said 13 year old may have even filmed it and he didn’t at any point think any of that was wrong? All of which probably happened a fifth of a day before Chase initially started dating him… The writers really designed a hunky furry bait wolf and then asked the question “how do we make this guy the worst person you know?”
When I say Leo is sensitive, protective and strong, I mean he is egotistical, possessive and forceful. I do not care how severely you experience the grief of the end of a relationship, this shit is too much. The writers actively foil any sense of trust you could have had in this guy. The one moment of growth I suspect exists is that speech on Flynn’s Route, which he later uses on Jenna's Route also, but even with that, how can we be expected to trust it after all that he has done?
While we’re making the comparison, I described Kudzu as “laid-back, sensitive, protective and strong. 10/10”
Okay, in this instance, I’m not choosing the words carefully; those are real words that you can actually use to describe Kudzu. Take Leo and invert his reasoning to be more positive and you get Kudzu - Kudzu is a short stack, slim-fit procyonid, who is sensitive in the sense of having a delicate sense of others, protective in the sense that he is self-less and strong in the sense that he is emotionally tough and resilient. He is basically the perfect man, really, if you can find anything about him that is worth complaining about you are simply wrong. He’s the sort of character that we actually never really see go through growth, but it’s mainly because most of his growth has already happened before we meet him, and that’s kinda what supportive cast should be, unlike characters like Julian and Raven where we don’t really see much evidence of growth based on what they talk about in their pasts.
I said Raven is “jolly and always in high spirits. 4/10”. I said Julian is “laid back and faithful and kind of a people pleaser. 4/10”. I dub these characters the least impressive of the side-characters mainly because I feel like they don’t add as much relevance to the stories. Julian seems to mainly exist to display what kind of behaviour makes Chase feel his secret is unprotected; here’s this strange man who he doesn’t recognise that seems to get on better with TJ than he does. In Chase's eyes, that’s a threat, and as pleasant a character he is, his existence seemingly largely being a way for Chase to be threatened takes away a lot for me and there could have been some more humanising in there. And as for Raven, I almost feel like he only exists as an extra pair of hands in Carl’s Route. Every notable event that he’s involved in is kinda just “oh nooo help me… oh my god you helped me” and then he also helps us to break up the fights between Carl and Jenna. Again, pleasant characters, but I feel like I came out of these two routes not knowing anything about Julian and Raven besides some basic character traits like Raven is kinda flamboyant and Julian is religious.
Okay, let’s tackle Sydney next. I called him “a temperamental, anxious otter… from a strict and unfair childhood home. 7/10”
He may not show up too often, but man what a poor kid. Poor guy has an abusive household, a dad who ran over a demon which then took over his soul, his dad then descended to madness and made Sydney watch his suicide which then got Syd’s own soul taken over by the ghost in his dad. He has a great friend, Flynn, but all of his other friends, and his friends parents for that matter, seem to just hate him and then one of the friends goes and fucking kills him. It is brutal what they do to this kid, but such is the way of Echo. I think his character is beautifully written; he’s not malicious and evil, he’s traumatised and has had literally nobody to teach him wrong. He’s not like Chase where he just kills someone because he identifies them as a serious threat, he is truly a child who hasn’t had the space to learn right from wrong.
I called Brian “a sadistic bear”, which does ignore a good amount of his character in fairness, but I don’t like thinking about him.
I see a story of a man who may be regressed and also has a hellish upbringing and probably a high level of self-loathing and internalised homophobia. I think the way he handles it is questionable in parts though, because he sometimes gives vibes of certain tropes about disabilities that I don’t like. Because he’s clearly not neurotypical at all, in fact I would say he’s kind of like Of Mice and Men’s Lenny, except Lenny was not doing that with intent and Brian fully does it with intent because he actually likes to see people suffer. But Brian is none of those things and I just find it leaves a sour taste in my mouth; it’s kinda a trope I'm tired of.
I said “Janice is a server coyote. She’s quite bubbly and clearly knows what she wants and expects. 4/10”.
Janice is just kinda annoying. I think in TJ’s Route she’s used in a similar way that Julian is; she’s a device used to show off a trait in another character, like how Julian was used to show how Chase can be made to feel unsafe with his secret and draw out more of that aggressive and possessive side in him, Janice feels like she’s in TJ’s Route to show how likely TJ is to be manipulated by having his heartstrings tugged on. Outside of this purpose in TJ’s Route, I don’t really feel like she does anything; she gets angry with Leo and Chase on Leo’s Route and then gets shot, sometimes she just feels like she’s there because there has to be a someone who owns the diner and then she has that moment where she’s acting strange on the side of the road, which feels mostly like a hint that the story is preparing to nosedive. I think my point is Janice serves her purpose fine, it's just not too interesting to me.
On Daxton I said “he makes a lot of references to Adastra. He’s a bit of a hermit. 7/10”
Daxton as a character is entertaining. I think the concept of a mega nerd who really loves his Sci-Fi but is kind of embarrassed about nerdy social gatherings and overusing related terminology is kinda refreshing; so often in stories the geeky characters are hugely stereotypical, they’re not at all sheepish about interjecting references to the show they watch to everything they say and the characters are always socially awkward, but it’s as if they just forget to code-switch or anything similar. I find Daxton a lot more realistic; a lot of geeks and nerds are socially anxious enough that they would struggle to pull all that stuff out in real life lest they be perceived as a nerd and be bullied for it. And, like I said on Carl, I find Daxton’s hermit-ness quite relatable and I also quite like the dynamic between Daxton and Flynn where they just kind of respect each other's space. Daxton could be argued, in some ways, as a device to add to Flynn’s credibility in a similar way that Janice, Julian and Raven were and it becomes clear to me that this is what a lot of side-characters are here for, but I think Daxton and Kudzu have just that little bit extra where their characters have more depth. I mentioned how Kudzu’s growth has already happened and that’s something that we get to hear about, but I think with Daxton we can see that he is in the midst of growth during this story in the sense that we get to help him be a little more confident during Flynn’s story, and I really like that.
Of the characters' relatives, I said “Jeremy is a drug dealing fennec fox. He is grouchy and menacing. 3/10” and “Mayor Moore is a mayor (obviously) and also a lizard. She is a strong character. 6/10”.
I actually wanted to see more of the characters’ families. When we went to Chase’s old house on Flynn’s Route, I had misunderstood what that meant and weirdly took it that we, Leo, Jenna and TJ were actually gonna go to see Chase’s parents, which I was excited about, but of course it never happened. Mayor Moore and Jeremy are the only two family members we get to properly see and they’re a little bit underwhelming.
I just left Mayor Moore off at “she’s a strong character” because that’s kinda just what she is. She’s sharp and knows where she stands, but also very clearly wants to talk to people who are important to her, and if you’re not already important to her, she will try to make you important to her, and I mean that in a good way, to be clear. Jeremy, though, is just kinda a brute and a liar. He’s doing the bidding of the story’s worst character and doesn’t seem to even really regret it, so there is that, but I think his core function is also to show why Jenna doesn’t talk to her family anymore and he’s also later brought up to show Jenna’s convictions.
