Fossil Echo Reviews

What an adorable game! The music is as soothing as a warm bath, and the artwork is visually exquisite! I found this game through imgur and I am glad I spent the money to get it. This is proof that a casual and laid back game can also be inspiring, challenging, artistically flirtatious and unique in a world of shoot em up games! I haven't had this much fun since Osmos!

This game features very appealing music and visuals, but there isn't much more to recommend about the game. The game mechanic doesn't connect with the narrative: the young boy is climbing a tower, and the game reveals the reasons for this in flashbacks, but the ending isn't very satisfying, and the dialogue-less cutscenes don't really add up to a story. The challenges are mildly difficult in a tedious manner - that is, the latter platforms are as hard as the initial, and without any save points, the player has to redo the initial platforms over and over and over again. Between the slight narrative, that ends after very little development and without any satisfying ending, and the tedious game mechanics, the game is a missed opportunity for a lovely litte indie game with nice music, sound, and visual atmosphere. 5/10

Fossil Echo is a tight rewarding platformer. Frustrating at times but rewarding when you get it right. Which is perfect. I love the soundtrack - pay for it - it is relaxing and very nice The game is roughly 1 hour+ so buy on sale if you want value vs time. More time is added depending on your platforming / temple times. Temples are extra and hard. I compare them to shorter versions of Donkey Kong Country Returns temples. Once you know the moves you get them easily, but it takes tries to know whats coming. Gameplay makes sense and progresses well. Several levels (and all of the extra temples) require trial and error to complete which is fine. There is nothing unordinarlly hard. I completed several levels avoiding active enemies trying to hurt me. I.E. my stealth sucked and I made it work. The story leaves questions no matter how much you finish but it is interesting. I'm not sure what I accomplished as the main character, but I liked accomplishing it. And the extra achievements. Well most of them. No way I was going to beat the game and all temples without dying.

I don't really get the mixed reviews for this title. Fossil Echo is a cheap game with a great visual foundation that is at least worth experiencing for no other reason than to marvel at its fascinating art. I will admit the controls probably are not the tightest around, but that doesn't stop the meaningful story and exemplary visuals from providing entertainment. I actually quite enjoyed the challenging platforming. After a while you get used to the controls, and the only thing that takes practice is timing your runs nearly perfectly without fail. This requires patience and precision. But in the end you don't even have to explicitly do the dream sequences--the hardest platforming sections--if you don't want to. I use a -35 to -50 deadzone setting with my DS4 and Input Mapper, but that is no different from Super Meat Boy where I use -50. Steam now has a toggle anyway if you need it. I recommend control tuning for pretty much every game. Anyway, the game is purely gorgeous, has nicely animated cutscenes, and an artstyle that is intuitive to the gameplay and the theme of the game. The themes concern family, moon phases, animals, and other things that pertain to the boy's journey up the guarded tower. I am having a blast going through the worlds. I do think maybe the achievements are a little crazy, but I don't mind having rare ones that very few people will ever attempt. I could not imagine spending the time to go through this game without dying while completing all the temples on Normal anyway. Maybe an Easy mode playthrough would be a bit more accommodating, but I won't be trying that anytime soon. The game simply asks for too much precision out of the player in the later temples for me to even attempt a no death run. And one mistake in timing, which has a very limited duration for your success, and you are done. There are some hidden extra modes if you feel you can beat some of the achievements, and 8-bit mode is simply hidden behind the play it all in one sitting achievement, which is super easy. I feel like the save system, and the occasional missed temple door, are a cause of some players' frustration as you cannot backtrack at all. But once you get the idea of the game, you won't miss any doors. Not too bad here. A challenge for those that really want it. The devs probably marketed this game wrong. They went in thinking this was a game with the clout of something far greater, and you really can't do that these days. FE should have been ten bucks on release, and it should have never released right before the Summer sale. Some of those decisions were just not very thoughtful, and they definitely killed this game in the end if they were thinking about a bigger audience. I have played just about all these art/experience games and Fossil Echo is definitely a memorable one if a little on the rough side. Beyond the complaints this is a classic little gem to me. It has overtones of Miyazaki works, and in bringing back a certain nostalgia for old school platforming it fuses a beautiful world within a time and tone familiar to those that played when this genre was once king. Totally recommended for the cheap price it resides at on sales. I disagree with others saying to skip the game because of controls. It's just a bit challenging in places, and you need to make sure you tune your controller. In reality it's not the controller but the strict requirements of the timing on the platform sections that makes it a bit overwhelming for some. But on a second playthrough it will go much easier once you are familiar with the puzzles. This is the same type of gameplay most of us love in all the other great platformers. It has some issues, but the enchanting soundtrack, mesmerizing visuals, which are a good step ahead of the usual indie, and charming animations all make up for it. I thought the story did everything it needed to do. It's a short game, but it's a sweet experience for around 5-10 dollars. This game is underrated. A damn shame in my opinion.

I love indie games but this was an exception. It is the same 3-4 stage designs over and over with very rigid red-light-green-light gameplay. If you don't do exactly as the creators planned you die and try again. Most of your time is spent waiting until the exact moment you're allowed to advance. The character can never decide if he's going to land or grab onto a platform which slows your momentum and causes you to fall off platforms and start over from the beginning. The game is pretty but not fun.

