If you think about it, not many videogames let you control a being that is not human. Most of the time, we engage with virtual worlds via humans, anthropomorphic robots, or animals that move and behave like humans. This allows us to engage with the world using verbs we are familiar with, like talking, grabbing, walking, jumping, and shooting.

In Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future, we embody a completely different being: a dolphin. Ecco has its own set of verbs to interact with the world: swimming, charging, eating fish, breathing, and communicating via sonar. The game does a wonderful job at simulating a dolphin-like experience, with realistic animations that are graceful to look at and a sense of existence and survival reliant on hunting school of fish and going to the surface to breathe.

The locations are also gorgeous. At its time this game was a graphical wonder and it is still a joy to look at. With sunny coral reefs, dark and oppressive caves, and volcanic surfaces bubbling with heat, the game shows the ocean as both a place of beauty and unknown horror. Varied beings like turtles, stingrays, sharks, eels, and jellyfish give the locations life.

Though the story fueled by an alien invasion and time travel is pretty simple, it takes us to different realities where dolphins and humans work together, or each become tyrants of the other. This results in a wildly diverse settings such as pristine oceans, polluting industrial mining complexes, underwater dolphin prisons, and H.R. Giger inspired alien hatcheries. It is crazy how this game can switch from wonder to horror smoothly.

The entire aesthetic is inspired and unique. It gives me a sense of childlike wonder and appreciation for nature that I got when watching documentaries and doing geography class homework. It is an ecologically inspiring setting that invites us to consider other beings in the planet. And at times it is pretty psychedelic, and proves to be a foundational pillar of [vaporwave][1]. With the cherry on top being the wonderful soundtrack by Tim Follin, this is a sensory experience I won't soon forget.

If I were to give this game a solely objective score, I would settle for four stars. The difficulty curve for this game is insane, especially because of the combat, which has you trying to charge at fast moving targets in a 3D environment. Some levels are very frustrating and will have you retrying many segments over and over again. Thankfully, the checkpoint system is very generous and lets you earn the progress from your efforts. I highly recommend having both a text and video walkthrough handy.

However, given how beautiful and inspiring i found this game, it is easy to overlook those problems. This game will stick with me for a long time, with adventures such as being propelled by a volcanic explosion, navigating a maze of laser equipped starfish, and swimming high in the sky of the hanging waters, a level which seems to have invented Mario Galaxy 7 years prior.

True ≋a≋ ≋e≋ ≋s≋ ≋t≋ ≋h≋ ≋e≋ ≋t≋ ≋i≋ ≋c≋ bliss.

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