Arches

I'm struggling to determine the proper way to talk about this game in this review. On the one hand it's a sequel to Echo in a lot of ways; a few recurring characters, same setting, many similar themes, etc. But on the other hand, it's very much its own story that exists completely independent of the previous game; you don't need to know anything about Echo to fully understand the story (there's a few minor nods to the previous game, but that's it). This game is also in a lot of ways Echo completely stripped of anything superfluous; there's no slice of life segments, no romantic or sexual content, a lot less supernatural elements (they are there but they're much less central to the way the plot unfolds), and not even any choices (that the player makes at least). One of the video essays I watched on it put it well; unlike Echo or TSR, the (incredible) opening of this game makes it clear that we are not going to do anything but watch these characters suffer. As I said in my Echo review, Brian is one of my favorite villains ever and he gets center stage, so to speak, in this game, which expands on one of my very favorite parts of Echo.

The narration has shifted to an omniscient third-person (I'll talk about this more later) and jumps between the characters a decent amount, but Cam is definitely the main protagonist; we get by far the most on his thoughts, background, and desires. This seems to be a very personal story for Howly (the sole writer) and it ended up hitting me really close to home many times, and there are two main things about Cam’s character I’ll discuss here. The first is his problems with addiction. To make a long story short I've had a lot of problems with substance abuse and I really connected with how it was presented here. I don't consume a lot of addiction-focused media (Infinite Jest kind of scared me away from that subgenre) so I can't say how common post-addiction narratives are, but I really liked this one. A lot of the typical details of addiction are included in the story: how terrible and repulsive your own body feels when you’re fiending, how you always want just one more hit, but what I liked most of all was how disempowering it all feels. I know that if I have access to any substance, I will use it; I’ve had terrible self-control since I was a kid (I still will eat basically anything in front of me even if I’m not hungry because my brain just wants that immediate dopamine hit). Cam feeling disempowered but managing to regain some of his agency is definitely a major part of this story; he exerts his agency by choosing to smoke weed with Artie, but then has it taken away when he gets drugged by Brian. The line about how staying clean will be harder than getting clean, because you'll never not have an addict's brain and you will always, always want to be completely fucked up was like a knife to my heart (Cam was an opioid addict, and relapse rates for opioids are north of 90%. Speaking from experience, opioids are really hard to quit and stay clean from). This is kind of a cliche, but you are never a recovered addict; you will always be recovering. The 'does he even know you at all' line also hit me really fucking hard, because it really can be so easy to hide present or past addictions from your loved ones as long as it isn't like meth or crack and present a happy face, and lying to the people who deeply care about you is generally a pretty terrible feeling. I have no idea if Howly has had personal struggles with substances but if he didn't, he did some really great research.

The other element of Cameron’s character that I really loved was how his self-esteem and general mental health problems were narrated. A lot of contemporary low self-esteem uwu ~self care~ narratives seem to imply that people with mental problems and low self-esteem just need a little bit of love and positive attention from someone else, that you can be 'fixed' with just some affection. While that certainly is true for a lot of people who do just need someone else to be there for them, it’s not always the case. When I’ve been in my deepest depressions I didn’t want my few remaining friends and family to give me love and support; I wanted them to hate me. I wanted them to validate every bad thought I had ever had about myself, to tell me I had always been nothing but a burden who did harm to other people and who everyone would be better off without; at least then they wouldn't feel bad if I was acting suicidal. I realize that this all probably sounds ridiculously over-the-top and melodramatic, but still, those are not fun thoughts to have bouncing around your head. I can’t remember the specific line but there’s something in Arches about how Cam would start fights with his previous, physically abusive boyfriend just so he would get beaten up and that he wishes sometimes that Dev would just hit him as well, to confirm his feelings that he really is a worthless piece of shit who will only ever be a burden to anyone around him, basically the self-harm version of suicide by cop. Cam's breakdown in the motel where he then runs into the desert is a really great depiction of how these kinds of paranoid, intrusive thoughts can spiral out to the point where you feel like you can't trust the people who love you (and then, of course, you feel like an absolute piece of shit for even doubting their loyalty once you calm down). There's also a great representation of the knowledge that you probably have the willpower to quit and stay clean, but that you don't care about yourself and your health enough to do that, and you never will, which is one of the most frustrating feelings I've ever felt. You need something else to be there, be it a partner, a child, a friend, or a god; you feel like shit not just for treating your own body poorly, but you also feel like shit for feeling like shit and for your inability to care about yourself. Throughout the game and especially in the epilogue it also deals with an experience that is very difficult to articulate but is nevertheless frustrating if you have mental problems; once you let other people know how you're feeling, they seem to be treating you as if you're extremely fragile and could fall apart at any moment, and you end up feeling like some kind of total pussy-ass baby wimp who everyone has to be nice to because you can't handle the real world like a real big grown-up adult. Cam decides to get high with Artie basically just to express his frustration that Dev is making that decision for him, and the outcome ends up pretty terrible. Connected to all of this is how Cameron feels completely unworthy of Dev’s love and affection. He’s a (literally) crazy recovering addict with no career prospects while Dev is already very successful and will only be moving higher and higher in the world. When I was at my absolute lowest I felt very guilty for even having any friends or acquaintances at all because letting people get close to me was just another way for me to let them down and hurt them, and when I've had intense depression in a romantic relationship I felt like I was just chaining someone to my worthless self. It’s not surprising that Cam would have similar thoughts, and I really loved how they were presented.