While we’re on Jeremy’s crew, I said Micha is “witty, lowkey and emotional. 10/10”
Micha is probably the funniest character in the whole visual novel. For much of the story, he’s a bit of a coward, in fact the first time we even see him he’s forcing a deeper voice so he can sound more intimidating and qualified among his drug dealer friends, but it’s later when he confesses to Chase that it becomes clear he was only such a coward in the first place because he didn’t actually stand by what they were doing, at least outside of the drug taking and dealing probably, and just didn’t want to be questioned as not to lose his plug or something. Micha is clearly a smart character and his brain works quite fast. We can see this not just from his wit in the epilogue, but also through the entire sequence in the caravan, where he’s quick to flap his wings to avoid dealing with Brian’s torture, he seems to just quickly figure out how to optimally untie Chase and Leo’s thighs from each other. I think he is a character with as troubled a past as the rest of the group, but unlike most of his colleagues, he actually takes opportunities to get out of it and experience growth and be actually bring him along with us, seeing some cool improvement by the end of the story.
On a similar note, I said “Clint is a scared lemur and by no means a coward, he’s quite brave. 7/10”
Clint and Micha both experience a similar path, but with Clint, the way it pans out is dependent on which route you chose, and what seems to be the splitting point for which path he takes, in my eyes, is the first impression because it’s clearly not on your affinities; despite Leo’s Route being the one where you pair up with his arch nemesis, it is also the route where he actively protects us and I think that's down to the fact that we initially meet him at the diner where we’re ultimately doing nothing wrong besides sitting next to Leo. Contrast that with Jenna’s Route and you first see him in the midst of us interrogating his crew which probably gives him the impression we are an enemy to his group, which means he doesn’t go down this path of being a good, or at least a better, guy. With Clint, his path doesn’t feel like he actually grows, more so like we get to see the start of some growth when we see him on the train at the end of Leo’s Route, because for the rest of Leo’s Route, and during Jenna’s Route especially, it feels like he’s just doing his normal thing of being subservient.
I said “Heather is a drug dealer's assistant cat. She is skittish, bubbly and distraught. 6/10”.
I mentioned this at the end of my review on Jenna’s Route, but she’s a character you can’t help but feel sorry for rather than just brush her off as evil. When It comes to the hysteria events, a lot of the time it feels like the characters were just written as “overcome with evil” or something where they’re just baselessly attacking anything they look at - I think back to TJ attacking Jenna on Carl’s Route. With Heather it feels less like she’s attacking things aimlessly and more like she’s trying to defend herself. Granted, she’s defending herself from the good guys, but it comes off more like she’s under extreme stress and has just lost her train of thought hard enough that she can’t even sense right from wrong anymore. And of course, by the end of Jenna’s Route we’re able to win her back down in a really nice moment. I think she's great.
Lastly, I said “Duke is an authority figure weasel. He is suspicious (the emotion, not the adjective), and also a druggard. 5/10”
Duke is a character where I roll my eyes every time he is on screen, but if I’m to judge him as a character, he does exactly what he’s meant to do and he is really engaging in that even after I had already established Duke was probably right, or at least justified, in a lot of beliefs, I still managed to conjure up the emotions that the characters experienced in his presence - his appearance in Carl’s Route was brief and we didn’t even actually talk to him, but the thought we might have to left me feeling annoyed at the possibility. He’s cold, but he’s got the best intentions, and his character is well-written.
Overall these characters are great and I tended to have strong opinions of them. There’s a clear inconsistency in the treatment of side characters. I tried looking into why this might be, to see if there was a growing pains stage where they weren’t as sure what they wanted out of a character, which turned out to be untrue according to my perception of what that would mean, and I also considered looking into whether it was based on who wrote it, which was also an inconsistent measure, so my understanding now is that it’s all instead down to how much they even needed a character; Carl’s Route is all about the relationship between John Begay and James Hendricks, and the only characters needed to support that narrative are Jenna and Carl, thus all we needed was an extra pair of hands, Raven. This s not really a bad thing.
To bring it back to the characters in the core 6, I’d rank them by having Leo sit right at the bottom. Sadly, as fun a protagonist as he is, Chase has to come next, followed by TJ, Jenna, Carl and then Flynn at the number 1 spot. This ordering won’t come as a surprise at this point, but this ranking is based on likeability. Judging it off of writing, I’m actually willing to change it around a little, such that Flynn and Carl are still at the top, followed by Leo, Chase, TJ and then Jenna. Why?
Biases are at play with Carl and Flynn, both being some of my favourite characters in this visual novel. Carl does nothing but bring out the good side in so many people and it’s probably unintentional but the energy is brilliant. Flynn holds my number one spot for being the most personally relatable to me. Leo, as big a twat he is, is near perfectly written purely because that’s what they intended; he is probably the character I see most people talking about and it’s not really a surprise when you just look at the man, but you of course then have to question what other reason there might be besides that; I doubt those lusting after him would actually want anything to do with him. Simply, he is a memorable character for how his story turned out, and the exact goal that they wanted out of Leo was achieved; he’s a childhood memory gone horribly wrong and the story makes no errors at showing it. Chase came next for being the most confusing character that makes the most sense. You have this inner conflict while reading because he is no doubt a charming character, but he did also kinda murder a boy. TJ and Jenna are the lowest simply because their character arcs don’t feel as drastic. TJ doesn’t seem to have a full arc in most situations and Jenna feels like she’s already had her arc for a lot of this. We do still get to see a part of that when she runs away from Echo in her Side Story, but it feels like her role is more about helping others achieve their arcs, which is great for a side character, but this is a main character we’re talking about.
The Full Thing: The Horror and Mystery Elements
The actual horror elements of this are really diverse and it’s worth exploring this. We’ve got possession, uncanny, mass hysteria, sleep-paralysis demons, transformation sequences, body horror, hallucinations… so many different ways of expressing horror and enshrouding this world with history.
The big one is obviously mass hysteria; it’s what the town goes through once per generation or two. This aspect is core to the whole story and we wouldn't be reading Echo without it.
I think we got just about everything we could have wanted out of the hysteria incidents while also leaving out enough that it’s all still mysterious and offers variations in interpretation. We see endings where the hysteria doesn’t repeat and we see endings where it does. We get to both watch the hysteria and experience it. We learn some of the history of it, but it is still left confusing and some parts of the story are still left out. Because of that small fact, I need to do some recounting and theorising for a second.
TJ’s Route is a strange case where I can’t recall the hysteria in this route. It was my first route, so I said none of it in my initial review of it, but looking back on it and subsequently speeding through the last 4 days of it, the signs of hysteria don’t really fall on anyone except for Chase; he has that freakout in the mirror and he gets irrational in his feelings towards TJ and Julian, but TJ, Julian, Leo, Jenna, Carl, the person now living in Sydney’s old house and Flynn all seem perfectly fine, as does the rest of the town on the weekend, which is when the hysteria normally happens. But the hysteria does still seem to happen in the epilogue set in the future when they go to take photos of the lake, so the hysteria was either postponed or I am misreading something, and if the hysteria was postponed, something must have caused it - perhaps a successful attempt at covering up the truth (i.e. Chase killing Flynn and traumatising TJ further into submission) or maybe it was something else like the truth briefly being uncovered which made the hysteria only focus on Chase until he resealed the secret for it to wreak havoc later, or maybe it was waiting for TJ to experience growth.
Flynn’s Route is another that allows us to look into the future and see Devon and Cameron witness Flynn’s ghost. On this route the hysteria already happens in the actual story, so this confuses things, but I think the answer to this is that the level the of hysteria we’re working with is dependent on how long ago it was since a major disaster happens; it’s impossible to list all of the bad things that happen, but take for examples Duke being killed on the road, the random citizen that gets pulled up at the town meeting in Flynn’s Route, any instance where Brian dies, any instance where Flynn dies, Heather killing her dad, et cetera… perhaps large-scale tragedies set the hysteria back further than small-scale ones, which may help explain why TJ’s Route leads to a hysteria happening a mere five years later instead of a whole generation, given that this is one of the only tragic events to happen on this route.
