Echoic Memory (Playdate)
Echoic memory refers to the specific way our brains store incoming auditory information, keeping it in our memory for a few seconds to better help us interpret a situation. This specific short-term memory is useful in carrying on conversations or listening to music so you aren’t left confused by noises that can take a bit to reveal their purpose or meaning, but the memories of sounds can also have a bit of an echo across time. When hearing certain music, you might remember the specific situation you heard it in years ago, this long-term memory often quite meaningful because so much sensory information was saved all at once. Echoic Memory on Playdate provides an interesting mix of both of these forms of musical memory, the gameplay relying on literal echoic memory that ties to a plot about those echoes of the past.
Echoic Memory sees you as a new hire at the Quality Commissions Warehouse for SoundFluxxr, a company known for its high-end AI-powered smart speaker known as the ECM-1o10. The robotic sound systems collect data from people who own them to better imitate human speech, but the ones on the production line you’ll be interacting with need some fine-tuning as they’re spitting out garbled random statements. You must validate their memory, something done by matching provided sound files to those stored on the device. Essentially, this makes Echoic Memory a puzzle game built mostly around sound matching, but as you play through the game’s five chapter story, the things the ECM-1010 robots say stop being jumbled nonsense and start sounding like they come from actual human memories.
As you fix more and more of the robots, you’ll keep hearing about the memories these machines supposedly have, these reflections sparked by the specific tunes played when validating their memories. Of course, since these speakers are AI-powered, the question will arise if you’re listening to a machine truly recount some stored personal memory or they’re simply getting better at imitating believable human conversation, an angle that does seem intentional based on a few factors in the stories you’re hearing told. One of them is more logic based, the fact that the stories are not set in stone so each person who plays through Echoic Memory will not necessarily hear the same memories or have certain details line up the same way. The other is that many of the memories shared with you seem rather broad, the supposed recollection of a moment in time lacking the specificity that would truly make it feel like a personal memory rather than an imagined sensory experience. Even if it is just imitation, might it have value if the robot believes it to be true? Echoic Memory won’t dive too deep into the questions it raises, one chapter even focuses more on a Greek myth that is interesting to hear recounted but not tied too much to the questions of this narrative, but Echoic Memory does at least feel like it wants you to be left pondering its ideas even if it doesn’t express them in the best manner.
When a robot comes down the line, sometimes with an unfortunate stutter if the game is loading one of the larger ones, you’ll pop it open and see a set of panels with dials. There can be anywhere from 4 to 20 of these, although the game works you up quite gradually despite how daunting some of the internals look later down the line. Each knob is tied to a short music clip that is uniquely different from all of the others, even if they might sound very similar. One at a time you’ll be provided a music clip and need to find its matching counterpart in the panel cluster, a robot’s memory fully validated once you’ve matched a sound clip to each panel available. There are two major things in place to make this more difficult. One is the machine’s battery, this working as a time limit so you can’t spend too much time considering every tiny detail in a tune. The other though is a set of three fuses, one bursting any time you make an incorrect match. Run out of time or make three mistakes and you’ll need to retry the robot, the panels shuffled around to prevent memorization although the music clips are still played in order.
Echoic Memory’s small music clips come from a range of genres and feature different instrumentation even within those. Hip hop, Jazz, Orchestral, Club, and Dubstep music serve as the wider types of music featured, but then you might have some musical clips feature only flutes, violins, and pianos in Orchestral to help you better differentiate them. However, there will also be times many panels have very similar music tracks, the player needing to listen quite closely to figure out where the notes differ. Luckily, a lot of the music is quite catchy, the clips only ever a few seconds long but they can still be easy enough to repeat to yourself or keep in your own echoic memory so you can compare it to its potential matches. Some of the music is energetic, ominous, peppy, or outright beautiful, and unfortunately there is no way to listen to it outside of the matching context just to enjoy how it sounds. Then again, these are fragments of music rather than full compositions, snappy pieces meant to be identifiable for their role in a puzzle game most of all. Making them enjoyable to listen to helps you better appreciate the task at least, and you might even walk away with a few of them stuck in your head after.