I can imagine that this game will probably be one of those 'either it works or it doesn't' type things for a lot of people, especially for non-furries. Either you can empathize with the characters and the torturous things they experience, or seeing a cartoony coyote wearing human clothes and crying just comes off as kind of goofy. As a furry this was never really a problem for me, but the closest it did come was the psychic communication bits, which could have easily come off as a bit bathetic and silly in the hands of a less talented writer. It's probably the weakest part of the story but certainly doesn't really detract or harm it in any way. If you haven't had problems with either substances or mental health I'm also not sure how much this story will affect you, as they're really core parts of Cam's story. I was a little bit apprehensive when I first saw that PaintFox was doing the art for this game, because his style is more cartoony than the art in Echo or The Smoke Room and ‘cutesy characters in DEEP TRAUMA SCENARIOS’ is so fucking overdone by now, but man he fucking nails it. The sprites are all really expressive and a lot of the CG’s are just straight up beautifully composed. For example, the series of CG's in the mine where Dev is holding Cam, trying to protect him from Brian by using his own body to come between them communicates the utter desperation of the moment super well; he's doing whatever he can to prevent another person he loves deeply from dying, to correct the mistakes he made that led to his sister's death. It's honestly one of the most emotionally potent pieces of furry art I've ever seen, even if that may sound a little bit silly to non-furries. Cameron in particular is such a fucking cute character, I just want him to be happy. Gone as well is the royalty-free soundtrack, replaced with specially composed music, and it’s also all really great. A lot of the music is just mellow electric guitar with a huge amount of reverb, and it captures the spacious feeling of a deserted desert town really well. There are a few production value gripes I have (they reuse a laugh sound effect from Echo that sounds like a fucking cheap Halloween store toy witch cackle, I cannot fucking stand it, although the text itself even mentions that it sounds like a fake toy cackle) but in general this game has greatly improved on Echo’s low production value.

The pacing is improved a lot as well. The story starts at 100 and never really lets up from there, but it somehow never feels like too many intense things are happening one after another. The opening scenario of being chained up and slowly tortured to death by a serial rapist and killer while you see that you're getting texts from your mom asking where you are is heartbreaking. The knowledge that you will die here and that your family is actively looking for you and are probably panicking is another knife to the heart. Thankfully I’ve never had hookups nearly as sketchy as Brian, but I’ve definitely had or tried to have some I really shouldn’t have. Brian has a particular fascination with Cameron and describes him as cute a lot of times, and the way that it slides effortlessly into seething hatred of him is really good too. It covers both the general point of how love and hate can be intertwined in mentally unstable people, but also the specifics of how much internalized homophobia poses a threat to gay men, especially smaller and slimmer ones, and especially in rural areas. The narrative here did something that is actually quite rare: I actually didn’t know if Cam, Dev, and Artie were going to survive. Most of the time main characters have such obvious plot armor that, even when they’re in situations where they could die, you know that they’ll make it through, but when Cam got shot in the face I really thought that might be it for him. This comes from the inherent artificiality of stories; like, if you're reading a novel and the main character seems like they might die halfway through you know they probably won't because there's still half of the story left. Cam getting shot in the mine sequence was clearly the climax of the game and we had established two other potential main characters, so it circumvented those problems. I was pretty sure Artie was going to survive for at least a while after getting shot, but I could also believe that he may not make it all the way to the end either. It would've been narratively weird if he died immediately after being shot (he shows up, is kind of annoying, and then just dies? This story has basically only four characters, and it would be weird for one of them to be that flat), but if he had died after his next scene it would've seemed like he fulfilled his narrative function properly. This all means that this game is actually the most effective horror story of all of Echo Project's games.