Leo’s Route is remarkably similar to Flynn’s Route, but despite the fact that the cataclysm on this route is much lesser, when we go to the future in this route, we don’t see any signs of hysteria even being possible given how many people moved out of Echo after the hysteria, which could either be that the writers simply wanted a more wholesome ending for this one and the hysteria was prevented permanently, or the time travel simply doesn’t take us far enough into the future to let us see the hysteria start to take root again. This is also an exception to the rule where you cannot escape the hysteria even by vehicle as we escape via train, but I think since you can’t really control where a train is going to move like you can a car and Flynn as Socket Man probably doesn’t want to cause his own death, the logic likely applies differently.
Jenna’s Route doesn’t give us a look at the future, but either way, in the bad ending Echo is flooded and everyone is killed, so the hysteria probably couldn’t possibly occur again, and in the good ending, we don’t really get to learn anything about the nature of the hysteria because it’s a fairly normal ending for the hysteria, in which several tragedies occur and the hysteria is able to come to a stop and may or may not reprise in the future.
And in Carl’s Route, we get to see that you can shake yourself out of the hysteria by simply looking at whatever situation you’ve been deluded to appear to be in and lining it all up with whatever location in Echo you are truly at. That or you get stabbed by a hysterical fox lady and the shock of sudden death draws you out of it briefly as you take your last breath. Other Route’s, like Leo’s, allow you to do this by calming down the victims of the hysteria and lulling them away from their trances… thinking about that is actually reminding me that we wake Carl from the hysteria when he’s in his parents bedroom, which is a neat little route cross-over there… But what’s more, Carl’s Route allows us to see into the mind of a victim and see what the hysteria actually does to produce its chaos; it tricks you into thinking you’re in a situation that doesn’t exist which makes you think you are something you’re not or just provokes you to violence. We get to see the future in this route, and we’re told that TJ, Leo and Flynn were not too happy in this ending, but other than that, we don’t get to see anything new about the nature of the hysterias' future because this future sequence takes place at Pueblo University.
All of this ambiguity around the matter leaves for a multitude of fan theories to be produced and I think Echo does this right. It gives you heaps of information to work with and has a fully coherent story and timeline of events even down to telling you when different notable events happen. It sets up puzzles that you are able to figure out just by thinking about it and it doesn’t ever just abandon a puzzle or forget to provide you with enough information to find a solution. There may not be one single solution that fits, but at least you can come to many conclusions and not find a flaw in your method; if people want to debate which ending is right, I don’t feel you’re going to be left screaming at each other because your “out-there” theory is too outlandish unless you actively ignore evidence and claim that the hysteria was caused by some resonating delusion cylinders you can hear from the mines, or that TJ is actually the crying hum of Echo because the sky turns a deep red when the hum is heard and TJ is wearing a red jumper… What do you mean that feels targeted?
My point is, the hysteria being vague only makes the story more engaging because you find yourself imprinting your image on it and your perception of what the hysteria is will not actually affect what we know is true of the cast’s story; the hysteria is almost like its own story that not only sits on a plane above our story, but also spans across all of history, separating it from they story we follow, of the core 6 and maybe some hints of Sam’s story. The only thing I think there is no sign of is where the hysteria came from, though it could just be that it comes from the incident in the mines.
So what about the other horror elements? Most of these do actually get answers, which is good - we don’t need too many instances of technically unexplainable confusion. It could be that hysteria is the only mystery or horror that doesn’t get answered, but the other stuff is simply areas of confusion for me personally. This is where I will now list those things and allow you to suggest places I might find the answers to these things.
The Hum seems correlated with the hysteria, but it’s inconsistent in where it’s felt and who is feeling it; when it happens to Chase, for instance, people just stare at him like he’s a weirdo and start to panic over his safety, especially if he experiences it in the middle of water. We know that Heather, Clint, Jeremy and Micha all experience the hum because they tell us so on several occasions and imply that it killed their old friend Keith. Flynn sees the hum as he enters the false Smoke Room and it seems this is the first time he experiences this. The question then is what actually is the hum? I think it’s the voice of the hysteria riling people up as it prepares to feed itself off of terrible events, but I don’t actually understand what it’s about.
I think it’s Sam who is presenting Chase with hallucinations, and he probably also gave said hallucinations to both Sydney and his father when they both died, and he is also probably responsible for why Flynn can suddenly see the Socket Man when we switch to his perspective and get to Sunday, but why did Sam get the ability to haunt his murderer? Does everyone who gets murdered gain this ability? And what actually is Sam’s motive in general - what does he feel about the people he has inhabited, why does he say such weird things to them and why does he transform Flynn’s burnt flesh into the Socket Man? We know that Sam worked in the ol’ timey original version of The Smoke Room somewhere around a hundred years ago, so perhaps I will find some of my answers when I go on to read that, but as of right now, I don’t know.
That’s about all I have questions on right now, so what about things that we do have answers on.
Tulpa Chase fits beautifully as an explanation for why Leo is so gross in this and why he’s not the only one who seems to “hallucinate” this version of Chase. Something I didn’t call too much attention to but is sitting in my mind now is that Chase did also see it across other routes in hallucinations; in the scene where we first wake up in Brian's caravan, we can see Chase’s reflection in the mirror on the ceiling with no beard, just like the Tulpa Chase has. Tulpa Chase, as we establish, is based on the version of Chase Leo knew before he left Echo, because that’s the version of Chase he was last in love with, and he is a manifestation not only of Leo’s grief over the loss of a relationship, but also of his horrific views on what his boyfriend “should be”. The Chase at 21 years old is different from the Chase at 18 which Leo broke off with, and so, when Chase has changed, that is what gives us the speech he presents at the abandoned childhood home and at the haunted caravan, alongside his manipulations throughout the route which become more extreme following the injury Chase sustains in the bad ending for Leo’s Route.
The Tulpa aspect of the story then might feel like it’s leading to the Socket Man if you play Leo and Jenna’s Route without looking at Flynn’s Route, but they of course aren’t connected; Jenna might see the Socket Man whenever she feels deeply unsafe, but the Socket Man then goes on to be explained, in Flynn’s Route, as a malformation of Flynn’s burned remains which is inhabited by the spirits of Flynn and Sam and is able to not only time travel, but also witness every possible reality. I tried looking for potential origins of the Socket Man in real world cultures for answers, knowing the Tulpa is named after a creature from Tibetan Buddhism, but the Wiki does not actually make observations like this - indulge in some of my failures to research this for a moment.
It references that Chase’s Tulpa is called a “tulpa” (though it actually refers to it as “The Embrace”), but it does not actually say that Tulpa name has this cultural link. When I tried to look into if Socket Man has a basis in real cultures, I first tried looking based on the appearance and it gave me the Spanish Coco, The North American Chupacabra and the English Hob, none of which match the description of its actions, nor really its appearance (though the Coco does have the three holes in its face which later gave us the name of the coconut). I looked into mythological beings known to protect children, but I found two beings, the Qallupilluit, which was said to steal children in the name of protecting them from danger, and the European Changeling, said to be a substitute of a kidnapped person put in place by a malicious spirit that stole them, none of which match. Other searches got me Vampires, the Wendigo, Sirens, Typhon, Taniwha, Erenyes and Nemesis, but nothing I found would match Socket Man. I last looked at myths around the gila monster, Flynn’s species, for which I got results for Greek myths about the species, but those myths were about how it was believed to have lethal breath and I did not find clear evidence the Socket Man is related to these myths. Chances are it’s a being of their own creation, but if anyone knows possible other ties, please do inform me.
