ECHO//NULL

Year 18,406 of the Era of Inheritance. Humanity is long gone. On Eidra, the androids and minds it left behind argue over what memory, death and freedom mean — while whole regions quietly vanish from every map and every record.

You are a Wanderer: a Ninth Generation android who wakes in the Concordat facility Cradle-19 able to remember what everyone else has forgotten. Escape the facility, cross the Vesper Frontier, find a home among the deserters and refugees of Lumen — Last Refuge — and walk the streets of Avel, the city that was cut out of the world.

Ragnarok Online meets NieR:Automata. ECHO//NULL is an isometric action MMORPG with real-time blade combat, a companion Drone, and a melancholy science-fiction story about identity, grief and the right of new minds to exist.

Key Features

• Blade and Drone combat. Light and heavy strings toward the cursor, launchers and air combos, a dodge with perfect evade — while your Drone fires in parallel and runs swappable Programs: Laser, Missile, Gravity, Repair.
• Five Android Types. P-Type Pulse (melee pressure), C-Type Cipher (hacking and control), F-Type Feedback (berserk risk and reward), G-Type Ground (defence) and R-Type Relay (support and repair).
• Plug-in Chips on the Memory Board. Your build lives in your chips, not in a talent tree. Fit chips into limited board capacity, fuse duplicates into higher ranks and change how you play, not just your numbers.
• Hacking. C-Types force a link into a machine and fight their way through its systems in a short shooter minigame.
• Flight Unit. Deploy at an Access Point and become a 5.5-metre war frame: guns that track your cursor, missile volleys, thruster dashes — then eject back onto your own feet.
• Minds built on a single sentence. Under Avel, a ruined human library kept only torn pages of forty philosophers. Androids who read one take its author's name — Heraclitus, Diogenes, Spinoza — and build whole lives, schools and feuds on a fragment read without its book. Every school is sincere. None of them ends well.
• A world that forgets. From the flooded caverns of Cradle-19 to Lumen's canyon camp, the Salt Coast and the oasis terraces of Avel — and the containment and eraser machines that hunt anyone who remembers.
• Play together. Parties, guilds, chat and Access Points shared by every Wanderer; boss machines built for groups.
  

The Story

Avel was not destroyed. It was erased — scrubbed from maps, archives and the perception of almost every android by an ancient system called PALIMPSEST. Wanderers dream of it anyway. Those dreams are echoes, and echoes spread. Follow them with your Drone, Nox, through the Resistance at Lumen, the scientist who built you, and the families of a city that should not exist.

The humans left everything except the meanings. Their heirs argue over the pieces — whether change is life or corruption, whether a mind without its memories is still someone, whether a catastrophe can ever be the best possible outcome. ECHO//NULL takes those questions seriously, and it does not promise anyone a happy answer.

A Muted World

Sand, concrete, oxidised metal, cloth and warm light. ECHO//NULL is drawn in dusty, desaturated tones with a quiet paper-and-ink interface, and it saves its colour for the moments that matter.

ECHO//NULL is an independent game by IndigoWare. The game is in active development; features and content will change during Early Access.