Fossil Echo review – Knave Gaming

Grade: A-

Gorgeous visuals mixed with hard as nails platforming.

Fossil Echo is a side-scrolling platformer with beautiful hand-drawn animations. Created by New Caledonia team Awaceb as their inaugural title, Fossil Echo regales you with a slowly unraveling story about a teen boy searching for answers amongst the ruins of a tower. His reflections and memories flesh out the story as you climb. They challenged you with timed runs, platforming challenges, and also stealth levels. You have no special powers, and stealth is all you have to protect yourself from the dangerous ninja cult that inhabits the tower. Fossil Echo was one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever looked at. I had a few difficulties with the platforming, but the outstanding illustration, animation, and soundtrack far outweighed any negatives.

Digital art you could hang on a museum wall

Any discussion of Fossil Echo has to start and end with the hand-drawn animated art and the soundtrack. Just for the art and soundtrack alone, Fossil Echo is worth picking up. They have crafted each setpiece in perfect detail, with light, shadow, fog, and texture added. It makes the 2D side-scrolling layout feel full of depth.

To give you a sense of the art style, I pulled out some of my favorite visuals.

I really liked how the light from the fire casts shadows across the sculpted hands.

After the platforming levels, you get attempt to interpret cave paintings that flesh out the lore.

The way they overlaid the shadows across the sculptures holding up the ceiling struck me.

The nebula colors in the background and the shadowed foreground really make this scene pop.

This is the quite possibly the prettiest and most epic door I’ve ever seen!

In the soundtrack, composer John Robert Matz starts with a marimba and violin duet that swells into a full orchestral piece. The music is a perfect complementary mood setter for the game. The soundtrack hit a sweet spot for me, and I’ll be pulling out the album long after I’ve lost interest in the game.

A narrative that unravels like a tapestry

There is no written word in “Fossil Echo.” The story unfolds piece-by-piece through the level exploration itself and cutscenes. At the start of the game, you go in cold. You do not know why this young boy is climbing this dangerous tower full of traps and ninjas. But, as you wend your way up the building, you rest at various campsites, which then unlocks memories from your prior journeys.

I was a little disappointed in the game’s symbolic, anti-climactic ending. Those looking for concrete answers won’t find them in Fossil Echo. I’ve thought about it a bit, and I’m still unsure of the overall meaning of the story or what it was trying to point out. Everything in the game was so beautiful to look at, though I didn’t care that the narrative details were unclear.

Game mechanics had some unfair feeling challenges

Fossil Echo switched between a variety of level types. Some levels had you speedrun vertically. Others asked the player to stealth among deadly ninjas and traps and carefully timed his movements. Others still were straight platforming nightmares.

The teenage boy we follow in the story has no special powers. He’s only able to move, hang off of walls, and jump. The controls are smooth, but the coordination they ask of a player is a tall task. The obstacles moved, or fell, or popped in and out of the wall on a timer. You’ll need to time a series of jumps and movements in a perfectly sequenced acrobatic performance to keep from dying.

Thankfully, there is an “easy” mode, where you can skip the platforming levels. This was perfect for me, as I was all-in on the art and sound but not ready to spend hours attempting to hone my reflexes.

I felt guilty watching this young adventurer get battered, shot, speared, knifed, and crushed many times during the game because of my poor reflexes. On death, the reset was pretty quick, at least. Sorry, kid!

Each platforming challenge in the game was simply devilish in design. They give you a roadmap of graffiti in the background to follow at least.

A game you’ll remember

Fossil Echo, to me, is a hidden gem in indie gaming. I’m surprised it didn’t gain more popularity. I had no expectations and hadn’t heard of the game before picking it up, but I was gob-smacked by the illustrations and sound. While it has some weaknesses in the gameplay, the “easy” mode can skip some of the nigh-impossible platforming handily balances that out. Fossil Echo is a digital piece of art I won’t soon forget.

I am looking forward to Awaceb’s future games. I was thrilled to see they’ve started the development of a new project, Tchia!

Want to see more? Explore all itch.io bundle for racial equality and justice game reviews.