Ultra Ultra has made an exciting announcement in regards to their upcoming game ECHO. Namely that the protagonist, En, will be voiced by none other than Scottish actress Rose Leslie. Rose Leslie is no stranger to the science fiction genre having played roles in films such as ‘The Last Witchhunter’ and ‘Morgan’, though fans are most likely to recognize her voice as Ygritte from ‘Game of Thrones’ or Gwen Dawson from ‘Downton Abbey’. Though this is Rose’s first Video Game appearance, she has done voice over work before appearing in both ‘Revolting Rhymes Part One’ and ‘Part Two’ in 2016.
She is joined by actor Nick Boulton, a veteran of video game voice over. Nick has lent his vocal acumen to series such as Assassin’s Creed, Dragon Age, Hitman, Final Fantasy, Mass Effect and The Witcher, and that list is just the tip of the resume iceberg. While Rose plays the protagonist En, Nick will take on the role of her spaceship, London. From what we’ve seen London will act mostly as a confidant and sounding board for En as a voice in the ear, though hopefully less annoyingly than Navi.
ECHO has a fascinating premise, En finds herself infiltrating a legendary space palace that has a defense mechanism that learns from you.
In ECHO everything has consequence: As you try to wield its magical technologies it becomes apparent that the Palace has a will of its own… It creates “Echoes” – exact copies of you in every way – that behave like you and only do the things you do.
This happens in cycles, every so often the palace will “reset” and it’s “Echos” will behave in essentially the same manner you did during the last cycle. So if you were stealthy and careful, now your echos will attempt to sneak up on you and garrote you from behind. If you were sprinting and blowing off echo’s heads, well guess what, your echos are now faster and have guns. Between each cycle there is a brief blackout, where you can do whatever you need to do without the palace learning anything from your actions, ECHO will definitely reward smart timing and precision and punish recklessness.
Based in Copenhagen, Denmark, this will be Ultra Ultra’s first game. However like Nick Boulton, they are no strangers to stealth action games. The team’s core mostly came from IO-Interactive, the masterminds behind Hitman. Seeing the stealth elements of the game, and knowing the mastery that IO had over the craft should definitely get fans of Hitman and Science Fiction very excited.
ECHO will be available on Steam September 19th, and will be released shortly after for PS4. You can find it’s store page here.