Review – Ravensburger Echoes: The Microchip
Website Link – we purchased the game through Amazon
Price – $9.99
Disclaimer: we purchased the game with our own money, this review is not sponsored. All thoughts are our own.
The Product:
Ravensburger’s Echoes Audio Mystery Game series is a collection of games which have players listening to narrative clues in order to piece together a larger story and to discover a secret truth. For this review, we tested out Echoes: The Microchip.
In Echoes: The Microchip, players find themselves in the far future, a world in ruins. Now they must piece together clues to learn what happened in the past and why humanity fell.
This game requires an app to listen to the narrative and clues. While the provided cards contain pictures, the gameplay is audio based with answers submitted through the app.
The game is suggested for one to six players, ages 14+. The advertised play time is about sixty minutes. As a team of two adults, we finished in about 40 minutes.
Our Thoughts:
Echoes: The Microchip was a fun, but less involved adventure. The required app was easy to use and did a fantastic job reading the cards with no real issues. We were impressed by its scanning abilities.
With twenty-four audio soundbites, between the item and chapter cards, there is a decent amount of story to listen to. The cards provide players with plenty of story while also staying vague enough to require thought and inferencing. As the audio clues are sorted into the correct order, players will get some of the missing story details filled in. With all that said, while there is plenty to listen to along the journey, the narrative is solid but never awe-inspiring or incredibly memorable in nature.
The audio recordings and voice acting are serviceable, clearly giving players the information they need to move forward in their journey. The voice actors’ tone and emotional range don’t always feel quite right, but for us that was easily forgiven.
When it comes to puzzles, it seems the Echoes series mainly requires good listening skills and inferencing abilities. Puzzles never go beyond simply putting together connected events and placing them into the right order. Because there is only this one straightforward objective, The Microchip stays a very easy game to master and beat. There is not much variety to the work players will put in.
The game advertises itself as 1 to 6 players, but we feel the game probably works better at the lower end of that player count. While as many people as you want can listen to the app recordings, there is not much to do beyond listening to and inferring which order events occur in. While players may wish to discuss their reasonings, it would be hard to find enough to justify needing six minds to solve and discuss the mystery.
Echoes: The Microchip is an easy mystery that works best for those looking for a quick and/or portable experience. The game never gets too difficult but it works as a nice deductive adventure. Those looking for a true challenge with a lot of components to work with are advised to venture elsewhere. Those looking for some quick and light fun, should find an experience worth checking out. Also, with such a low price point (about $10 at the time of this review), it’s tough to beat the cheap fun found here.
Official C&C Rating:
Narrative: 3/5
Puzzles: 1/5
Overall Fun: 2.5/5
Total Averaged Rating: 2.16 out of 5
Chaos & Confetti 