Like most games born of Metroid, Echo Weaver’s inspiration is obvious. You explore and fill out a large, continuous map in a mysterious location and your abilities expand as you progress. Its other presumed inspiration, however, Outer Wilds, only makes itself apparent as you dig deeper into the unique structure of the game. You are stuck in a time loop in Echo Weaver, and it dictates what you can do and what you know about your suite of abilities. You don’t unlock new traversal moves and expanded weapons as much as you remember you literally had them all along. It makes the reward of discovery powerful in Echo Weaver, but it also creates frustrating barriers to progress.
As the titular Weaver, the character basically knows as much as the player holding the controller. You have a boomerang-like glaive you throw primarily to solve puzzles, and though it can be used to attack enemies, you won’t encounter very many. You also quickly learn that every few minutes, a vague calamity strikes, and you are forced back in time to start over. You keep your map progress and obviously everything that you’ve learned, and that’s more than enough to make death or resets not feel too unfair.
What really sets Echo Weaver apart is that many of your most useful abilities are not ones that you unlock, but rather ones you learn exist at some point along the way. For example, you can set your glaive on fire from the moment you start the game, but you won’t learn how until you’ve made significant progress. Mechanically, this is basically how every Metroid-inspired game works: Make enough progress and you will be able to do a new thing. But learning the often complicated procedures necessary for these later abilities that you could always do makes the reveal all the more rewarding. You weren’t given the ability to set your glaive on fire – you figured it out yourself. And that’s a good feeling.
This all plays into the time loop structure, too. The shortcuts needed to get to certain areas so you have more time to explore them were there all along – you just didn’t know how to see them. It’s why Echo Weaver feels more like a complicated puzzle box than a search action game where you’re killing the same creatures over and over, and I appreciate how that sets it apart from other games in the genre.
When you’re figuring things out and making good progress, it feels like you’re working in tandem with the time loop. But on the occasions when you’re not solving the puzzles you need, which is frequent, it can be frustrating. Running out of time when you’re trying to explore or just figure one last thing out becomes a burden, and the best course of action is often to just reset the time loop (essentially killing yourself), which feels like giving up in a moment that you don’t want to.
The worst moments of the time loop coming to a close are when you’re engaged in a complicated platforming gauntlet. Echo Weaver’s greatest shortcoming is that its jumping doesn’t feel great. Leaping is solid for general exploration, but when you’re trying to make it through thickets of thorns and endless pits that steal your health (and time), the action struggles to keep up with the demand. And when you’ve finally made it through and time loops just before you hit that checkpoint, it can be incredibly disheartening. Though resetting and trying again is built into the game’s design so it doesn’t become too much of a burden, I did hit a handful of distracting bugs primarily related to areas not loading properly when I fast-traveled to them.
Echo Weaver’s unique approach to the Metroid structure is admirable, unique, and well executed. The sense of discovery is fantastic, and though I realistically probably won’t immediately play the game again, the idea that I could start with knowledge of basically all of the abilities to rip through the game at high speed is an enticing one. Developer Moonlight Kids puts a lot of trust in the player to figure out how it all works, and the reward is palpable. That trust leads to some frustrated, aimless wandering, and the platforming challenges occasionally venture into feeling unfair, but by the end you will feel like a genius. That’s a good feeling to leave a game with.
