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While Echo Night Beyond suceeds in delivering a great atmosphere and a pretty creepy story, it falls short of delivering a particularly fun experience all the way through.
Early on, it was interesting to plod slowing through an empty facility, not sure what to expect. As time wore on, though, that feeling dissipated and I was jogging through previously visited areas, bored that I was moving so slowly.
The puzzles, while all simple fetch-an-item from point A and deliver it to target B, still at least made sense and the components were generally in the vicinity of the puzzle. I get annoyed by puzzles where you fetch the item from one side of the map and have to traverse the entire world to find the target.
In only three cases did I get stuck and have to turn to a walkthrough. One was because I missed the item tucked away in a corner, which was another issue with the game, basically forcing to you to scour every nook and cranny with a fine-toothed comb and pick up every object you encountered.
The real problem with this game, however, was that, toward the end, once the story started to become more clear, it is as if the story telling just stopped, leaving me to run amok through the facility with no care or concern. I ripped through the last puzzle or two before being ready to approach the final area. For survival horror, the game just gave up on every aspect of horror and let me cruise to the end.
After the first conclusion, it was obvious that multiple endings existed. This does not, however, justify playing through again, so I simply loaded up the previous save point and checked out the alternate endings with some satisfaction.
I really enjoyed the story and the game early on, but in the end, the game only delivered an average experience.
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