Project ECCO

I am having a fun time with this. It’s my first solo-journaling RPG experience, and I’m enjoying the freedom that comes with this game’s loose prompts that promote world building. 

My one major critique—and I acknowledge that this is likely a personal failing to efficiently tie up story threads—is that there are many prompts that require you to make some pretty big decisions about yourself, the Agency, and the Entity. And those decisions keep coming, and coming, and soon you have a narrative puzzle with plot points that become difficult to satisfyingly tie together. 

I had a few neat story beats that really complimented each other for the first few hours. I kept seeing the same smiling woman whenever something creepy happened. I had a tattoo that also appeared on ancient ruins and Agency documents. A man on a yellow suit was hunting me down. It was enough to discover what these elements had in common, but I’d also constantly get new prompts to add to the intrigue. Soon, I had a mysterious bearded man who was trying to help me, a derelict yacht with a research station, a song that the Agency was trying to contact me through, and a convoy of truckers I traveled with that slowly began to disappear.

When it came time to make a big  decision, I had to look at this very colorful cast of clues and characters and ask, “What the heck does all of this have in common?” And if feel like my solution came up a little short. 

I was a little slow on getting the prompts that push toward end game, so I had a very complex network of things going on by the time I was pushed to reveal secrets. What was the Agency doing? What are we getting wrong about the Entity? What secret did the dead agent whisper to me? What secret weapon did I find in the Agency? What secret am I keeping from the Agency? I had three of these secrets come up in a row, and it was difficult to make huge proclamations about the world that needed to fit in with everything else.

So, that’s all to say that this is a very novel and exciting theme with quite a lot of responsibility on the journaler to tell a cohesive story.  I also think that the mechanic that pushes the story forward  is far too sporadic. With only two visits to the Entity and three to the Agency, I began rerolling prompts because they were just way too irrelevant to anything I had going on with the hope that I’d get a push toward end game or find something that complimented my tangled story so far. 

I’d like to play again, but I might modify the rules to simply freely trigger an Entity or Agency visit if it complimented the story.

Try it out - it’s interesting!