Peaceful, Serene, Brutally Cruel to Children by YiKwang on February 9, 2012
Rating: 10/10
This game is an affront to all gamers everywhere...
Allow me to explain: as I child I loved this game like no other. First, TRAGEDY! Poor Ecco's friends and family have been abducted by some strange alien-esque force. An unusual mix of the beauty of lusheous reefs and the surreal horror of a giant purple vortex in the sky sucking up dolphins and pretty pink fishies.
But lo and behold! Ecco is safe! And if ever a dolphin could overcome adversity, danger, obstacle and the instincts they hve in real life, it's Ecco.
The beginning of the game is fairly simple, you learn to adapt to needing to eat creatures of the deep, while having to breathe at the ocean's surface. Of course, air pockets fathoms down while sustain young Ecco, but there is a difficult balance that must be respected.
After you've explored a bit and gotten used to the feeding, breathing and avoiding dangerous creatures, you begin to find the dangers are growing, and as Gene Wilder said, they show no sign of slowing and there is no way of knowing, in this case, what may try to eat you next.
By the end of the game you are torrenting through labrinths of underwater caves, fleeing from fearsome beasts and constantly looking for food and air to keep poor Ecco going.
All in all, the juxtaposition of the gentle and beautiful, and the fear of the unknown, combined with the struggle to save one's loved one's - is a classic combination of story-teller's tricks, but personified by a simple Bottle-Nose, just trying to understand a world he was never designed to encounter.
A fine puzzle game spliced with moments of desperate survival and action, wrapped up in an endearing character that in most of these stories would be a lonely young japanese boy from the 1600's, or perhaps a 21st-century bimbo who has to move to the-middle-of-nowhere, Alabama. Not all stories are great, you see... but this one is.
Ecco, if I were a male dolphin, I would totally switch for you, bwong!
