Echo the Shadow

Echo:	Overview	Glossary	System	Fiction

Alejandra Pizarnik

“No one has more thirst for earth, for blood, and for ferocious sexuality than the creatures who inhabit cold mirrors.”

Echo is a game about the creatures that inhabit mirrors, borne of the flat image in the reflection given life with soul fragments lost by the real person. Empty of purpose and fate, these unconnected beings grieve for the loss of who they were, and seek depth in what they could be. Feeding off the real world, they carry back power to the Inverse – the land behind reflections – and if they do not fade away, they can slowly and with great effort grow into powerful and twisted legends.

Themes

Echo the Shadow is a game about the process of finding or forging new meaning in one’s own self. It is a journey of reinventing identity and personal depth from a place of loss, and exploring the question of what defines a person.

Echo is about the journey upward from grief, moving away from a shattering moment and toward hope. It is an interpersonal effort, requiring the support of others.

Echo is a game about image and truth, illusion and reality, movement and purpose. It is about appearance hiding the deeper layer underneath, or finding contradictions underneath the obvious.

Echo is a game about loss, recovery, and the process of growth and reinvention.

Image vs. Identity

People have relationships, direction, fate, and move with purpose. In short, they live. The essence of who they are is typically intangible, but is often discussed and recognized. Photos, twins, corpses: we generally agree that these do not have the ineffable identity of the person they resemble.

Our descriptions of people also describe some events and the passage of time as changing something fundamental within people. We say, “after the death of her daughter, she was never the same,” or “he stopped drinking and is not the person he was ten years ago.”

Echos start as empty images, stripped of the identity they remember. Transformed by an event, they are born of soul fragments shed off a living person, and can watch a life they are no longer part of. They struggle to find new meaning and purpose, becoming more than an empty reflection.