If you happen to run out of fuel, then your only option is yet another dice roll that will determine whether you are rescued and returned to the nearest space station or if you receive a game over and have your save file automatically load at the nearest space station. You need a certain amount of fuel to get from one point or another, and if you don’t have enough you’ll need to explore abandoned caves (which is also usually just a random dice roll) to gather treasures that can be sold to buy more fuel. Because of the repetitive and underwritten nature of these events, the majority of time between major story scenes is really just a glorified fuel management simulator. If you succeed then you’ll probably be rewarded with some extra fuel or money, and if you fail then the event will simply end with a generic blurb that adds a “tale of failure” to your inventory. These events are made worse by the fact that most of them boil down to the same two options: either roll the dice to see if you happened to succeed or simply run away.
There isn’t a lot of story to get attached to in these events many of them delve deep into the sprawling political and religious backstory of the world the game takes place in with very little time dedicated to seeing characters interact with each other in any meaningful way. All of these events occur quickly with maybe two or three lines of dialogue and then one or two paragraphs of narration explaining how things went. A local could ask you for help with some task, or you may get harassed by the border patrol. Upon arriving at a location for the first time you will usually be prompted with a problem and a choice. Each space station or planet you can stop at features some flavor text and maybe a quick dialogue event with very little else going on. The adventure takes place mostly on an interstellar navigation map where you fly Eda’s ship, the Red Chamber, between points of interest. However, the beginning of chapter two introduces the primary interactive element of the game. These events-which are comprised almost entirely of linear, scripted cutscenes-make up roughly the first hour of the game, and I had begun to assume at this point that Echo of Starsong would essentially be a visual novel. The game’s first chapter ends in an exciting scene where they successfully escape and fly off into the stars together. The two pairs compete to get the job, and several mishaps lead to them needing to work together when they are ambushed by a band of pirates. Soon after they meet a strange woman named Eda and a young girl traveling with her named Remi.
Music swells as the game flashes back sixty-six years ago to a post-war interstellar civilization, promising to tell the story of how Jun met Eda and why he wishes he could hear her voice one last time.įrom there we meet a younger Jun and his guardian Kay as they try to talk their way into a well-paying gig. He explains to a colleague that, despite the risk, he must explore the cave himself in order to atone for how he failed someone named Eda many years ago. OPUS: Echo of Starsong opens with an old man named Jun arriving alone in a wondrous cave.