The biggest criticism that I can foresee for this game (and for Howly’s writing in general) is that it’s just misery porn, that all these stories are is just watching terrible things happen to cute characters that you love. I can understand why someone would think that if they didn’t really try to analyze the stories, but I think that would be an incredible misreading of both of these games. In both Echo and especially Arches, the narrative is ultimately very hopeful. No matter how bad things are, you can still make choices that improve your situation for yourself and the people you love. Cam’s character arc is very much about him learning to reclaim the agency he has lost throughout his life to his addiction, his schizophrenia, his abusive relationships, and his upbringing. I really love that when he gets shot in the mine, it’s explicitly presented as a choice, but not for the player to make. He is the one who has to make these decisions, not you. A lot of his story in the epilogue is him learning that he is in fact worthy of love and not just a dead weight for everyone who cares about him; if you have so many problems, just wanting love can feel selfish in itself. It’s also very significant that Brian’s murderous fetish is asphyxiation; the sexual violence he enacts on his victims literally takes away their voices (it's an impressive bit of writing that Brian's asphyxiation fetish is extremely thematically significant in both games but in rather different ways). Hell, when Brian tries to maul Cameron to death in the mine, he tries to rip his throat open; Cam singing a song that he wrote is the thing that lets Dev find him in the mines. There's a ton more examples in the story if you start to look for them. I think the epilogue to this game really shows that bittersweet hope at its core. The three of them all survived, but they’ve been deeply changed by their experiences. There are very, very real repercussions. Artie and Cam realizing that they can’t really be friends anymore is such a good addition to the story (I’ver seen some people criticize it, which is frankly ridiculous to me); traumas and tragedies can bring the people who experienced them together, but they can also drive them apart (think of how many divorces follow the death of a child). There is no easy fix to any of their problems (Cam had to try a bunch of different anti-psychotics to start seeing any meaningful improvement) and things that are broken will never become unbroken, but you can always make some kind of progress forward. There's an implicit contrast between Cameron and Brian that also emphasizes this. They're both gay men from broken families who are addicts and see supernatural things, but Cam's life is proof that even from such a disadvantageous position you can still carve out a decent life and find love by making better choices. I think part of Brian's stalker-ish love/hate of Cam comes from him realizing that Cam has the life he wanted.

Addendum: After replaying this I realized there's a ton of stuff with Devon and Artie I didn't pick up on my first go around. Dev's arc is basically the opposite of Cameron's; As a result of his experiences Cam ended up becoming passive and losing his agency in many situations, while Dev responded to his sister's death by becoming a bit of a control freak. He's not abusive or manipulative at all and always means well, but he definitely is the one in control of the relationship in basically every way, and that kind of power dynamic is always at least somewhat unhealthy. He needs to learn that you can't prevent everything and that you do need help from others sometimes, as painful as it can be to even just ask for it. A clear example of this is his inability to free himself from his chains until Cam slipped him the key; for what seems to be the first time in their relationship, Dev relied on Cam. In the epilogue the extremely unequal power dynamic between them is somewhat leveled by the simple fact that they both are traumatized and have to rely on each other just to regulate their base mental health.