Anyway, back to reviewing the Socket Man; its story is extremely confusing and it took me hours of indulging in this story to get my head around it. I initially praised this, but I was left feeling like it could have been expressed a bit better by the end of the story. You could read every route and figure out parts of what it all means if you spend enough time on it, but I think how long it takes to wrap your head around Flynn and Sam being the forces behind the Socket Man who can also travel across all of time and space and every universe and can also ruthlessly attack people and wants to protect our friendship group, but is also willing to throw our cars into Lake Emma and nearly have us drown is a little far-fetched and overly confusing to slot into a story that already has a very vague element as a foundation.
Outside of themes, what horror tropes are used and how effective are they?
Body horror is used a few times either in combination with gore or transformation; Flynn’s burning body transmogrifying into an unrecognisable stick figure, Chase’s legs catching under the escape train in Leo’s Route and Brian stitching Chase and Leo’s thighs together are the moments that come to mind, where the transformation into the Socket Man is expressed with much less graphic language and the moments with Brian and the train are intensely descriptive. It’s shown once in artwork, which I won’t be sharing here, but it’s during a moment in Flynn’s Route during a town meeting where they pull in a dead body.
The gorey elements are intense and I found myself unable to read some of it, so that shows how effective it is at least. I’d say this is a drawback to my personal experience; when I read about symptoms of things your body experiences, I can actually feel it, so having my thighs in a screaming pain while I read about Chase and Leo’s thighs being stitched together is not ideal. However, I am also someone who would have written that into a story that way anyway because I find huge value in writing in such a way that the reader might be able to feel it; it’s what I aim for when I write things for myself, though I’m generally going for a more pleasing experience. Point is, I think this descriptiveness is good writing and I do applaud it, as much as I struggled with reading it peacefully.
The uncanny is a little bit disjointed in its writing. The actual best element of this is when we first meet the Tulpa Chase, which is not a part that you read, but watch; they have the Tulpa’s sprite walk unnaturally into frame, which is a huge switch up from the fact that the sprites are usually flat and unmoving. The descriptions of it don't quite match though. The moment where we find Janice in the road is meant to be an uncanny valley, to my understanding, but the description of her smile in these moments instead gave me the image of Mr. Beast, so perhaps he’s just desensitised me.
The hallucination and sleep paralysis scenes were also a little bit less effective to me and I couldn’t really sink into what it feels like. A lot of the scenes where we get out of sleep paralysis don’t always feel detailed enough that I actually understand what it would feel like to have my body locked in place and out of my control while I wait for its effects to fully subside. Generally, I think the writers’ strength in the area of showing how things feel was in pain, deep sadness, dread and any of the strong, positive emotions, but the feelings of being scared or nauseous fell a little flat in comparison, as did the drug’s sequences in the side stories, which was better in the visuals than the descriptions which instead left me feeling like an outsider rather than someone within the perspective it was actually written in, Carl’s or Chase’s.
The Full Thing - Music
Let’s now cover what is arguably one of my fields; the music. Few people know it about me because my connection with music is very personal to me and I don’t like talking about it with people because it’s that deep, but I get very attached to my thoughts on music so here we go lol.
Now, it’s worth mentioning that some of this music is not made for Echo specifically, but was instead sourced from an array of places. This includes the theme song, which is a piece by absolute legend Kevin Macleod called Pepper’s Theme, which composer Abyuse then went on to adapt for a Dark Version which I last found used in the bad ending of Carl’s Route. Pepper’s Theme as used for the games title screen is really good at capturing the energy. It’s a C Major song at a slow pace of 76 beats per minute and takes a compound meter time. It starts later on in the piece during the second phrase where it introduces chords and a guitar, and loops through this and the third section in which it goes up an octave and is slightly deconstructed from the previous form. The sound is sweet and somewhat romantic, yet sombre and delicate, capturing a very personal sadness that I imagine would be the soundtrack to Chase’s thoughts about Echo before arriving in 2015. In the Dark Version of the Theme Song, they lower the volume of the melody and put a lot of reverb on it. They open the theme with a deep, low hum and continue to apply a deep hum over the whole track, giving it a harsher and much more unsettling tone, sucking out any semblance of romance the piece once had and replacing it with the sense of loss.
This isn’t a rare tactic, but it works every time; introducing a theme early on for you to get used to and then changing it up near the end for a new and more emotional effect. The effect is pulled off successfully.
That's not the first thing you hear though; the first notes in Echo comes from a short opening screen and is a very short 15 second piece called Emo. It sounds like it’s cut off though, which could have been disguised a little bit better. It’s a loud opening and doesn’t do a lot to set the tone.
I’d like to note briefly that an online source for where all the music came from and where it was used would be really nice; I found a YouTube playlist for the Echo soundtrack which helped me find the names of the music I was looking for, but it attributes all the music just to Echo and doesn’t properly credit any of the actual creatives behind them. Kevin Macleod produces royalty free music not inherently affiliated with Echo and the piece we just talked about is from Storyblocks, previously known as Audioblocks, to which these pieces are accredited. The only true source I have for this is Echo’s credits, but it’s inconvenient to have to watch through the credits over and over until the music section, especially when the credits is not given a dedicated selection on the title screen. Through the means you find the gallery and side stories, you can find a list of music tracks and ambient sound, but it only lists them by name and does not state who made it, which I personally find a little bit shit.
Anyway…
When your Arms Were Around Me, composed by Abyuse, is used in a few places, but the most notable is Leo’s Route as you escape Echo. This piece is absolutely perfect and I have absolutely no notes for improvement on it; it’s in G Major and takes a vivace tempo, but when I first played that ending, it felt slower than it was, and though it’s in a major key, it doesn’t at all sound like it given a major key’s reputation. This music is heart breaking and sits beautifully in the moment, giving off the image of Chase’s shoulders dropping and knees buckling as he wails out of the train car at Echo. This image is vivid in my brain and it’s really difficult for me to do that in my mind, so you know they’ve done well. Past the small intro, the looping part of the melody starts on the F#, giving the effect of the breath escaping one's lungs as they’re hit with another sudden sad realisation. Other places this gets used is during Flynn’s credits and Jenna’s path-split to either ending, both of which feel equally suitable, proving that the team knows how to repeat instances of music without it feeling repetitive or overdone.
In bad endings a piece called Death is played. This isn’t so much a song as a looping sound effect, that resembles the noise of a whole stadium of people being exorcised; a loud and gasping breath in and a heavy gasping breath out. Ringing in the back of this sound is a quiet siren-like sound singing alarm bells. I couldn’t find where this sound came from, but where it was placed is perfect.
Brian’s Theme speaks dread and mistake. What happens in any instances where we are kidnapped by Brian is never a mistake, but it certainly was not to plan and we have most definitely given up. The track is slow, but suddenly urgent, giving off the effect of someone who’s been struggling for a while and given up, but continues to find the instinct to take a few steps.
And I hate to bring it up again, but sourcing that tune was ridiculously difficult. The playlist I used called it Brian’s Theme and that wasn’t listed in the credits, so then I had to find a second playlist, which I found on Spotify, where I had to listen to the intro of every song until I found it; Track 19 entitled Lost and Found for Complete Rest and Peace by Doctor Pain Relief under his Calming Music collection. If this turns out to not be the correct source, please do tell me, because my god this was exhausting to find.
