Ecco is a dolphin simulator. You swim around, breach, butt into other sea creatures and use your sonar… wait, a tornado kidnapped my family? What’s this talking orb helix? Now I’m in Atlantis?? And a time machine sent me back 55 million years?? Now I’m being hunted by aliens in their spaceship???
These surprises unfold gradually. The muted colour palette and New Age-y music add to the ambience that comes with these deep-sea mysteries, a dolphin out of his depth (pun intended) in a vast ocean of secrets. I really love this feeling that the game portrays… unfortunately it’s often undermined by frustration while playing.
Ecco controls well enough, and it’s really fresh and different to be playing as a dolphin underwater, using sonar to interact. The only other things like it I’ve played are Ika-chan (which is going for a very different movement style) and Aquaria (which has more refined control and is more complex). But Ecco is much older than these games and shows perhaps an inexperience in game design of this type. You have to watch both health and air, which are replenished in different ways. Go too fast and you bump into enemy sea creatures constantly; too slow and your air runs out. Dying means doing the whole level again, unless you have savestates, and please DO NOT play this game without savestates. The last level in particular is an extremely lengthy autoscroller followed by a gruelling boss fight. Lose and you do the autoscroller all over again. Did I mention that section is full of one-hit-kill aliens that move through walls?
The later Japanese release adds checkpoints to this level, and the Mega CD version has checkpoints throughout when you clear a barrier glyph (these revisions are what suggest to me inexperience with difficulty balance). I played the 3DS release, which is the Mega Drive version but with some nifty bonus features and one save state. The CD release is the way to go though as its soundtrack is better quality and it has extra levels, on top of the aforementioned checkpointing. (The PC version is even more advanced but you need fan-made patches and I’m not sure if it does savestates.) You’ll want to make this experience as pleasant as it can be, because the game is actually something special if you can get through it. The Game Gear/Sega Master System version is also fun; less levels, a more blippy “video-game-y” soundtrack, more block-pushing puzzles, less combat, brighter colours, clumsier controls. It’s not essential to get the full Ecco experience, but it’s got its own charms and little additions; if you must try it then opt for the SMS version: the much larger screen real estate really helps.
Ecco confounded my expectations and my hopes with its difficulty, but the atmosphere and the fresh mechanics pulled me through for sure. Real dolphins may be cruel jerkstores, but this dolphin’s quest was gripping, even if Ecco himself is a cipher. Special mention must be made of the manual done by Carol Ann Hanshaw, a real gold standard for writing, interesting content, and not spoiling the surprises of the game like I did… oops.
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