[I recently discovered that I missed out a large number of #1 games from earlier in the ’90s, and with help I’m working through one a week. For this one I’m joined by Mel, a friend with a strong interest in the marine world and a perfect fit for the game I’ve invited her to write about.]
Despite not being much of a gamer when I was younger, and not owning the game myself, Ecco the Dolphin is one of the games that has stuck with me over the years. I’ve always found Ecco to be a bit of a contradiction – the music and graphics are very peaceful and easy, in strict contrast to the game which is so frustratingly difficult.
The years have gone by and now I’m an avid gamer. I’m not good, but I really enjoy them. For me, the story is a big aspect of a game and I have always been a completionist. Never knowing what happened to Ecco’s pod has haunted me throughout the years, so when I was given the opportunity to replay this game I snapped it up.
I’m not kidding about it being frustratingly difficult. It took me a good 20 minutes just to start the game – try as I might, I could not jump high enough to trigger the impressive cutscene depicting the loss of Ecco’s pod. I still can’t explain what I did differently to make it happen. And this is just the start of the difficulty issues. One part of the game I love is the realism, with Ecco needing to find regular air sources to breathe – but it adds an even harder dimension to a game that did not need it. The game functions as a labyrinth you need to navigate without twine or a map to find your way back. This is most pronounced with the key glyphs blocking your way, where you have to find the one that unlocks it and sing to it, then find your way back to the first. 3 hours later, and not much further into the game at all, I noticed that you can “echolocate” to show a very small map by HOLDING the A button – a key skill that is never properly explained. Unless you read the manual apparently. I didn’t – my mistake.
The tutorial involves communicating with fellow dolphins who will give you hints, like “sing to the shelled ones and they will heal your wounds” and “charge small fish to feed and gain strength”, but unlike more modern games these clues are all you get. Alarmingly, following the first clue I got, “How high can you jump?”, will trigger the cutscene to progress the game and potentially miss the others. By a few years later Spyro would force you to interact with your peers so vital information isn’t easily missed, and tutorials for games are now largely unskippable and go through all aspects of gameplay, expecting you to physically demonstrate competence before letting you loose in the big virtual world.
Once you complete the tutorial and move onto the Undercaves, the peaceful music becomes more urgent. The music throughout the game is very atmospheric and helps build the world you are in. There’s no gradual difficulty increase and you as the player are plunged straight from the softly sloping shallow seas into the cold, dark loneliness of the abyss with no internet to help when you get stuck. Welcome to the deep end, it’s sink or swim time.
Ecco is a unique game for its time. It was a brand new concept, a peaceful dolphin just searching for its friends. Gender unspecified, it easily allowed all players to believe they could be our protagonist, and was a far cry from the typical side scrollers and shooters of the time. As you progress, foes like pufferfish, “8 arms”, sharks and tentacles that just will not let you go start to appear, oftentimes overwhelming Ecco and regenerating constantly whilst you have few resources to heal in the depths. Fellow echo-locators and glyphs give you cryptic clues on what to do. Some suggestions definitely need blind luck, excessive trial and error or an astronaut’s degree from NASA to decipher. Whole levels can be the same. If you wander aimlessly, you WILL die, but how else can you fathom what to do? The cutesy names for various other sea critters add to the confusion but build Ecco‘s world to make a cohesive, fairly realistic ecosystem with a coherent vision that lasts until the end.
Just squidding! After the first 10 or so levels (there are over 20), things get surreal. Spoiler free, I can completely understand the rumours that the developer Ed Annunziata was heavily influenced by John C. Lilly’s eclectic, drug fuelled research into dolphin intelligence and rantings on extraterrestrial life, although he has never confirmed anything more than reading Lilly’s work. Ecco would have been a fantastic game if it had remained realistic and entirely based in the setting of the first few levels, but the actual ending adds to its kooky charm.
The game is quite unforgiving, and doesn’t give you the tools itself to help you progress. Original reviews praise the complexity, stating how the first 4 levels took a reviewer 5 hours to figure out. By Annunziata’s own admission, Ecco was intentionally vague and nearly unbeatably difficult to increase income from game rentals. The manual does more to educate players about dolphins in the real world than how to actually play the game. Too much of Ecco relies on errant, blind exploration when going the wrong way results in a “game over”. With no mini-saves throughout levels, just a complete reset, it is easy to understand why so many didn’t finish the game. The difficulty creates an awkward situation where players can easily get frustrated with what is, at its core, a great, sophisticated game with original gameplay and beautiful graphics for its time. I appreciate a lot of what I have said so far sounds negative, but I do love this game, and you should too. What I wouldn’t give for a proper remake of this with more modern safety nets built in to help make the game more accessible to all. A chance for this game to be an appropriate challenge rather than feeling like Sisyphus rolling that stone up a hill.
Although maybe it’s more apt to describe its players as Captain Ahab, chasing the unattainable white whale of a completed Ecco playthrough?
Never mind. Now, there are plenty more fish in the sea.