I wanted to like this game because it has great art and music, but it's a rage-quit game. The store page calls it "challenging", but it's far beyond challenging. In the 30 minutes or so I played before rage-quitting, there were two types of sections. The first type of section is a vertical climbing stage in which the game auto-scrolls the screen upward and you have to keep running, jumping, and wall-jumping your way up. This requires precisely-timed jumps. You will die if you're even 1/10 of a second too slow, which is easy to do since your character does not control well. As other reviewers have commented, the character is "slidy" (it seems that momentum carries him forward a bit once you release the movement key/button) and you cannot jump immediately after climbing/landing). This is the first section you encounter, so it's very possible you will rage-quit within the first five minutes of the game. The second type of section is one with enemies which shoot and instantly kill you. You need to avoid these enemies by jumping and climbing while their backs are turned. The problem is that their backs are not turned long enough to successfully make it through these sections. You need to learn their movements and be able to start your progression several seconds in advance so you are in the right place when the guards turn. In this section, too, if you are even 1/10 of a second too slow, you will die. It doesn't help that there is a lack of consistency when it comes to wall-jumping. Most of the time, you cannot jump and grab onto a wall and then jump again and grab the same wall again, but sometimes you can, with nothing indicating when you are allowed to do this. This happens in the auto-scrolling levels, so following the game's established rule of no double wall jumps will contribute to your number of deaths and rage level because some places require double wall jumps. This may not look like a game which requires perfect timing, but that's exactly what it is. I'm not against challenging games, but a game which requires timing this precise is beyond challenging -- it's nearly impossible, especially given the troublesome controls.

This game has a lot of quality : great graphics with an artistic visuals, it offers challenges and variety in gameplay : runner, stealh, platforms, puzzles.... problem is : it through them at you in a very mechanical way, always rotating between 3 variation of gameplay phases. Some of them being kind of easy and some being crazy hard in the bad sort of way : pixel perfect jumps with a strict timing needed, stealh map with only one "way" to go through. I couldn't bring myself to go to the end which is sad because the game had great potential

I just completed the game. $15 for a 1-2 hour adventure? I feel ripped off. I will admit, the animation in the game is spectacular, but if I wanted to pay to see art I would go to a gallery. Fossil Echo can be challenging, and I consider myself competent with platform games thanks to the good ol' SNES. However, as the stages progressed, I began to realize some of my deaths were not even my fault. The character likes to forget he's able to cling to ledges and instead falls to his doom. This thing in particular caused much frustration. There are also optional stages (one of which I accidentally skipped) that send you to flashbacks in Momento order. The final flashback (technically the first part of the story) shows what the adventure had all been for with a suspensful cutscene, leading up to the extremely anti-climactic ending that I don't dare give away. All in all, this game is pretty, but needs more content to be worth its price.

I know the screenshots look pretty, but whether you want a good story [b]or[/b] tight gameplay, [h1]you'll be deeply disappointed.[/h1] By the end of the game at approximately the 1-hour mark, the simple and unimaginative story and all its potential side arcs are left unconcluded and unexplained, and there are some "mysterious" insinuating visual cues throughout the game that will amount to nothing. A complete waste of time and very unsatisfactory in that regard. The wordless storytelling accomplished nothing except corny gesturing and leaving things in the dark. The gameplay consists of three modes. The first is normal unhurried (and sometimes hurried) platforming that's pretty okay. Then there are obstacle courses that require you to follow some incredibly exact route with very exact timing or you die, and even if you survive some mistake, you probably blew your chance and have to commit suicide anyway. Lastly there are stealth sections with exactly two enemy types that have predictable but annoyingly timed movement patterns. The game gives close to zero room for improvisation and creativity, you just need to do things exactly how the developers envisioned it. And even with the game's very short length, it still manages to be repetitive both in its levels and cutscenes. So boring and frustrating. The makers obviously spent a lot effort creating the background art, but considering that, the characters look lazily designed, the animations are very choppy, and they couldn't even keep the main character's asymmetry (two feathers on the [b]right[/b] side of his head) in check: the gameplay sprite is mirrored for both sides, and in one cutscene the feathers momentarily jumped to the left side. All in all, the developers didn't seem to care much about this game beyond impressing people at festivals. Speaking of which, I no longer have much regard for the parties that decided to shower this game with awards.

The greatest flaw of Fossil Echo is also its greatest strength: it is a pretty game with pretty animations. In fact these animations are very pretty and the designers wanted the player to see these pretty graphics so much, the platforming had to adapt to the art. And here lies the heart of the problem: the animations and the platform collisions are clunky, which makes the platforming frustrating and incoherent. You will often expect as you run close to the end of a platform to jump out as you press the jump button, only to open your mouth and rage in anger as your character falls to his death. No you're not insane. Yes you did press the button. My hypothesis is that the game doesn't like that you press the jump button before it finishes its running animation loop, so it has to end it, but by the time it can play the jumping animation, it won't because you're in the air and now Gravity owns you. Add to that: -a poor understanding of progression... (that sequence at the start where you chase the feathers is not just EXTREMELY frustrating, it comes RIGHT AFTER YOU LEARN HOW TO WALL JUMP) -...a poor sense of difficulty balance... (namely thinking of the first jungle temple sequence with the moving platforms, where you have to time your jumps while taking into account descending wall jumps, a moving platform and clunky platforming. I basically uninstalled the game after that point) -...the PRICE... (15 dollars for a bad game, that according to other reviews can be completed in 1-2 hours?!) ...and you have a product that is very nice to look at, but horrible to play. If you wanted evidence that art does not make a game, this is it. If you want to play a good platformer with nice art, I highly recommend the recent Rayman games (origins and legends) or Ori and the Blind Forest. Stay away from this.