ECHO vs EchoChambers

A maze with no light in it. You are the only light there is. Touch the screen and your voice goes out as a ring. Walls flare where it passes, then fade back into nothing. What you saw, you have to remember. The dark does not keep it for you. Take the Journey, level by level, or go down into Survival: an endless descent, one life, as deep as you dare. TWO VOICES, AND A PRICE A whisper is cheap and shows you almost nothing: a small circle of the world, close to you. A call carries across a room. It charges the resonators that open sealed doors, and it wakes whatever else is down here, listening. A hundred levels are built on that one choice: how much light is worth how much risk. TWELVE ACTS, DEEPENING The first ones teach you your own voice. Then something that sleeps in the dark learns it too. It cannot hear a whisper. A call, it hears. Later the world stops answering at all, and you cross whole rooms from memory while more than one thing follows the sound of you. FELT, NOT ONLY HEARD Every echo fans out under your palm through the Taptic Engine, in time with the sound. Nothing here is a recording. The soundscape is generated live: a calm pad breathing over near-silence, thinning as the dread rises to take its place. Headphones, if you have them. A dark room, if you can. WHAT IT COSTS Levels 1 to 20 are free. That is the whole hunt: both voices, sealed doors, zones of silence, and four acts spent beside things that come for the sound you make. One purchase opens the other eighty and everything in them: the pack that learns your habits, silence laid over whole maps, and the abyss, which is not the bottom. It opens Survival too, the endless descent. There is nothing else to buy, ever. No advertising. No subscription. No account of its own (Game Center is optional). The only permission the game asks for is an optional daily reminder for Survival. ACCESSIBILITY Reduce Motion, from iOS or from the game's own settings, stills the camera shake, the parallax and the pulsing. The echo itself stays: it is the game. Sound and haptics have their own separate controls, and the menus and in-game controls are labelled for VoiceOver. iPhone, held either way. Best alone. ECHO is made by Crowmill. More at crowmill.com.

There is no light in here. The maze is drawn only by the sounds you make. Tap, and a pulse spreads out from you — walls flare where it touches them, then fade back into the dark. Hold, and a low hum shows you further, and costs you more. Throw a distracting stone, and listen to where it lands. Everything that hunts you hears exactly the same sounds. That is the whole game. Sound is how you see, and it is how you are found. Every sound spends breath, and breath does not always come back. The player who lights the maze up cannot get out of it; the player who creeps through in near-silence can. SEVENTY HAND-BUILT LEVELS, in seven sets that each teach you something new: • Origins — learning to see with sound • Echoes — things that hunt, and things on rails • Hollows — crossings over what is not there • Thresholds — closed doors need a key to open them • Spiral — rings and spokes, not corridors • Honeycomb — six ways on from everywhere • The Famous — mazes that exist, or did, or never did! THE FAMOUS ONES ARE REAL, MOSTLY. Hampton Court, Bridge End Gardens, Horta, Versailles and Schönbrunn are traced from their published plans: the same hedges and the same wrong turns, in the dark. Villa Pisani and Ashcombe are reconstructions built on what is documented of them. Chartres is the pattern rather than the floor. Hawara is gone, so it is built from what Herodotus wrote down. And the Minotaur's is ours, because his never existed! Every one of them says on screen which it is. A MAZE A DAY. Everyone in the world gets the same daily maze, built from the date. Clear it on consecutive days to build a streak. The daily is free, always, and it draws on everything the paid sets contain — doors, rings, honeycombs — so you can see what the rest of the game is like before deciding whether you want it. AN ENDLESS DESCENT. Deeper and darker, without end. Your breath carries from one depth to the next, so how far you get is decided by how much sound you were willing to spend twenty levels ago. THREE LEADERBOARDS through Game Center: today's maze by fastest time, resetting every day; the longest daily streak you have ever run; and the deepest anyone has gone. THINGS THAT HUNT. Three of them, and they are not the same. One is blind and wanders towards noise. One waits, silent, for you to come to it. One runs a fixed route and does not care about you at all — until it does. ALSO: a relic hidden in every level, awards for finding half of them and then all of them, colour themes that unlock as you go, and a full tutorial, because almost nothing here can be worked out by poking at it. FREE TO PLAY, AND HONEST ABOUT IT. Thirty levels and the daily maze are free forever. One payment unlocks everything else — the later sets, the famous mazes, the endless descent. It is a single purchase, not a subscription. There are no adverts anywhere in this game, no tracking, and no analytics. Play with headphones if you can. It is a game about listening.