do not play if you have seizures

Game takes forever to start, the first hour and a half is just running through extremely samey and needlessly long geometrical corridors like you're in a UE4 demo. This gets upgraded with the game stuttering you to stop every few minutes as it 'loads' the combat encounter. When the game does start, you realize the gameplay is razor thin. I googled after since of course that can't be it, but it was. A very shallow pass at a stealth game with limited toolset and moveset against a mechanic that could just have been a small roguelite.

The biggest shame is about the narrative, i was somewhat invested and the voice acting and dialogue were superb. The game also looked great, but the environment felt entirely nonsensical and 'constructed', i didn't play enough to figure out if the game eventually turned to more organic or sensical level design but it really did feel like "arena" levels strung together.

I was curious enough to check for "let's plays" videos of later gameplay but mostly everyone gave up after the first 4ish hours especially as apparently the challenge goes up significantly, and they still end up going around in the exact samey palace levels that make little sense as to why they're there like that aside from just "to have levels for the player" while engaging with the same infinite respawning enemies and limited in-world save spots. The last video of a let's play was someone sounding obviously frustrated, just after going down a long elevator to a new biome/level and all he can say is "'we're still in the palace level it seems, but it has a green tint to it, we'll have to see next time what's up with this". There never was a next time. And there's a lack of any videos showing "ECHO Ending" proves how few people actually finished the game.

End of discussion is if a game takes two hours of my time as a first experience and doesn't do a meaningful job at making me engage with the game, it's just bad design, and it appears it doesn't get much better later on.