Review: Fading Echo
- Guilherme Ribeiro
- 37 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Use the elements and save your world from collapse.
THE GAME
Fading Echo is an action-adventure game developed by Emeteria and published by New Tales and Com2uS Holdings. The protagonist, One, sets out to save Corel, her world, from the Paradox Corruption that is distorting reality and destroying everything in its path. With the support of her mother, One seeks to restore order to the world before its complete extinction. One discovers a latent power that manifests at an opportune moment: the ability to transform into a kind of water slime that absorbs elements, combining them to acquire new properties. Thus, One embarks on an adventure to help save Corel.
MY IMPRESSIONS
The third-person adventure presented by Fading Echo, combined with recurring action, creates a classic combination, with many platforming challenges and puzzles throughout the journey. Interestingly, the game often doesn't explain certain mechanics, expecting the player to understand them through trial and error and/or observation to progress. The level of challenge is excellent, requiring the player to think before acting. Map exploration, while often seemingly linear, is rewarding, leading you to find artifacts and points to equip them, which are nothing more than new abilities for One.
Combat in Fading Echo is quite simple, but rewards creative players who use elemental combinations to defeat enemies. Each element has an effect on opponents, greatly facilitating battles, but also creating chaos on the battlefield, as enemies also possess elements and end up interacting with each other. When transformed into his aquatic slime form (if I may call it that), One acquires water properties, allowing him to pass through grates and leaving a trail of water in his wake, which he can use to interact in battle. Touching other elements in this form grants you that property, and you can also combine elements to create new interaction possibilities. It's a mechanic you'll use both in battle and in puzzles, so it's very important to pay attention to the possibilities.
The game is in Brazilian Portuguese, but the coolest thing is that it's also dubbed by renowned Brazilian voice actors such as Carol Valença, Adriana Torres, Guilherme Briggs, Reginaldo Primo, Flávia Saddy, and Léo Rabelo – voices you'll immediately recognize from each character's first line. Speaking of voices, a negative point in Fading Echo is the character conversations, where you have to stay in a specific area to hear the characters talking, and if you leave, the conversation stops. This significantly disrupts the game's rhythm, forcing you to wait through an entire conversation before returning to the action. I only stopped to listen because I wanted to see the voice acting; otherwise, I would have skipped through the whole process just to listen to conversations. The game's art is very colorful, with great color contrasts, well used by the variety of elements that should stand out as they are the core of the game's main mechanics.
Fading Echo doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it does the basics well. The puzzles are much more appealing than the combat parts, which aren't as exciting. The story unfolds gradually, and details of this world are sprinkled throughout the journey, keeping the player interested in what's happening and explaining things about that world. As an action game, Fading Echo doesn't disappoint, but it's not thrilling either; as an adventure, it's very fun.
ACHIEVEMENTS
Fading Echo doesn't complicate things for those who want all the achievements, but it won't make it easy either. Some will be simpler, like listening to all possible conversations, while others will be more challenging, such as finding all the game's artifacts. Finally, in addition to the story-related achievements, a large portion of the achievements aim to make the player interact with the elements and defeat enemies in specific ways, creating an extra layer of challenge while indirectly teaching some mechanics you might not have noticed before. As I said, it's not that complicated, but getting 100% of the achievements will be, at the very least, challenging.
CONCLUSION
While I enjoyed all the puzzles and platforming in Fading Echo, the combat didn't appeal to me. Although the idea is good and rewards creative players, the execution isn't that fun. Whenever I could, I preferred kicking enemies into an endless fall rather than dealing with various elements that I often didn't even know where they came from. The break in rhythm to listen to conversations between characters also didn't please me; it could have been done in a more dynamic way. The Brazilian Portuguese dubbing steals the show, with our incredibly charismatic voice actors. Fading Echo has a good dose of challenge and does the basics of the genre, with interesting mechanics in the adventure, but not so fun in the combat.
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