Dark Echo
is a minimalist survival Horror Video Game developed by RAC7 Games.
Trapped in darkness, the player must use visualized sound to navigate threatening environments. The sounds created (whether through footsteps or other means) will bounce off obstacles, revealing the shape of the surrounding world. The player must get to the end of each level, mapping out their surroundings and solving puzzles - all while avoiding horrifying entities (represented by red lines), which will kill the player if they catch them.
Dark Echo contains examples of:
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Your footsteps and the echoes they make show up in white. Hostiles are red. Water Is Blue. Trapdoors and switches are yellow, and their waves return a different kind of sound. The end of each level is rendered in thicker white lines.
- Collision Damage: One touch from an enemy is enough to kill the player.
- Deliberately Monochrome: Most of the game is black, and the player's footsteps + the echoes they make are white to contrast. This is reversed in the Light World levels.
- Hard Mode Filler: Zigzagged by the Light World levels. Layout-wise, they're identical to their Dark World counterparts. However, there are more enemies, and they're buffed: they're faster, are able to walk through walls, and they can absorb sound.
- Hell Is That Noise: The loud, bloodcurdling scream that the player character lets out when they're caught by an enemy.
- Nothing Is Scarier: What the enemies look like is completely unknown. Judging by the scream that the player character lets out when they're caught by one, however...
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: It only takes one touch from the enemies for the player character to be killed.
- Pre-existing Encounters: Enemies always spawn in fixed locations.
- Roaming Enemy: Flavor 3. Enemies will always spawn in fixed locations. Part of beating the game involves figuring out how to outrun or get past them.
- Run or Die: Some levels involve the player trying to outrun an increasingly large mass of red lines, all converging on the player.
- Step into the Blinding Fight: A variant; instead of fighting, the player must flee from enemies that they can't otherwise see.
