READ & REVIEWED: Project ECCO

A guest post from Tabletop Bookshelf

This issue of The Many Sided Newsletter features a guest contributor: Christopher John Eggett.

Christopher is a writer, editor and game designer from the UK who recently reviewed the solo RPG Project ECCO by Elliot Davis for Tabletop Bookshelf. You can read his full review below, and don’t forget to check out Tabletop Bookshelf’s other game reviews, including My First Dungeon favorite Orbital Blues, before adding these TTRPGs to your collection.

Time travel is a tricky business to keep in a straight line. After all, the only time we actually experience is ‘now’ and where that ‘now’ is in any given week or century is really by-the-by. But, being narrative animals, humans do like to thread one thing into the next, usually in the hope of something like a ‘happy ever after’. Or at least one thing after another. But when it comes to the mechanics of time travel in art, writing and film, we’re always in a spot of bother. Any medium that encourages inquisitiveness is going to cause trouble: Is there only one stream of time? Is each jump creating a series of fractured realities? Will you stop existing immediately if you change the course of events which lead to your birth? If something is ‘eating’ time, does it eat what is perceived and remembered, or what actually happened? And what is the difference?

Very quickly, we’re off into a philosophical funhouse while the plot hangs around outside holding our candy-floss for us.

My favourite way to solve this is to simply hand-wave it away, a la Old Spock talking to New Spock in Star Trek: Into Darkness. “Just don’t worry about it too much” is a good way to avoid getting tangled in the technicalities. Games, because of their core properties of ‘simulating something’ can’t always just use this method, and in the case of Project ECCO the solution is to make messing up how time works is important to the story and to the mechanics of the game.

Project ECCO is a solo roleplaying game of working for a mysterious agency that has sent you on a mission of hunting down a strange entity that is ravaging time in a local area. The entity is eating time and the memories of those who experienced it. As such it’s got a SCP vibe in parts, which I fully welcome as a fan of There Is No Antimemetic Division. While in Project ECCO we can’t be sure of it: this might not be your first day.

This is an ‘artefact creating solo game’ where you not only get the pleasure of journaling your playthrough, but also the joy of creating a weird object as you do so. It’s one of the more involved sub-genres of solo journaling games but it can be the most satisfying. It’s also got a bit of upfront cost, in this case you’re about to deface a diary or planner. So go dig out that diary you hoped to keep two years ago, and begin a wibbly wobbly journey through time.

The core loop of Project ECCO sees us use one of the seven devices acquired to travel from the current day in your planner to a different one, forwards or backwards. When you get there you respond to the prompt in that day’s diary area and then repeat the process. It’s a neat little loop that gathers pace and scope as the adventure explodes and unfolds.

At the start, you’re only armed with The Watch, a D6, that you roll on a simple table. One of those six prompts will lead to you discovering a new device, which you claim from another table. This could be a Skimmer, which uses 2D6, or the Season Shuffler which uses a deck of playing cards. Or most excitingly, the Temporal Spread which asks you to go and grab your tarot deck and use the naturally interpretive power of the cards to leap through time. The devices are at the heart of the game, mechanically and thematically – they’re the way that the game unspools and becomes weirder and crazier. The step up from using D6 to a spread of tarot cards to be interpreted is a breathtaking expansion in scope, as you’d expect.

Early on you’re desperate to get hold of these new items, just for the thrill of getting deeper into the weeds of time. Each has its own flavor – partly because this is where additional collaborators (Sam Leigh, best known for the solo tarot game Anamnesis) provided design and writing, and partly because they represent more opportunities for ‘late-game’ style prompts.

So as you can guess, this is a lot of stuff to have to hand as you play through the game. It grows from a simple coin-and-D6 set up next to your diary and your copy to Project ECCO into something more like a movie scene of an occult ritual being performed. Soon you have a tarot deck being flipped here, a deck of playing cards there, a small handful of dice, a couple of coins and a book that you’re scribbling in with increased madness. We’re just a few drippy candles short of a good night in with the devil.

You’ll soon be muttering to yourself about whether you trust the cards or the dice for this jump. It’s totally reasonable muttering, as ultimately you’re thinking about the ‘range’ of the jump you’re about to make, and where it will land you. But it will still make you look like you’re in the middle of a minor breakdown when your partner walks into the room.

So, what am I armed with when I set out on this adventure across time? A 50p piece to represent my coin – vital for time travel, and a key element of branching options on some prompts. Losing it can make for some dangerous situations. I also have a lowly D6 chosen because it was the nearest. And for the planner I used a really nice Faber & Faber Poetry Diary from 2024. I hoped the context of the poems printed every now and again throughout the planner will provide inspiration. Later I realized it makes the whole experience a little bit more mad – in a very good way.

And the writing instructions really lean into the ‘mad book’ idea. You’re instructed to destroy pages, or days, when you meet the entity. You’re asked to write in the margins when time goes funny – and in my case this led to writing around the edges of the poems on the opposite pages like a clockwise caterpillar. Hitting the same day twice can make for a real squeeze and of course produces some surprising interactions.

