Echo: A Music Game

There's a relatively good idea at the core of Echo: A Music Game.

Your job is to replicate a small section of a song by placing arrows, which sing out musical notes whenever they bounce off of a wall, on a cramped pegboard.

Get it right, and the game will play a little ditty. Complete all the levels in one chapter, and they'll play in unison. Your reward is a full harmonised song. You can then edit each piece to make your own remix, should you be so inclined.

Completing that goal isn't particularly challenging: you just place each arrow on a track long enough so that it bounces off either side in time to the music, and at the right distance so it strikes a wall at the right moment.

The difficulty arises when the claustrophobic nature of the board means that the arrows will intersect one another's paths. That's a bad thing, as colliding notes result in an immediate Game Over.

Now, you could theoretically count the exact number of tiles that the arrows will move to predict any collision points, but that's more of a chore than a challenge and practically impossible when you have more than three interlocking arrows.

There's also trial and error. You could tweak and move the arrows until you thoroughly optimise the solution and come up with a perfect answer, like a sort of rhythm-based SpaceChem.

But Echo: A Music Game goes to great grotesque lengths to stop that. Because if you mess up ten times (which is not an uncommon occurrence), the game sticks you on a five-minute time-out. Thus, you can't play that level again until the wait timer reaches zero.

You can't advance in the game at all at this point. You could go back and try to get a better score at a previous level, or you could remix finished levels, but you can't try the level again until the wait timer is over.

The absolute audacity of the developer here is shocking. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so infuriating and demeaning to be put on the naughty step for five minutes. Somehow, not being able to pay to skip the timer makes it seem even more gross.

That the developer feels it has the right to dictate how many goes I should take and when I should take a break is definitely the worst of the game's sins. But not the limit.

Echo: A Music Game takes way too long to teach you the basics, so you have to sit through a whole series of hand-holding stages that give away the answer in the form of overzealous hints.

It's also repetitive and alarmingly straightforward. The only real challenge comes from trying to find places for all the notes so they don't collide. This isn't very fun, and is taxing in all the wrong ways.

Echo: A Music Game has a kernel of a good idea. But by refusing to build on that central puzzle and by cruelly locking you out if you dare to test and tweak your answer, this game cannot be recommended in any real way.