Lone Echo

Lone Echo
Information
VR/AR	Virtual Reality
Developer	Ready at Dawn
Publisher	Oculus Studios
Platform	Oculus Rift
Device	Oculus Rift, Oculus Rift S
Operating System	Windows
Type	Game
Genre	Adventure, Action-adventure
Input Device	Oculus Touch
Play Area	Standing, seated
Game Mode	Single-player
Release Date	July 20, 2017
Price	US $39.99 (at launch)
App Store	Oculus Store
Website	https://www.meta.com/experiences/pcvr/lone-echo/1369078409873402/

Property "Platform" (as page type) with input value "Oculus]] Rift" contains invalid characters or is incomplete and therefore can cause unexpected results during a query or annotation process.

See also: VR Apps and VR Games

Lone Echo is a 2017 virtual reality adventure game developed by Ready at Dawn and published by Oculus Studios for the Oculus Rift. It was released on July 20, 2017, and is built around hand-over-hand movement in a zero-gravity environment, using the Oculus Touch controllers to grab and push off surfaces. The game is set aboard a mining station orbiting Saturn in the year 2126, and casts the player as Jack, an artificial-intelligence android who assists the station's human captain, Olivia Rhodes.

Lone Echo received generally favorable reviews, holding a Metacritic score of 89 out of 100, and won the Game Critics Award for Best VR Game at E3 2017 and the D.I.C.E. Award for Immersive Reality Game of the Year at the 21st Annual D.I.C.E. Awards. Alongside the single-player campaign, Ready at Dawn released a free multiplayer mode, Echo Arena, which later grew into the standalone service Echo VR before its servers were shut down in 2023.

Gameplay

Lone Echo is played from a first-person perspective in microgravity. The player controls Jack with the two Oculus Touch controllers, which map to a pair of virtual hands. Movement works by reaching out, grabbing a wall, handrail, or object with the grip triggers, and pulling or pushing to propel the body in the opposite direction. Wrist-mounted thrusters on each hand provide a secondary form of propulsion that lets the player drift, brake, and finesse a trajectory in open space. Because locomotion is driven by physical reaching rather than a control stick, the design avoids the artificial-locomotion movement that commonly causes discomfort in VR.

Jack is equipped with tools that emerge from the hands and wrists. A data scanner interfaces with the station's machinery and displays holographic readouts, and a retractable plasma cutter is used to slice through bulkheads, debris, and obstacles. Conversations with Captain Rhodes use dialogue trees, and the player physically gestures and interacts with the environment to progress through repair tasks, exploration, and the story.

Development

Ready at Dawn is a studio founded in 2003 that had previously developed entries in the God of War series for the PlayStation Portable and The Order: 1886 for the PlayStation 4. The project that became Lone Echo grew out of a 2014 conversation between studio co-founder and creative director Ru Weerasuriya and Jason Rubin, then head of content at Oculus, with focused development beginning in May 2015 under the working title "Ascendant." The game was one of the first titles built for the Oculus Touch controllers, which Ready at Dawn received as early prototypes; the team treated touching and grabbing as the core interaction rather than adapting a traditional control scheme.

The team grew from an initial group of four or five developers to roughly 60 people at peak production, a large team for a VR title at the time. Rather than a commercial engine such as Unity or Unreal Engine, the studio used its proprietary RAD engine, adapted for VR. Ready at Dawn developed a procedural hand-posing system so that Jack's fingers would wrap convincingly around arbitrarily shaped surfaces when the player grabbed them, a technique the studio presented publicly at the Game Developers Conference. The game was directed by Ru Weerasuriya and Dana Jan, with an original score by composer Jason Graves.

Release

Lone Echo was released on July 20, 2017, as an Oculus Rift exclusive priced at US $39.99, and required the Oculus Touch controllers. On the same day, Ready at Dawn released Echo Arena, a free team-based multiplayer sport that reused the zero-gravity movement system; it was available at no cost to Rift owners. Echo Arena was later folded into a free standalone multiplayer platform called Echo VR, which combined the Echo Arena sport with the Echo Combat shooter mode. Meta and Ready at Dawn announced in February 2023 that Echo VR would close, and its servers were shut down on August 1, 2023; the single-player Lone Echo campaign was unaffected. A sequel, Lone Echo II, was announced in 2018 and released on October 12, 2021.

Title	Type	Platform	Release date
Lone Echo	Single-player adventure	Oculus Rift, Oculus Rift S	July 20, 2017
Echo Arena	Free multiplayer (later part of Echo VR)	Oculus Rift	July 20, 2017
Echo VR (servers closed)	Free multiplayer platform	Oculus Rift, Meta Quest	Shut down August 1, 2023
Lone Echo II	Single-player adventure (sequel)	Oculus Rift, Oculus Rift S	October 12, 2021

Reception

Lone Echo holds a Metacritic score of 89 out of 100 based on 14 critic reviews, indicating generally favorable reception. IGN rated it 8.9 out of 10, and Road to VR and several other outlets scored it 90 out of 100; the games-news outlet GMW3 gave it a perfect score. UploadVR's hands-on praised the detailed character faces and voice work, calling the experience "breathtaking" and noting that it felt like a more thoroughly designed world than most VR titles of the period.

The game was widely recognized in 2017 awards. It won the Game Critics Award for Best VR Game at E3 2017, ahead of other nominees. It was named Rift Game of the Year in Road to VR's 2017 Game of the Year Awards. At the 21st Annual D.I.C.E. Awards, held in 2018 for games released in 2017, Lone Echo won Immersive Reality Game of the Year, beating nominees that included Robo Recall, Space Pirate Trainer, Psychonauts in the Rhombus of Ruin, and Wilson's Heart.