Jenna’s Theme, or Sandbox, is a piece by Hop-Skip & the Chewtoys that I could only find played when Chase and Jenna discuss potential feelings for each other in the lead up to their sex scene on Jenna’s bisexual route following the path-finding decisions. You might not immediately gather that this song is romantic just by listening to it, but what you do get is the sense of something old and familiar being brandished in a new light through its choice in instrumentation and use of the post-rock genre. When you realise this is a romantic piece, you find yourself hearing the songs drums louder, which function like the songs beating heart as our characters become overwhelmed with emotion. Other tracks by Hop-Skip & the Chewtoys like Book of Job and Who “We” Used to Be capture a similar energy in different ways.
Not all the music fits so nicely in though. Leo’s good ending makes the bizarre decision to suddenly include a song with a vocal take. Blurry, by Lilybug, is a good song and the lyrics are right on theme for what you just read, so I’d never say this song was a bad decision for this particular route, I just can’t find any other places where they added a vocal take to the music and it leads this song to be an outlier in this respect, making it feel just a touch out of place. The credits would be the place to use a vocal track, since we’re not liable to be distracted by the lyrics instead of reading the story, but at the same time, the decision to include lyrics in this ending may have felt more fitting if other endings or the opening screen also had lyrics; having one piece of music with lyrics amidst a whole soundtrack of purely instrumental work feels just a little bit strange.
Daze, from the Storyblocks sound library was used in sections during the hysterical delirium of Carl’s Route and gives local aquarium vibes rather than “we’re deluded into a place we’re not”. The energy of this section in Carl’s Route is overall more haunting than this tune would have you believe and throws off the vibes that the writing achieves every time it pops up. This piece is too happy go lucky considering the situation in which it’s used where the characters are not happy, nor are they particularly carefree.
Pop Summer Jams Club/Beach Music from Storyblocks is the sort of tune you expect to hear in a bad VRChat skin server or Roblox beach roleplay game. So much of the music in this VN is ambient and clearly made to fit the very specific tone that is present throughout the entire visual novel, but this strange choice to cut from the incredible tune of Cuzn Angel’s Rock EP, also known as Winter Embrace from SilentPaper’s sound library, to this extremely generic paradise music is a really bizarre decision and jumped out to me the second I picked up this side story. What would have been a better decision is if they just amped up Cuzn Angel’s Rock EP as TJ entered the dancefloor instead to indicate that he’d removed himself from the more secluded area to the more busy one.
Overall the music is outstandingly well placed and those three instances are the only true standouts in what is ultimately an impressive expanse of music.
The Full Thing - Conclusion
Let’s rank the routes now. I’d like to preface by saying that just because these routes are ordered from what’s worst to best in my opinion does not mean this is a scale from horrible to excellent, it’s more of a scale from good to excellent; I highlight a lot of downsides in these, but it’s more because I felt it more necessary to explain why a route didn’t make the number 1 spot because doing this by comparing the best traits of each route would have made this a lot more difficult for me personally.
At number 5, the bottom of our list, is TJ. As solid a twist it is, I unfortunately can’t look past how sudden the change was in Chase. Events like this feel a bit more gradual in other routes, but here, it sort of just happens like he snaps. In Leo’s Route, the manipulation takes a couple of steps before it’s actually realised and the reader is made to be drawn into it a little bit, but on TJ’s Route, it’s more like they just put a hard veil on it while we do a scavenger hunt and then all of a sudden they unveil it and Chase is getting angry when TJ has a friend and ends up sexually assaulting him out of nowhere.
At Number 4, as much as I praised it, is Carl’s Route. Ultimately, I understand that the biggest part of the story that blew me away came largely from the fact I’d played the route last and not everyone is going to do that or even have the same reaction as myself even if they don’t play it last because, in hindsight, I could have seen the hysteria realisation coming. When it comes down to it, I also felt that a lot of that route was the early days where not every idea was set in stone and the start of the route can feel a little lacking in comparison to others, though the relationship between Chase and Carl is charming enough, and Carl himself is charming enough, that it brings the route out on top of TJ’s.
At Number 3 is Flynn’s Route, largely down to the ending being so damn confusing in conjunction with my personal bias towards Flynn as a character and how his interactions in this route were written. Ultimately, if the order you read each route in was forced so this was maybe 4th, I’d have less of a problem with the confusing ending because the elements at play in this story innately have some confusion. The level of that in Flynn’s Route, however, is just a little bit too much for me to say that this route really fits all possible times you might play it and if I find that a route should be played in any particular position, it takes away from it a little bit. I also find that the confusion can take away from some of the emotional impact that is walking Flynn into the fire. The route spends a good amount of time getting you attached to Flynn and it’s very clear they had a lot of fun building on Flynn’s character in this route. This route is absolutely incredible.
Placing Leo and Jenna’s Routes is really tough, but I think it’s got to be Jenna’s at number 2 because of how it doesn’t tie us to Jenna’s story as much. Yes, Jenna’s agency is incredible and her route really helps you to get into her character if you weren’t already digging it, but her route feels like it spends more time caring about others; even moments where Jenna is having an important conversation with us, we spend very little of that time making progress towards something about Jenna, it’s usually about Chase. The pathfinding decision is the only major outlier to this I can think of besides the extremely brief apology in the epilogue and, if you choose the bisexual route, there’s a scene where we go over her feelings for Chase which was brilliant, but I think in any given route, there should be equal development for both the protagonist and our character of choice and I feel with Jenna’s route the balance is just a little bit too skewed towards Chase.
Leo’s Route is my number 1. We get an extremely well-written side character, a brilliant journey from thinking of Leo as some glorious boyfriend to the horrible person he is and an incredible emotional climax and satisfying conclusion. Could we have seen Leo have a redemption arc within the route instead of skipping ahead to when he’s just content? Sure, but I can’t fault an ending where our manipulator at least gets shat on and we get to go home with a perfect boyfriend we’ll stay with for at least 2 years. His route is truly a magnificently engaging story.
I had a ball playing this VN. It was a bit of a slow start beginning with TJ’s Route, and I wouldn’t personally suggest starting with that route to anyone who goes on to read this themselves…
Oh, right, I was going to suggest an order to play the routes in. I’ll throw out a few suggestions depending on a person's circumstances.
The creators generally state that the order you should play them in is in line with the order the routes were completed, which does make sense considering that would roughly go with the order that the writers came up with all their ideas in, but for me personally, I really enjoyed the way my run with this ended and the order the routes were completed doesn’t really align with my personal bias on how I think it should go. If you’re someone who would like to follow the creators advice though, start on Carl’s Route, move to Leo's, TJ’s, Flynn’s and then Jenna’s.
As stated in the long form review, which some of you are reading (you’re absolutely insane and I really appreciate you guys for reading all this way), the order I played this in was TJ, Flynn, Leo, Jenna and then Carl. I reiterate that a different order may have suited me better. Here’s my reasoning:
I will always recommend that either Carl’s Route or TJ’s Route be played last. Carl’s ending is actually a great note to close off on, so that’s my personal recommendation, but if you’re the sort of person who feasts on a tragedy or a good twist, TJ’s should go last.
What I would not recommend is TJ’s as a first route; the parts in the middle of the story being a bit of a drag is something I blame on the fact that my curiosity wasn’t yet piqued on anything to do with Sydney and I also think if I had let the story lead me on to thinking that Chase is a good guy, that twist ending would have been much better, so I would place TJ’s Route somewhere in the middle.
Flynn’s Route should come after TJ’s; my story, where I got to witness the truth and then see Chase be held accountable for it was an incredibly satisfying moment I would like everyone to have.
