Echoes of the Living

I've been following this game for a few years on youtube and steam page and I must say I'm very impressed with its state. The scenarios' graphics are very beautiful to watch. The puzzles are well designed. The files are well written. The ambience is great, I got a lot of genuine scares along my playthrough. The voice acting is bad, yes, but this is a 2-people work, I believe most of these people working on VA were their friends, relatives, etc. Imagine creating a game, you and your friend only, it is a big challenge. The story is very intriguing and interesting, the writing here is very good in my opinion. As of July 2026 I haven't encountered any glitch, bug or anything that could make the game look weird or unplayable. The controls are on par with its genre and I could say they are innovative with the option to reload on the run and while turning back. However... I'm neither an elitist nor a young gamer, I've been playing video games since 1988 when I was a kid and got my first videogame. Hell, I played Mute House, which is extremely rough and Tormented Souls 1 which was unpolished AF and had tons of fun, so I'm not being picky with what I'm about to say, things that led me to lose interest in finishing the game after reaching City Hall: Too many items in a small section...you finally save your game, you dump items on storage, leave 5 open slots and go to a new door..then boom, in the next room there are 567 gunpowders, 5 saplings, 2 melee weapons, 3 key items. So you grab 5, go back to storage box, deposit them, then go back to that room, grab the items, you are full again, go back to storage to leave some slots open again to keep going. That's not normal, that's not natural. Speaking of key items, there was a time I had 6 different key items I had no idea where to use them, of course, because I've never played before...so the amount of times I had to spend 5min running back to the storage just to pick the right items was insane. If you are doing your first run, there are items you gonna grab that will gather dust in your inventory for 3-4 hours and you simply cannot dump them on storage because you never know when you gonna need them. Backtracking is one thing (I played all Resident Evil and Silent Hill games), but the backtracking in this game is on astronomical levels. No other game of this genre I played has the same backtracking, and that includes old classics like Resident Evil 1, Dino Crisis, and most recent ones like Tormented Souls 2. To give an example, I just realized, what if I had not picked Pendantel Crest from his body? It can happen...I wonder how many tenths of minutes I'd have to waste just to backtrack everything and go back to that torture room now that I am in front of City Hall's door. Same for the bottles you have to mix to make acid. 70%+ of the healing items are hidden in corners NO camera angle can access, so you have to click like crazy on void hoping for an item. I might have missed a few items because I don't want to click on every single corner of the screen. Storage box management is not good, it takes ages to find items there and to take what you want. Lockpick and Hammer Nail Removing is annoying as hell..you spend too much time on a meaningless lenghty minigame just to open a door. There was a specific plank that I had to click A button 16 times for a single nail (they have 4 nails), that's not reasonable. Their time should be shortened. I don't know why we need 2 different shotguns, 2 different weapons that use SMG bullets, an assault rifle I haven't needed nor used in 19 hours of gameplay, a magnum AND a flare gun, then a crossbow. That makes inventory manage a nightmare with the amount of different ammunition we have to keep in the inventory and also the variety of different ammunition we grab, making the item pool much worse. If we could only craft SMG and/or Rifle bullets with powder, then yes, maybe it could feel better because after spending my SMG bullets, my SMG weapons are gathering dust on my storage box while I have 30+ shotgun bullets, 20+ bolts and 140+ handgun bullets. Ammo availability is not a problem, it is not scarce (at least on Experienced difficulty), but the oversaturated pool of ammo is a problem. Game has WAY TOO MANY enemies for a game that labels itself as a survival horror game. By the time I left Peacock Pub I had killed 75 enemies, and that's like very early in the game. This game has easily 500 enemies and that's too much. Yes, avoid enemies blablabla, but the game also gives you too many items and you are supposed to use them. In my opinion reducing the amount of enemies could lead to reducing the amount of gunpowders and the negative amount of different weapons (and ammo) this game has, which would make it much more fluid and less tedious. The main culprit of the enemy count in my humble opinion is the respawn this game has. You kill 2 enemies in a narrow corridor where you can't escape, then you proceed to next area, grab a key item, boom, when you come back 4 more enemies where you killed those 2 if you triggered anything like grabbing a new key item. Then 1 hour later you goe another key item and need to go back to that same place, 3 more enemies. WTF, is this an RPG? The killing or the avoidance gets tiring when you have to cross the same alley 9 times. Some of the issues I pointed are probably engine-related like the storage box, and that could take some time to adjust, I can understand that. But most issues this game has for me are design choices which are make the game extremely repetitive, tedious and boring. I really wanted to see how story unfolds, final boss, etc. But I just lost motivation. I currently have 29 hours of playtime, 10 of which were trying my first playthrough on Survivor...I did not manage resources well so I just restarted from scratch on Experienced difficulty. 19 hours and I reached City Hall because I like to play the game slowly, read files, admire the scenario, solve puzzles by myself, etc. I have no problem with a lengthy survival horror game, but the things I listed made me give up. I understand it is in Early Access, and although I doubt anything regarding item management and enemies will change in Liam's campaign, I'm gonna wait for the full release with Laurel campaign to try it again. I'm also pretty sure some people love this game, after all there is a reason the game has positive reviews on its majority. The devs are very caring and dedicated, they answered an email of mine in like 1 hour after it being sent. And making a game with only 2 people is something praisable, I can see love in this project. So, maybe it's just not for me and that's ok. Either way, I honestly wish them both success despite my negative review (I wish I could leave a neutral review but steam sucks, it's yes or no), because that's my personal opinion on the experience I had. Edit: I hate letting things unfinished, so I got my sh*t together and decided to finish the game since I was feeling I was close to finishing it. Manor was a decent experience like the pub. I think the major problem for me ends up being the entire City segment, which is more than half of Liam's campaign, so my arguments above still stand. On standby now waiting for Laurel's campaign and some qol changes.