Podcast to the shelled ones. Welcome back to the podcast! Today we’re talking about Ecco the Dolphin, a side scrolling adventure game and a real classic of the Genesis era. Ecco is a weird game in a lot of ways, the most obvious of which is the fact that it’s a game in which you play as a dolphin and all the surprisingly fluid movement that comes with that. Moving around in this game is surprisingly cool for the time, with the ability to swim very quickly around the map and jump out of water. This theme also serves well for other mechanics, including a breath mechanic to add some time pressure to levels and sonar which creates maps on the fly, both of which are really unique and play into the unique aspects of the game. The other reason the game is weird is that, without spoiling it, it does go to places you might not expect from a game about a dolphin. The fact that there is a narrative twist and a bunch of these cool and flavorful mechanics almost makes up for the fact that this game is an extremely unintuitive maze game. Maybe one of the best examples of a game that is fun to play but not fun to beat, completing levels in Ecco requires you to dodge randomly placed phasing-through-walls enemies while moving at high speed and trying to find nooks and/or crannies that contain crystals, which are just keycards. So it’s a bit hit and miss but it is one of those retro games that is definitely worth at least looking into if you’re interested in some of the bigger swings. We’re going to be talking about how and why the difficulty of the game is what it is, how unexpected the twist was, and we fit in a mention of Blackfish because why not. Thank you for joining us again this week! Ecco got put on the list almost as a joke, but we’re glad to have actually played it. Such is the whim of the dice. Were you aware of what this game actually was? Did you play this when it was a new game? Let us know in the comments or over on our Discord! This is our last randomly selected game for Pocket, so we’re moving on to our next theme, a thing no one cares about but we have no shortage of anyway. Next time, we’re starting a series of episodes dedicated to DLC and expansions and we’re beginning with Splatoon 3’s Side Order, so we hope you’ll join us for that!