About the game

Echoes is a puzzle platformer for LÖVE 11.5. You are a small lantern-spirit in a ruin lit by hanging torches. You can’t jump very high and you can’t cross wide pits. What you can do is remember.

Run it

The quickest way is to play it in your browser. To run the desktop version:

With LÖVE 11.5 installed, run the play script from the repository root:

scripts\play.cmd        (Windows)
scripts/play.sh         (macOS, Linux)

LÖVE loads the game/ folder, so love game from the repository root works too. On Windows, "C:/Program Files/LOVE/lovec.exe" game also prints the console output.

Controls

Keyboard and an Xbox-style controller drive the same actions, and you can plug the controller in at any time. On-screen hints switch to button names once you touch the pad.

The pad gives a light rumble when you die and when you cast.

The echo

The game records your position every simulation step, 60 times a second. A cast copies the last 3 seconds, which is 180 frames, into an echo.

• The echo appears where you were 3 seconds ago and replays what you did.
• When the replay ends, it stays frozen where you cast it for 4 seconds, then fades.
• An echo is a one-way platform. You can land on it, ride it while it moves, and jump up through it from below.
• An echo weighs down pressure plates. A door is open only while you or an echo stands on its plate, which has the same letter in the level map.
• At most 2 echoes exist. A third cast removes the oldest.
• Dots trace the path an echo cast now would walk, and a faint ghost marks where it would start. At a mirror shrine they show the reflection, and they stop at a veil. A live echo shows the rest of its route the same way.
• Hold rewind to run the world backwards, up to 30 seconds and faster the longer you hold it, even after a death. The level clock keeps running.

Two tricks fall out of that. Stand on a plate for 3 seconds before you cast and the echo sits on that plate for about 7 seconds. Cast at the top of a jump and you leave a platform in mid-air.

Tiles that change an echo

The second and third acts add three tiles, the fourth adds a checkpoint, and every level has an ember.

• The mirror shrine is violet. Cast while touching it and the echo replays reflected about the shrine, so it walks where you did not, even through walls. Mirrored echoes are violet too.
• The veil is amber. You walk through it. An echo whose next step would enter it stops there and stays for 4 seconds. A veil is where you park a ghost.
• Crumble stone is ochre. Half a second after anything stands on it, you or an echo, it gives way. It grows back 3 seconds after nothing is left inside it. An echo replays positions, so it keeps standing where the stone used to be.
• The ember is an orange spark, one per level, off the main route. It’s optional. You or any echo take it by passing through it, and it counts once you clear the level carrying it. It survives a death only if you lit a waystone while carrying it.
• The waystone is a cairn with a crystal on top. Touch it and it lights. Death and R put you back on the waystone you lit last, with no echoes, an empty memory, doors shut and crumble stone whole. The pause menu’s Restart level starts the whole level over.

The twenty-two levels

Acts IV and V are long levels of two to four rooms, each room starting at a waystone. Progress, best times and fewest deaths save to save.txt in the LÖVE save directory. Clearing a level unlocks the next two, so you can skip one you’re stuck on.