Echoes of the Emergent
From the creators of Bloom, one of my favorite Playdate games to date, comes Echoes of the Emergent. It’s not quite what I expected when I heard it described as a “kinetic visual novel,” but that is exactly what it is, in the purest sense. Bloom was very, very story-centric, but there was still an interactive element with the rooftop flower garden and deciding what you wanted to text back as replies to friends and family, plus the real-world-time gimmick brought you back day after day for weeks to see where the story would go. Echoes of the Emergent has no interactivity or garden or dialogue choices at all – you push the A button to advance the text, and there is an image in the background illustrating your surroundings, sometimes with light movement in it and accompanying sound effects. You can save your progress at any time or hide the text box to better see the art, but there’s no going back to re-read something you missed, no chapter select, and only the one save slot. It’s basically a digital graphic novel that you can only read in one direction.
When you have a game this barebones, it lives and dies on the story and characters. Luckily, this is where the people that made Bloom excel. You are a high school girl living in a post-apocalyptic world, making the mistakes, feeling the anxieties, and having many of the problems that a high school girl might have when there’s no one around to help and the world is falling apart. Bloom effectively put me in a similar character’s shoes, and you know how you can be watching a scary movie and say things all pragmatically from your couch, like, “I would never do that in this situation!” Well, we’re not in that situation yet. It’s hard to really know. Protagonist Ayumi is doing her best, but it’s bad out there.
She eventually has to leave her cozy (as cozy as it can be) shelter that she’s made for herself and go out into the big scary world to find more food. She meets a cat and nothing bad ever happens to the cat but there are people that will absolutely not play this because they’ll be worried about the cat the whole time. Since Playdate games aren’t really big enough to put on DoesTheDogDie.com, I’m telling you: the cat is never in danger and lives the best little life a cat can have in the post-apocalypse. Spoiler, yes, but it’s important to know this up front. The story is tense enough!
It does a great job alternating between the present day survival mode story and flashbacks to see how the world ended up like this, without revealing too much, too fast. The focus on the small things in the world that keep you going or break you down when you’re all alone give the words a life that is missing in lesser video game stories. There are little nods to characters from Bloom, too, which seem to be there specifically for me, and it’s nice to be part of the super-niche Playdate fandom with our little inside references.
It's a dark story, and nerve-wracking, best enjoyed when you yourself are somewhere safe and warm and well-fed. Like other post-apocalyptic settings, it’s not the being alone part that’s the scariest… it’s what happens when you find someone – or something – else. The sound effects and music are used sparingly but effectively, and the visuals are suitably off-putting. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, just don’t go in expecting a playable “game” and you’ll have a unique experience you can only have on Playdate.
And it’s part of the Fun in the Sun ’24 Playdate Bundle mentioned in the recent Community Direct, along with nine other cool games for just a few bucks more than if you get this game by itself. I’m not a regular visual novel player and it even kept me hooked until the end! Playdate is the place for that – try something new and feel something new while you’re at it.