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I'm not sure how you feel about eye contact, but even if you really, really love it, Echo is going to test you. Its menu screen, for starters, is a huge eyeball, lashes thick and curling and as weird and alien as real, human lashes, its pupil darting around as you hover between the usual options. Phew! Once you've gotten past that, you're up for a lengthy opening ramble through an orbiting spaceship where you have emerged from a century of cryo-sleep, down to a planet where ice fields turn out to be endlessly replicated white cubes, and beneath that to a vast procedural palace.All this time you are being watched, of course. Your ship's AI is tracking your every move and can't wait to tell you how much he - it? - hates you. And then this palace, filled with baroque furniture and clear white light to invoke all those 2001 memories is also quietly agitated by the act of seeing. The shiny floors have a pattern that works like an optical illusion, the walls are often mirrored or home to doors that come studded with bland marble faces. Everything is ready to reflect an image or bend it into some weird new shape, and then the baddies turn up and Echo shows its hand, because the baddies are you, and the baddies' big trick is that they are watching you.
This is Echo's big selling point, inevitably: murderous AI that doesn't know how to do much until you start murdering it yourself, by which point you realise that you're simultaneously teaching it how to murder you right back. Each challenge in Echo - get from here to there, collect enough of these to open a door, grab one of those from a distant point and bring it back to this point again - is broken down into a series of stages. You mingle amongst the murderous clones. You pick a few off. The game notices the ways you've been picking them off and powers everything down. Lights out. When the lights come on again, the clones are all back but they've learned to do the things you've been doing.
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