Welcome Back to the World of Survival Horror: ‘Echoes of the Living’

As you may be aware if you follow me on Bluesky, I’ve spent the first half of 2026 in the IGN guide mines, and the newsletter’s suffered as a result.

So far this year, I’ve co-written or written the guide wikis for Resident Evil Requiem, Slay the Spire 2, and Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake. It’s been a busy few months. I don’t know where IGN got the idea that I’m a horror guy, unless it has something to do with a solid 75% of everything I ever do or say.

Speaking of which:

I’ve been looking for an excuse to pick up Echoes of the Living for a while. After 70 hours of Fatal Frame II, it sounded like it’d be genuinely cathartic to hit some Spanish zombies with a baseball bat. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.

Echoes, now available in Steam Early Access, is a classic-style survival horror game by the Madrid-based husband-and-wife team MoonGlint, which throws you into the middle of a vaguely European city that’s been overrun by the undead.

As you might be able to tell from a short glance, Echoes is a deliberate homage to the first three games in the Resident Evil series, and to a lesser extent, to the first five years of survival horror history. Your resources are scarce, the controls are deliberately awkward, you're isolated and alone from the jump, and it’s set in a surreal alternate universe where every building in a major metropolitan area is locked by three ornate keys, two crests, a puzzle that requires you to read up on local history, and a malfunctioning fusebox. Echoes is not wearing its influences on its sleeve; it is wholly shirtless, the better to display its influence-themed full sleeve tattoos.

This is not a complaint. Echoes is clearly a game that’s been baking in the back of someone’s head for decades, which takes 1998’s Resident Evil 2 as a starting point and adds multiple mechanical and narrative tweaks. It’s someone’s wouldn't-it-be-cool-if dream project, and I don’t have it in me to mock that to any serious extent.

What kind of is a complaint, however, is that Echoes is one of those indie retro revivals that’s deliberately held onto some of its inspiration’s jank. With many of these games, there’s a distinct friction between how you remember these games and how they actually were, and the success or failure of an individual nostalgia project tends to ride on how they handle that conflict. Echoes has every bit of the atmosphere of the games that inspired it, but it’s kept some of the early-installment weirdness that should’ve stayed in the ‘90s.

In October of 1996, ex-soldier Liam Oakwood rides into Alba City to move in with his fiancé Octavia. When he reaches the outskirts of town, the roads are closed due to dense fog, so Liam checks into a local motel and goes to sleep.

When Liam wakes up, Alba City has been overrun by zombies. Instead of leaving, he fights deeper into the city in hopes of finding Octavia. Along the way, Liam meets another survivor, Laurel Reeves, a police officer who’s in search of her missing father, and her buddy Marcus; makes a couple of powerful enemies; and slowly begins to unravel what’s happened to Alba City.

At time of writing, Echoes only features Liam’s campaign. A second one starring Laurel is planned for when the game reaches version 1.0. For right now, you still get a lot of game for your money; a blind run through Echoes could take you 20 hours or more. It feels less like a standalone ‘90s game and more like a collected trilogy, especially once you make it out of the second major area.

The big selling point for Echoes, at least for die-hard survival horror fans, is that it’s built top to bottom using pre-rendered backgrounds and static camera angles, in the spirit of the 2002 remake of the original Resident Evil. It’s rare that you can see an enemy coming, and many areas deliberately hide zombies and other monsters behind blind spots.

Further, Echoes takes a distinct glee in giving you as little help as possible. Only about half the items in the environment have any kind of visual cue attached to suggest they’re important (if you’re one of the people who was losing his entire god damn mind about yellow paint a couple of years ago, Echoes was made for you), and many of its camera angles are poised to make it difficult to tell where you can go. When I’ve been stuck, it’s frequently been due to a puzzle or hint that I completely overlooked or because I didn’t realize there was another exit to a particular room. Echoes may be a self-conscious take on old RE games, but it has a deliberately sadistic edge all its own.

That adds up to create a real sense of dread. Alba City does not make any intuitive sense, and much of it is comprised exclusively of blocked roads and twisting back alleys. Half of it is sealed behind strange puzzles, every car or intact window is a potential ambush vector, and the camera is actively working against you. In its best moments, Echoes feels less like a horror game and more like the nightmare you’d have after playing one.

In its worst moments, conversely, Echoes is so committed to its 1998 feel that it comes off like it doesn’t want you to play it at all.

If you weren’t there back in the day, many of the old-school survival horror games used a specific “tank” control scheme where pushing Up on the control pad always made your character move forward, regardless of your current camera angle. This took some getting used to, but it was really the only way to make action gameplay coexist with static camera angles.

Otherwise you’d have run into the same problem you can see in a few other ‘90s games like Parasite Eve, where you have to reorient yourself in every new room because all the directions have changed; you were moving left, but now left takes you back the way you came. The tank controls address that, but they were so counterintuitive that many vocal players simply opted not to bother.

Echoes of the Living actually keeps the tank controls. Worse, it tries to split the difference between them and the later adjustments from games like the first Devil May Cry. As a result, playing Echoes is a rigged game of roulette where I possess no great certitude about what direction Liam will opt to go when I push the thumbstick. Sometimes he’ll play ball and I’ll successfully juke an oncoming zombie. Other times, he’ll swan-dive into that zombie’s arms with a focus and intensity that is usually only seen in acts of affection. There’s no way of knowing which result I’ll get outside of the given moment in which it occurs.

Less relevantly, Echoes could stand to rework its voice acting, it's got a few rough spots in its narrative (Alba City's outbreak timeline only seems to be about four hours long), and its English script needs a solid copy-edit. It’s an indie, self-published Early Access game, so I’m not that put off by all that, but the overall presentation is still rough. I’m really hoping that it’s not going for deliberate camp, especially since one of the major enemies currently sounds like he’s doing an unenthusiastic impression of Ren Hoek. It really kicks a hole in what would otherwise be a tense experience.

(I'd also note that there are two mandatory puzzles in Echoes that I couldn't solve on my own due to being red-green color-blind, such as the fuse box in the city hall. It could use a few accessibility tweaks.)

Ordinarily, Echoes of the Living would be so firmly in my wheelhouse that I’d have to wonder if I was somehow responsible for its creation. It faithfully recreates the original '90s survival horror formula, warts and all, with a solid grasp of what made it work. Genre die-hards will probably want to play on the highest difficulty, as Echoes is otherwise quite generous with weapons and health, but it’s got a lot going for it.

The biggest issue is that after 21 hours, I still don’t feel like I’ve got a handle on how Echoes controls. It’s not deliberately awkward as much as it’s broken, and while I can muscle through, it feels like my character’s a suicidal drunk. If MoonGlint can switch up the controls so they’re less of a struggle, they’ve got some solid art chops and design skills on display. This could be good, with time. Right now, it’s only kind of okay.

[Echoes of the Living, published and developed by MoonGlint, is now available via Steam Early Access for $24.99. This column was written using a retail copy of the game.

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