Echoic Memory isn’t just a game about matching soundalikes though. When a round starts, the music panels often have their sound distorted in some way. That’s where the knobs factor in, the play needing to turn the dial to alter the music they’re hearing. This can manifest as tunes starting off much faster or slower than normal, the music might have some form of interference that makes it sound less clear, and eventually pitch shifting enters the picture as well. You’ll need to spin the Playdate’s crank to adjust the levels to make the music recognizable, but even if you find the natural setting for the panel, sometimes the example music has already been altered. You might spin the knobs for the panels to the point the music becomes recognizable only for the main clip to be much slower than usual, the player having to be able to identify rhythms later down the line regardless of speed or be able to pick up unique aspects of the instrumentation to properly pair up music tracks. Since the game does take time to grow, this is trained into the player well enough, but it is fairly likely you’ll still fail a few robots and need to try them again, and that’s where Echoic Memory’s concept starts to lose some of its appeal.
When you need to retry a robot, especially the more difficult late game ones where they have so many panels, it’s not exactly an exciting process to dive back into. You’re going to need to spin all those dials again to make the clips recognizable, figure out where they’ve been randomly placed this time around, and work back to where you left off in a process that feels fairly tedious because of the amount of attention required to do this accurately and reliably. You’re already listening very closely to short tracks to look for clues and doing it all over entails a small mental reset, but Echoic Memory is also at a bit of an impasse. If there is no punishment for failure, you could blindly guess and speed through the game without needing to pay any attention, but this doesn’t get around the reality that retrying puzzles involves repeated work that doesn’t necessarily change much but still requires as much brain power as solving new material.
Echoic Memory does offer a more casual Pair Match Mode that lets you better customize the experience and somewhat shifts the design a bit. Rather than receiving a provided sample clip to match to one of the panels, the panels themselves contain the duplicate, meaning for example a set of 8 panels will only feature four unique music tracks rather than eight distinct ones. You can alter the amount of panels, the types of distortions, and even the music featured in this mode and you can even disable the timer and fuses, this mode more insubstantial but it’s likely easier to appreciate the musical clips on their own should you play this more forgiving and less challenging format that feels like it exists for quick play despite not really providing the same style of challenge as the main game.
THE VERDICT: The reliance on memory all throughout Echoic Memory gives the game its substance and its drawbacks. The plot explores the nature of sound tied to memory and whether robots can experience it but doesn’t feel like it has enough specificity to make it as impactful as it could have been. The music matching play can be satisfying when it’s going well, especially with the clips being catchy and well composed much of the time, but the amount of focus required to play can make setbacks like repeating a round exhausting. The idea behind Echoic Memory is sound, but it can’t quite balance out the levels needed to make it a smooth experience.
And so, I give Echoic Memory for Playdate…
An OKAY rating. Echoic Memory is trapped a bit in terms of how its concept relates to its difficulty. When you are going through solving the music matching puzzles well it can be quite satisfying, the player getting catchy and lovely little samples to listen to while knowing many of their matches involved some work to figure out. However, when the pairing is made more difficult, you are at risk of failing the level, and trying again and going through the same sound clips but with mild randomization so you can’t pop back in and speed back to where you left off, it ends up tedious and sometimes aggravating. Having to spin the dials on every panel again just to get back to the starting position isn’t an entertaining process to repeat, but without some form of punishment for playing flippantly, the weight of your choices would vanish and you wouldn’t be working so hard to listen to the subtleties in the music tracks. It is possible the game takes things a bit too far with the 20 panel robots near the end, it exhausting to sometimes sort those out even in a run without mistakes. Echoic Memory does account for this somewhat, bigger panel arrangements having some panels that are completely different from the others and often having it so a music clip is only truly comparable to two or three others in the set, but that doesn’t mean it’s not work to recover from a flubbed round. The game does account for its scope increase how it can, but the idea behind Echoic Memory might just not scale too well without some other fundamental shifts in design. You’d likely have to start exploring new puzzle types or break from the panel matching format to keep evolving the concept, and it’s not like it would be unbelievable for new speaker models to maybe shift up the devices within so that the story premise wouldn’t need to be discarded in search of gameplay innovation. The plot has room to evolve too of course, not having the room to dive as deep into its questions due to choices like the speech scrambling that make it hard to properly present more unique ideas.
Echoic Memory mostly manages its music matching well enough you don’t even need to know much about music to be able to play it. You’re recognizing beats, tempos, specific instruments and unique sounds in the tracks, the size of the clips keeping it manageable. The dial turning can lead to obfuscation that makes it tougher if you don’t devote your full attention, but that need to focus so deeply can also make it wearisome when things don’t work out your way. It is the kind of game that you might want to put down between rounds to relax your brain a bit, but when you are making matches well, the music here sounds so sweet. Your memory of Echoic Memory might not be exquisite in the end, but its unique gameplay still makes it stand out and you might walk away with a few good times to reflect on despite the small upsets.