I’m Obsessed with Emerald Echoes’ Narrative Hint System

PostCurious has a new narrative puzzle adventure called Emerald Echoes crowdfunding on Kickstarter, with the campaign running through August 14th. In many ways, it’s a classic PostCurious game: a series of moderately difficult puzzles strung together to tell a heartfelt story, drawing upon thoughtfully constructed game components designed to draw you into the narrative.

But the reason I’m currently obsessed with Emerald Echoes is how the game reinvents PostCurious’ already strong hint systems, taking the game fully offline in a surprisingly satisfying manner.

Emerald Echoes Finds Puzzlers Returning to the World of The Emerald Flame
Emerald Echoes is framed as a sequel to one of PostCurious’ earliest games, The Emerald Flame. The first game in the series followed Marketa’s research into an alchemical elixir and the often strained relationship that blossomed with Hannah, as told from the player’s perspective as a Koschei Historical Society researcher poring over letters and artifacts from the time in the modern day.

Emerald Echoes picks up where Emerald Flame left off, as people who have come to care for Marketa try and retrace her steps and find her after the events of the first game: a story that is once more told through the perspective of researchers investigating archaeological findings.

Notably, this is a standalone sequel: I played this with a friend who had never played the first installment, and the story still made sense without context from Hannah and Marketa’s prior adventures, although there are the occasional light nods to prior events.

Streamlining the Puzzle and Narrative Structure for Emerald Echoes
The biggest structural change to Emerald Echoes when compared to prior PostCurious games is in how the story and puzzles are delivered. Inside each of the game’s four chapter-based envelopes are a collection of physical objects, and a series of blue and green folders. Blue folders provide purely narrative updates to the story, while green envelopes also contain clues on where to find puzzles within the artifacts, and how to solve them.

Having said that: this is a narrative heavy game, and even letters used to transmit clues for the puzzles dedicate a significant amount of real estate to advancing the narrative across three distinct characters, distinguished by their handwriting.

Since Emerald Echoes is designed to be a completely offline game, the game’s hint system doubles as an answer-checker: the right side of every folder contains an “Analysis” pocket, that walks through the intended solve path and confirms the solution, through the lens of two modern researchers exchanging notes in an online chat.

This structure on its own is an elegant way to take Emerald Echoes fully offline. But the narrative execution of that structure is what has me so obsessed with PostCurious’ newest game.

A Narrative Hint System That Doubles as Heartwarming Story
On a functional level, the Analysis chat logs provide narrative justification for how these artifacts were uncovered. Two researchers pored over a series of letters and artifacts, and used what they learned to figure out where to search for the next set of evidence. If players get stuck, revealing the chat logs can help nudge players to the next step. If players are looking to verify their answer, the logs provide a fun way of highlighting the steps it took to solve the puzzle.

The thing that blows me away is how packed with personality these chat logs are. We never learn the names of the researchers: we only experience them as a blue chat bubble and salmon chat bubble. But the hint system delivers a full narrative arc for the pair, despite that anonymity. We get to witness them give each other nicknames, commiserate over inter-office drama, and even…well, that would be telling. But by the end of the game, I was just as invested in the story told through the margins of the game’s hint system as I was with the game’s main narrative.

I cannot stress this enough: Emerald Echoes‘ narrative hint system is a massive step forward for a company that has already been on the bleeding edge when it comes to in-game hinting, and hope more game designers explore ways to add a dash of fun to their systems.

Emerald Echoes Puzzles to Write Yourself Into the Game
Emerald Echoes delivers a series of diverse and well constructed puzzles, while maintaining a moderately hard difficulty level throughout, consistent with past PostCurious games. If you’re only beginning to get into puzzles you might find yourself checking the Analysis logs for a nudge fairly often. But ultimately, it’s hard to describe whether you’ll like a creator’s puzzling style adequately in a review.

Luckily, PostCurious is offering up a series of four sample puzzles over the course of the Kickstarter campaign to give prospective players a sense of the company’s puzzling flair: and four lucky backers who solve those puzzles will have their name included in one of the game components for the final version of Emerald Echoes. New puzzles will release every Friday for the duration of the campaign, with the first one featured above.

Check out the Emerald Echoes Kickstarter campaign before it ends on August 14th. You can also find past coverage on PostCurious games on ARGNet.

Note: ARGNet received an early copy of this game for review.