I would recommend Jenna or Leo’s Routes first. This is a bit iffy because Jenna’s Route is one of the most captivating for me and the heightened drama of it all easily made it one of the best routes for me, but I also don’t want readers to find out Leo’s manipulative and then have to sit through a whole route where we just let him do the manipulation. I think such an experience would frustrate a reader rather than capture them narratively. Thus, I recommend Leo’s before Jenna’s. I also consider that a lot of people probably naturally would start with Leo’s Route knowing that Chase and Leo have some history, so I think I’ve made a good case here.
Thus, my order is this:
Leo > Jenna > TJ > Flynn > Carl.
I also think that the order of story information you get in this order is pretty solid; Leo and Flynn’s climax sequences are very similar, but Leo lacks the extreme amount of confusion that comes with the Smoke Room hallucination and Flynn becoming the Socket Man. Flynn’s being the last in the four most interconnected routes is just the best option in terms of keeping the reader as unconfused as possible. Finding out that Leo is manipulative and then seeing the group school the shit out of him in the next route, and then doing the very same thing for Chase in the next two routes is really satisfying in my opinion and then having a really big switch up on the way the story goes in Carl’s Route for a finale is a really nice bow to slap on top.
For alternative suggestions, you could use the narrative difference in Carl’s Route to argue that it should actually come first because it not only keys the user in on what the hysteria looks like to a victim early and allows them to better empathise with those going through it in subsequent routes, but you could also argue for it as a warm up to the story. In this situation though, we’re ending on the tragedy that is Flynn’s ending, so I’d switch my two couplets around; Carl > TJ > Flynn > Leo > Jenna
If you want a reader's experience to end on a twist, I’d suggest TJ’s Route last. In this world, spectacle is more important than sense, so I would put Flynn’s Route first to offer the unconfirmed suggestion that Chase is the murderer, which the reader can then forget about by the time they reach the finale in TJ’s Route. Through this path, I would recommend this order: Flynn > Carl > Leo > Jenna > TJ
Where do I go next?
As we round off this review, I would like to talk about what of Echo I’ll be reading next.
As stated previously, I want to read and review Arches. It likely won’t be as elaborate a review as this, because I have spent an inordinate amount of time on this, but it will happen eventually. Before that, in my own time, I will be re-reading and going through what I missed in Echo Route 65. I would like to look at other works lined up on the Echo Project Itch.io page. God only knows if I’ll play the Adastra stories, Glory Hounds or A Role to Play right now as I may need a break after I’m done playing with the Echo series, but maybe somewhere down the line.
I’d like to also open the floor to you readers; I would like to hear you guys’ input on visual novels I should read and review. I’m gonna keep the floor open to all VN’s, but those that suit my tastes are more likely to be picked. I’ll also keep the floor open for the spicier side of this industry and if you don’t want to make a public recommendation Substack just released direct messages, but do also expect reviews to be story reviews and not sex reviews - I won’t let you know how much of a turn on the story was, much like I didn’t express it in this review for Flynn’s Route or Carl’s bad end or Benefits.
Alright, thank you for going on this journey with me. I can’t wait to read Arches and take you on a new journey with that one. I’ll see you all soon.
Ciao! Here’s my drawing of our best boy :)
Fact check:
I have two written down from when I was keeping track of what decision each save I had moving on was indicative of, but I can swear down there’s a third somewhere before them,
I mention the sexuality question and who we decide to lean on at the theme park. The third choice, or rather the first choice, is on the drive to Echo right at the beginning where Jenna asks if we’re excited - “yes”, “not really” or “I’m nervous”.
Fact check:
There’s a moment in the middle somewhere where they visit a state fair and Leo and Jenna have a bit of a competition to win Chase a prize,
This was actually in the prologue.
Walking back:
My main belief about the scene is that it's meant to show where Sydney’s behaviours may have come from.
I no longer believe this - what I instead believe is that this was meant to show that TJ was not the only one who held negative thoughts on Sydney. This accusation didn't come out of nowhere; Chase and his mother had thoughts about Sydney and those thoughts influenced them to believe Syd may have killed his dad. Chase then spread that thought onto the rest of the group, where it largely persisted with most of the group until his death.
Fact check:
This follows an event in which Sydney pranked TJ by holding him underwater for a while which Chase interpreted as attempted murder.
I can't confirm this - that may have been a separate event. I pulled this take from a flashback scene where Sydney holds TJ underwater for a bit too long, but in that flashback Sydney lives, so I could be wrong in my initial interpretation here.
Walking back:
although TJ and Jenna feel like they’re intended by the group to be the moral centres of our cast of six,
TJ doesn't feel like a moral centre, as much as he feels like the subject the moral centre is based on - this is to build on my previous point about TJ being coddled and obsessively appealed to by the group.
Walking back:
when Chase isn’t there to intervene, everyone is more than capable of growth.
I have one place where I believe this goes my opinion here in Carl’s Route where Chase not only unintentionally helps Carl see actual growth, but when the conversation about Sydney is addressed, and I’ll evade some some of the details of this for the sake of getting into it later in the review, the conversations starts by devolving into an argument, but acts from Chase are what turn the argument around into what ends up being quite a beautiful moment for the group before it is interrupted by another tragedy.
Walking back:
it is creepy, but it’s also just nostalgic, bittersweet and a big show of how Leo’s love for him never went away, even if that love is towards a version of Chase that no longer exists.
I debated several times addressing this in a footnote, but we’re here now, so you can see the decision I made. I do stand by the fact I’m seeing the faint image of improvement from Leo in this conversation and the context of this conversation especially feels like it, but when this speech comes up a second time in Jenna’s Route, it does not invoke the same emotion at all and this instance of in Flynn’s Route can be viewed negatively in hindsight.
Fact check:
What this points to, obviously, is the reader; as I said previously, our perspective is not Chases, otherwise we wouldn’t be playing as Flynn right now, so what Daxton sees that feels wrong is an additional personality.
Is it us? If it was us, why was Daxton’s thoughts on Chase negative while his thoughts on Flynn were positive? Do we and Flynn just mix better than we and Chase? I have to admit I’m a bit stumped on this, or I may just be overthinking it.
Fact check:
Rat
Duke is a weasel.
Emphasis:
the ending is quite possibly the most confusing thing in the world, but I think in the last hour of trying to figure it
To illustrate the point of my review of this ending, that claim is not an exaggeration - it truly took me over an hour of processing before I started to gather ideas and, as you'll see through the next load of footnotes, I end up disagreeing with a huge chunk of what I inferred in this ending.
Re-evaluation:
if Sydney never died, the events where we helped Carl with his job interview would have instead happened with Sydney.
Not inherently - this could have just been Sam using the image of Sydney to speak to Flynn more directly than just whispering lightly in the back of his head like he did with Chase.
I go over this again in Footnote 13 as I have changed my tune on this footnote slightly… yes, footnotes within footnotes… this is how complicated I’m finding Flynn’s Route.
Fact check:
Flynn is always destined to become the Socket Man - we just don’t see it in TJ’s Route because we never flipped perspectives to Flynn - as we drowned Flynn in the river on TJ’s Route Flynn probably became the Socket Man at that moment.
This is not true. I informed this opinion on two routes which saw Flynn dying at the end, so it was based off of incomplete information, for one, but also, there's no way Flynn could become the Socket Man here since the event in which he becomes the Socket Man involves influence from Sam, who is still in the conscious of Chase throughout the ending of TJ's Route.
