A Lonely Reflection - Kenopsia and ECHO

“Then she is whirled away in a room whose walls and ceiling and floor are all of mirrors. No doubt it is her own memory of her image in those mirrors I see, but after a step or two she vanishes into the dark and I see her no more” (The Book of the New Sun: Shadow and Claw, Gene Wolfe).

I’ve never been to the Palace of Versailles, and I’ve certainly never visited after hours, when the lights are dim and its ornate halls no longer echo with the footsteps of tourists. Still, I’d wager that playing ECHO, the 2017 stealth game developed by the Danish studio ULTRA ULTRA, is about as close as I can get to having that specific experience without breaking into a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In ECHO, you play as En, who after a century in cryostasis arrives at the Palace - a planet-wide megastructure within which she hopes to find the means for resurrection. The Palace itself is a network of opulent, seemingly-infinite halls. However, it’s more than just a pretty face. The Palace can create exact copies of En that mimic her behaviour and will overwhelm her if she’s not careful. Thus, ECHO is about navigating a beautiful but deadly puzzle box in which the enemies are constantly updating to imitate your own behaviour with each ‘reboot’ of the Palace.

While the gameplay might seem like the prize jewel of ECHO, I want to focus on the setting. There are several reasons why the Palace is one of the most memorable locations I’ve ever experienced in a video game. Firstly, it is a pristine abandoned place. The Palace was constructed by machines for an elite and ultra wealthy family who sought to live out their retirement there for eternity. However, it seems that those elites never arrived. Can a place be abandoned if it was never occupied in the first place?