While not an epic tale of global proportions, Echo Night's story has a spooky feel to it that intrigued me while playing. One day a man named Richard Osmond receives a letter from his father that includes a small key it. Richard has not heard from his farther since he left home, so this letter's arrival puzzles him. The phone then rings, it is police officers telling him that his father's house had burned down and that he should come check it out. Richard arrives at his father's house to find it blackened and in smithereens. Sadly, he walks inside, searches around, and discovers a mysterious large clock in one of the rooms. This is where it all begins.

The First quirk that I found out with Echo Night was directly after taking control of my character, while beginning to navigate around my surroundings. Oddly, there is no way to make use of the analog pads, so to move around you have to use the d-pad and the L1 and R1 buttons to look up and down. The latter is the part that had me scratching my head in frustration, as the option to look around using one of the analog pads would have made turning on light switches and such a heck of a lot easier. A minor gripe, but a gripe nonetheless. Also, a nice option is the ability to change how fast or slow the character turns and how quickly he moves about. At first I was about to complain about how slow movement was, but once turning up this option a notch it made running around the environment easier and less time consuming.

Moving about the ship Orpheus (which you'll learn about more as you make your way through the plot), eventually the player will meet up with the various ghosts that inhabit the ship. They are all stuck on the ship for one reason and another and it's the player's job to free them and let them go on their way. Completing certain tasks (such as fixing a busted fuse) allows the spirits to leave the ship and get you one step closer to the end of the game. However, some of the tasks are tedious and require you to find tiny objects littered in miniscule corners of the area.

There's nothing to brag about when it comes to the game visually. There's no reason for Echo Night to be full of eye candy, for the engine is suitable for the game most of the time. It is noticeable, that the frame rate will drop off at certain areas, but only for a short time. Most of the time it doesn't really effect gameplay since there's no real action sequences to be found.

Echo Night's story, as it moves on, doesn't become all that interesting, but is fun to work through during those periods when there doesn't seem to be anything else worth playing. It doesn't take a considerable amount of time to finish the game, either. It's possible to complete the entire game within the span of five hours or so, depending on how much difficulty you have with the puzzles that are presented in the game.