Fact check:
In Flynn's Route, the hallucinations where he sees the adult Sydney fade to Sam which triggers him to walk to the Smoke Room, what is actually happening in reality is Flynn completes his “walk to Leo's house” which is actually down into the mines where the spirit has lit up a fire to burn Flynn in - since Sam couldn’t use Chase as a vessel to kill Flynn in this route, he takes over Flynn’s body and guides him there himself,
This accusation is baseless and assumes Sam is the evil force behind Chase's actions, which is left ambiguous throughout the entirety of the visual novel and I don’t believe Sam is an evil force anymore. So how did Flynn get to the mines if he wasn’t guided by Sam? I don’t entirely know, but I think it’s likely the same voice that took over Chase in TJ’s Route guided Flynn there, either through Chase or directly. Sydney is definitely Sam though, as it’s written in his font, and we are also seeing the hallucination of the Smoke Room so I definitely don’t think Sam realises we’re in the mines until he does have the realisation and claims that this part of the mines is “the source”, which is either of every problem within Echo or of Sam himself.
Okay forget that lol we’re going diary mode again - I have an amendment. I don’t think the Sydney hallucination is Sam, I think it’s Echo. We’re still in Flynn’s headspace, so we haven’t moved our conscious to the hallucination. Sam was involved in some kind of major tragedy in the mines when he was alive and so the hallucination from in the mines is something that Echo itself is revealing to Flynn. Perhaps it doesn’t realise Sam is also seeing this hallucination. When Flynn starts to approach the Smoke Room in this hallucination, Sam tells him “I’m still here”. That comes from the real Sam, us, as a warning to Flynn, but I think it’s futile as Flynn doesn’t realise we’re in has head and he just tells us to fuck off thinking it was the hallucination that said it. Sam then decides to accept Flynn’s fate and turns it into something positive by morphing Flynn’s body into the Socket Man and using it as a vessel for both to live on for eternity and become a new voice of Echo.
I think all interpretations are valid, but this is the one I’m most personally happy with right now as it helps explain a lot of things. It would also clear up that Sam is good, and I am championing him here. I have also started reading my copy of TSR by this point, for full transparency, so although it’s no longer canon, it’s hard not to see the connections and it’s also hard to see how they intend to retcon Sam without it messing up the story, so I’m kinda just sticking with what I think was the original intent for the story until a retcon has formally been released that says otherwise. I feel a little guilty doing this, but it’s kinda just what happened unfortunately and I don’t want to just lie and say I suspiciously came to this conclusion that Sam was involved with the mines.
Anyway… I promise none of the other footnotes are like this, this is truly just the one thing I had left I wasn’t wholly satisfied with my answer to so I had to come back and clear it up, and then I realised the TSR thing and… ah whatever, you don’t need to hear even more recounting.
Fact check:
As for what those scenes where Flynn sees these historical events is meant to be in the first place; they’re all instances of the Socket Man showing up - the Socket Man has always been Flynn in this nebulous paranormal form that has the ability to travel across all of time and insert himself to these events,
Kinda correct, but if only I'd picked up that he can jump across timelines. I never have this realisation while writing the review and I also fail to observe that Socket Man showing up in other routes would also back this point about jumping across timelines; if he can’t do that, how does he appear in other routes?
Fact check:
the Socket Man has always been Flynn in this nebulous paranormal form that has the ability to travel across all of time and insert himself to these events, which shows that Flynn’s death in this sense is inevitable and unavoidable.
False: I was noticing a pattern based on only two instances of this happening, which is logically fallacious and disproven by every other route.
Fact check:
Flynn becoming the Socket Man is the soul reason he is never able to see the Socket Man until the Socket Man starts to merge with him; because all those instances described by Dax, Carl, Chase and Jenna are Flynn. And those moments when Flynn sees the Socket Man during the car loop section just happen to be the only times he decides to pay himself a visit
This is founded on truth, but ultimately false I think. I now have contradicting evidence from Jenna's Route over the "this is the only time he decides to pay himself a visit" thing because he pays himself another visit in the climax of her route and he still doesn't see it while all others present do. As for why Flynn can't see it, I think it's because Sam is sharing a mind with Chase in most instances, and Sam's ability to see the paranormal like everyone else hasn't passed on to Flynn yet since it only happens on Flynn’s Route. TL;DR I think in order for Flynn to see the paranormal, he needs Sam and this route is the only one where he has him.
Fact check:
the moment where Flynn dies is the moment that the Socket Man is created as a physical manifestation of the evil spirit of Echo,
Not "the", as there's multiple. I didn’t realise that when I originally wrote this.
Walking back:
Despite Flynn dying and such, I actually think this is kinda a good ending? A once wholly evil spirit that loomed over Echo now has a good side to it now that Flynn is merged with it.
I have changed tack here; I no longer believe the evil looking over Echo is one single entity but multiple, and I still think this is a good ending because a good spirit, that of Flynn, is now haunting Echo - at this time I believed that Sam was Echo’s sole haunted voice and I no longer believe this either, so I think of Sam and Flynn combines as one big good spirit.
Re-evaluation
This section kinda exposes the logic of the haunted voice of Echo in a way
I’m not sure if I fully agree with this paragraph, but I can’t really rebut it at all. The main difference in my opinion now is just that Echo doesn’t actually pick a person to centre it on and just make sure everyone in proximity to it is safe and I also don’t think it has to be Chase anymore - in other routes, and even Leo’s Route, Chase isn’t the centre of Echo’s hysteria, in fact he arguably only s in TJ’s and Flynn’s Route. In this route I don’t really know what the centre of attention is and the same goes for Carl’s Route later on. But I think the hysteria happens because people bare witness to crazy events that are going on and it then drives them into chaos. I think the hysteria then selects people to protect and who will be guaranteed to live on to tell some of the tale, and also allows outsiders a chance to survive to keep the story convoluted, confusing and unbelievable as to help obscure the towns secrets; I call back to TJ’s Route where the voice of Echo states exactly that; “this town needs secrets”.
Additional context:
This time Flynn isn’t with us, neither is Jenna and in Dax’s place is Kudzu. Additionally, a side we don’t get to see in Flynn’s Route very often was Leo during this segment; he’s acting extremely jealous of the fact that Chase has taken a liking to Kudzu and has a disdain for how Kudzu is constantly able to take control of the situation and make the right decisions.
I'd like to add that this attitude from Leo couldn’t have happened in Flynn’s Route in the first place since he not only is split apart from Leo through most of the route, but I also think in hindsight that that conversation from Flynn’s Route in the abandoned home may have been a legitimate change of heart in Leo, so the attitude wasn't even something Leo had in the version of these events in Flynn's Route.
Fact check:
I’m not entirely sure, but I believe this story lines up with the vision we get of the near-dead fennec on the table after we merge with the Socket Man on Flynn’s Route.
This is false; that vision from Flynn's Route actually goes back to the body that gets pulled out during the town meeting which is in the present day, while Brian's story seems to come from years ago, first based on the fact Duke still had a wife at this time, but also through the fact that this hidden evidence is just bones now.
Walking back:
During all of that the voice occupying Chase's mind, who we’re playing as, is becoming clearer and clearer to Chase, taunting him about how he’s on the brink of being killed and he’s just sitting there doing nothing to change it. Which is the point, of course; the whole solution proposed by Duke is that killing the fuel of the malicious spirit of Echo, which happens to currently be Chase,
…in Duke's perspective. It was also in my perspective at the time, but my mind has since changed. The phrasing here still applies though, just not to me anymore.
Fact check:
My assumption here is that, since Socket Man kills Brian, the malicious presence of Echo, instead of merging with Flynn, merges with Brian.