With Arturo, it's picking up on a theme that's widely spread throughout this game and also Echo, although it's generally in the background; the inevitability of change and the ephemerality of everything. Artie very literally and viscerally loses a piece of himself in the narrative, and when Cam describes feeling his presence he calls him an amalgamation that's missing pieces now. In a lot of ways we are all just the sum of our experiences and thus everything we do necessarily changes us in a Ship of Theseus kind of way. The line 'nothing will ever be the same again' pops up here and a few other times in Echo, and although it may seem to contradict the 'always going in circles' motifs of these stories, they actually reinforce each other; not just history but your personal lives don't ever repeat, but they sure do rhyme a lot. You can't go home again, indeed. If you're as neurotic as I am, then the very idea of finality is kind of scary in itself. Knowing that there will be, necessarily, a last time you hug your mother or talk to your best friend or share a meal with your partner is somewhat existentially frightening; all those things might have even already happened. All you can really do is just to cherish each thing you love in the moment. You can't know if you'll get hit by a bus or have a heart attack or get a TBI while trying to pick up your friends from an abandoned town, so always appreciate the things that are meaningful to you. There are plenty of forks in the road and once the decision is made, it can't truly be unmade; sometimes you make the wrong choice, and all you can do in those situations is to take some deep breaths, put one foot in front of the other, and keep on living. Although his arc is generally about learning to reclaim agency, parts of Cameron's story also fall into this theme; there are plenty of things in your life that are uncontrollable, and as painful as it can be you sometimes just have to deal with that. Taking his anti-psychotics meant giving up music not just as a career but even as a hobby, and as someone who is extremely reliant on music just to keep my emotions regulated, that's a really sad and scary prospect. You are always changed by everything you go through, and the most you can hope for is to have someone beside you who changes with you.

The only really significant thing I could criticize this story with is the third-person omniscient narrative. The emotional intensity of basically everything narrated is a bit incongruous with the relatively detached way it's being told. Reading 'Dev knows it's because he's a bad boyfriend' as opposed to Dev thinking 'this is because I'm a bad boyfriend' feels a little bit tell-don't-show, although that's a much lesser problem than your high school English teacher would have you believe. However, the reader is shown examples of each of the traits that are told, so there's still plenty of showing involved. I'm not sure if this is entirely fair, though, because I think the third-person perspective fills an important thematic role. This story is very much about the various characters' agency, and the third-person perspective emphasizes this. You, the reader, are not Cameron, or Devon, or Arturo. You don't make decisions for them. You don't see events through their eyes. The fundamental distance between the characters and the player is clearer from this perspective. On a more practical level the narrative also needs to cover quite a bit of backstory relatively quickly for the various characters and it would be kinda weird for all of the characters to randomly monologue to themselves about their pasts, but again it provides enough examples of these events' repercussions to make all of the details feel entirely relevant. There are two extra short stories, both of which are in the first person, which is proof to me that the third-person perspective was deliberately chosen.

The other criticisms I have are all quite minor. In the final mine sequence Brian talking about politics and like, antifa or whatever, was a little on the nose for me and I would’ve preferred it stay unstated (Cam and Dev represent everything he hates; a young gay couple deeply in love with each other, one of whom is Hispanic, who work in tech and live in a liberal coastal urban elite city), but I’m also really sensitive to that kind of stuff and I doubt most other people would see it this way. I’m not sure if this counts as a criticism, but the characters are less complex here than in Echo (it's like a sixth of the length, so that's not surprising); I don’t think they have the complexity of, say, Flynn or TJ, but that’s not really a problem because this story doesn’t need them to be that way. It's all pretty straightforward, but like I've said the lack of subtlety is actually one of the things I love most about the storytelling in these games, as it makes them feel very honest and sincere, not drenched in the thousands of layers of irony and fourth-wall winks that so much other stuff seems to have nowadays (Note to writers: actively trying to destroy the audience's suspension of disbelief is bad, not good!) I haven't felt quite the same degree of interest in thinking endlessly about this game that I felt for Echo, but the more consistent pacing makes it feel more coherent, cohesive, and focused, and that there aren't any dangling plot threads left unresolved. In 'objective' literary terms of balance, pacing, etc this story is probably better than Echo's more meandering method.

TL:DR
A really powerful, affecting representation of the real-life struggles to reclaim your agency from everything in your life that will try to take it away from you: your past, your personal problems, and even your relationships (both platonic and romantic). Bitterly sad but still very hopeful for the future. I’m pretty sure this is the conclusion to the Echo saga of TSR, Echo, and Arches, and I couldn’t think of a better way to wrap it all up.