This is also false; I have this realisation much later on while theorising for the ending of another route, but since we know the Socket Man is able to time travel and witness historical events, we have no reason to believe this does not extend to being able to visit other timelines - The Socket Man we see is always the same Socket Man inhabited by Flynn and Sam, and he isn't just able to time travel, he transcends times itself. This is to show that every route in Echo can be called "correct" - it's multiverse shenanigans, in a way.
Re-evaluation:
Whether or not a route chooses to portray this as underdeveloped childhood morality or an ever-present sense of justice is what varies, and in both previous routes it was portrayed as the latter. In this route it feels like Chase is on the former; I think all of the bad things that happen to Chase in this route is what makes him accept that this killing was bad, and it’s once he comes to terms with it that the story stops shoving bad things at him.
Not exactly; thinking back, this may be a misinterpretation of TJ's ending - there's the moment in TJ's ending where it says "this town needs secrets" which implies that Chase was encouraged by the evil spirit to kill Sydney. I think Chase's animosity towards Sydney probably made Chase more inclined to listen to that voice, but I think the voice of Echo helped him decide it was a good idea. Additionally, the voice of Echo is distinct from the voice of Sam as the fonts vary, something I never pick up on until way later when I double check things I said in the conclusion. Despite that, I don't bring this up throughout this review.
Here is the voice of Sam:
Here is the voice that takes over Chase in TJ’s ending:
Fact check:
It feels a little bit like when they made the VN, Ren’Py didn’t allow them to have more than 4 options available, so that’s why this split off with Jenna and Leo is so awkward, but I’m also not entirely sure that’s actually true?
After doing a quick word search through a few Ren'Py changelogs, I could not find any evidence of this being true. Something I've noticed while fact checking this in post is that there are places in Echo itself where 5 dialogue choices are presented. All of this says that the strange writing in the split off to Leo and Jenna's Routes is intentional. In hindsight, I can see why Jenna and Leo went off together when they stormed off given they share similar viewpoints on TJ, but I still do think that having Jenna walk back and letting you decide to follow her was handled in a really strange way and could have been done differently.
An aside:
this idea mainly coming from an instance of this sort of thing happening in the Five Nights at Freddy’s series’ FNAF World and Ultimate Custom Night
To explain what I mean by this and why it relates to my scepticism on this, FNAF World has achievement trophies seen on the title screen that are unlocked by completing specific endings of the game. One such trophy is an 8 bit Freddy unlocked by finding Old Man Consequences and drowning in his lake. FNAF World happens to share information with Ultimate Custom Night, a game which also features Old Man Consequences as a character and by setting him to difficulty 1, catching his fish and then drowning in his lake, that information is shared with FNAF World and when you next open the FNAF World game, you will have unlocked the trophy even if you haven’t started a save of the game.
As for why I thought this, when I opened Echo for the first time, all of my saves from Echo Route 65 were on my save screen. In fat, from going back and replaying Echo Route 65 to look at other routes, all my Echo save files are seen on my save screens there too and I now keep my Route 65 saves on the last page because of this. Echo and Echo Route 65 are the only Ren’Py games I have played where I have seen this happen. I’ll go on to debunk this in the next footnote.
Fact check:
I’ll have to ask my friend about that later, but for now, back to the story, which I’ve not finished reading yet by the way; I didn’t read the whole of Jenna’s Route before starting this so I’m kinda writing as I go here.
It does not; I tested this by replaying Echo Route 65 on my phone and choosing to come out to Flynn (who, by the way, notably decides not to make an advance at Chase because of their age difference, which is really funny to read following something that happens later). When I then replayed Echo on my phone and got back to the part where Jenna mentioned us coming out to her, she still said it despite me not choosing to come out to her in Route 65, meaning this was pure coincidence on my end. When I looked into what other readers were saying about this, something that was mentioned several times is that, canonically, the route you go down in Echo Route 65 leads to the timeline where you choose to follow through that players route later, which explained why Jenna can recall this no matter which route you picked in Route 65; if you choose Leo's Route in Echo, for instance, then that means in this timeline, Chase came out to Leo in Route 65, and we do not need to read 65 to see this happen in Echo. What this implies is that the person you chose in Route 65 is also the person Chase was closest to in that respective timeline.
Additional context:
The spider prank happens again here. Did I mention this in TJ’s Route?
No, I did not; at the top of the hiking trail, on TJ's Route, TJ decides to prank Chase by hiding a souvenir spider in his backpack while he isn't looking. This happens again on Jenna's Route, but here it's said she set it up instead.
Fact check:
So, this proves the Socket Man is a real thing, and so are all of the other hallucinations in Echo; if you let these hallucinations take over for long enough, they will manifest in reality. The Socket Man is one such example of this; he’s an entity that follows and protects Jenna throughout her life, initially starting as a comforting presence who lived in her closet, but twice in this route, the Socket Man shows up in the real world where she and everyone else is able to see it.
Not every hallucination is necessarily reality. The second part, about hallucinations becoming manifest, is true in some cases, but not this one - the Socket Man, as I've said in a few instances now, only comes to exist in Flynn's Route and then all other versions of him from other routes are the same guy. This guy is always a physical being actually present in the real world and was never a figment of anyone's imagination.
Fact check:
At the end of Flynn’s Route, we die in the caves and Flynn is merged with the Socket Man, and our perspective follows. This confirms my previous theory that Sam is the haunted voice of Echo… kind of…
Not at all; it only shows that he is a relevant haunted voice to the situation with Chase, Sydney, Flynn and others.
Rephrase and fact check:
I think that theory was a lot more dumbed down, but using it to describe the essence of Sam’s importance to the story is probably accurate; a lot of our flashbacks and dreams come from events Sam would have witnessed, so his importance to the Echo story is impossible to miss; he is the one who created all the hallucinations in the first place by inhabiting the bodies of all these people and feeding them hallucinations in the first place.
This implies that Sam is the source of everyone's hallucinations, which is not and was never my opinion. What is my opinion here is that all of Chase's hallucinations come from Sam, but even that is not true - there's no evidence he would have seen the fox's hanging, for instance, and since he is still within Chase's body here, he couldn't have gone back in time and witnessed it through the Socket Man only to then re-inhabit Chase’s mind and show it to him then. I think the hallucinations come from a third party haunted voice that gives them to everyone, and every hallucination is some historical event that happened in Echo.
Additional context:
We stop at a caravan on the side of the road, the doors swing open and out pours a barrage of spiders, thus giving Chase his worst fear.
Not necessarily, but it's the only evidence I could point to. What's equally likely is that Chase has always been arachnophobic and Echo was just showing him spiders for the fun of it.
Walking back:
I think if I was to personally suggest an order to read these routes in, I would have suggested to start with TJ’s, move on to Jenna, Leo, then Flynn and then Carl.
I change my mind on this, which is covered later in the review.
Fact check:
I was just in the middle of looking into which order the big routes were written in on the Echo Wiki for a later part of this review where I review the characters individually and give my perspective on why some of the side characters feel more fleshed out than others and in doing that I was actually proven incorrect in my initial theory that it was just because they were the earlier stories of the project.
I still didn't find evidence of this and no longer believe it; I think what's actually the case is that not all side characters need to be built the same. Not every character has to have heaps of interesting and detailed personality traits and backstory; sometimes it's okay for characters to mainly just serve their purpose and me trying to criticise this is just a little bit silly.
Fact Check:
Metaphor follows Leo and Flynn about 6 months before the events of Echo, in September of 2014. We aren’t following either of their perspectives, and this is instead written in the third person, which I think means we’re playing as Sam disembodied from Chase in this instance.
I do not have any evidence to back this. I don't think we're playing as anyone here, I think this is truly a third person story, which is a bit of a strange choice, but whatever.