The pre-printed content of your planner has an effect on the kind of game you’re going to have too. Special days – such as birthdays – are, as part of the set up, meant to be added to the diary to set off certain triggers. National holidays also have their place to give your prompts extra twists and challenges.

Looking back at what I’ve created it does seem mad, but weirdly cohesive. It is you putting this all together after all, you can’t help but make it somehow work.

The book’s design is lovely, stark, and exudes a sense of ‘unknowable threat’ throughout. It mixes distortion and scribbles to bring you into the core concept of making a cursed physical object – a record of when you’ve been that you can hold in your hands.

This sparseness of thematic elements and crunchy specific does make it a bit daunting at first, but the game is well sign-posted, and more than that, it knows the tools you will have in front of you. See, while you might be worrying about how you’re going to end up entering your entries into the diary before you start, the answer lies before you – literally. The diary or planner solves these fears as soon as you actually start playing. It’s a clever sidestep of the blank page – and had this been a board game, I’d be commenting on the robustness of the components in leading you through the experience.

Time travel can make a sentence complex. Occasionally the game bends over backwards to say ‘write your prompt on the day you arrived here’ – because it’s not always as simple as that. Once it’s in your head though, and your training is complete, you’ll not worry about that.

Like all games of this style you are going to get out of it what you put in, but it’s a slightly bumpy landing to begin with. You find your first day – and you’re encouraged to simply write where you are, what is around you and so on. I scribble my first entry and find my place – plucked from my mind on a first-come-first serve basis. The starting prompts can leave you a little unmoored in time at first, and depending on whether you take that as an immersive disorientation because of the time travel, or a speed-bump to your fun is a ‘YMMV’ moment.

I found my character working through a Call of Cthulhu-esque mystery set in a small leafy village in a well-to-do part of the world. I added the fact there’s warehousing developers trying to ruin the place. Local people are being made spiritually and psychologically vacant, and now sometimes do strange sleepwalking rituals in the night. There are others nearby working on their own homemade time travel devices. I met a woman who might be my daughter – as I know nothing from the time before my acceptance into the agency it is hard to say. The creature I eventually track seems to be plucking light out of the stars themselves, with its hundreds of hands. The resolution that comes is from an unlikely source, someone I had thought would be an enemy at the start – but became misinterpreted. A good twist that came about from the way you end up journaling yourself a scaffold for a story as you go.

Only slivers of this are from the game’s prompts, which are, for the most part, overly broad. I would have liked the prompts to draw out more specific elements earlier and more directly, without me having to provide so much of my own inspiration. It’s through the kind of ‘layering’ of prompts against your own initial inspiration that the game forms. This is a strength of the game in the long run, and I know that future playthroughs will see me trust the process that little bit more from the start.

Once you’re into the meat of the game this exploration becomes a little more spatial. The well-worn trope of ‘time is a place’ becomes completely true during play. You could almost lay out the days as a map and think of your journey as a bit ‘there and back again’ – if it wouldn’t be such a mess. In the planner you’ll start thinking about how you might lay out the beats of your narrative, flinging what could be a larger event further into the future, or in the past. You’re trying not to trip on your own laces as you move through the story, or rather, as you pop in and out of the unfolding of events, slowly building up something that has a kind of ‘arc’ to it.

You’re filling in entries and find yourself building a mental year-map of where key events seem to gather. This is important as visiting a location twice, or landing on a day that’s been destroyed is one of the ways that things can go wrong. When you encounter the entity it destroys time – which can quite literally mean ripping out pages or scribbling them across. It’s a good mechanic that can see things you believed to be key plot points deleted from your world.

Let me share one of my favorite mechanics, one that occurs when time gets a little bit wild and frayed and you’re lost within it: the wormhole. You are encouraged to take your pen or pencil in one hand and grab a clump of pages. You’re then encouraged to shove the pen or pencil through those pages until you can’t any more. The day on which your point device stops is the day the wormhole dumps you out into. Encountering prompts and instructions like this is what elevates this game from something that could just be an X-Files meets Dr. Who crossover and takes it into the world of the weird ritual.

We’re engaging with non-linear storytelling in Project ECCO. You, the player, become the architect of the shape of this story as it is happening to other people in the timeline. Soon events get tangled and webbed together. The character you’re playing is suddenly more involved than you thought they would be. If you land on a day that immediately follows on from a big event, you have huge amounts to work with to develop the story in really satisfying ways. It’s interesting how much this game relies on the contextual understanding of what has come before or after – your own entries might supersede the prompts sometimes.

Want to talk more about Project ECCO? Join us over on our Discord!

And that’s fine because what Project ECCO excels at is this kind of tightrope walk between the ‘game’ and the ‘character’, both of which need to be held in your head at once. You begin in an investigative mode, looking for what your goals and motivations are as a character, while later things become more strategic – like a real agent of time might need to be. This is your journey, moving from a blank slate to a ‘hero of time’.

The returns to the world of the agency and encounters with the entity produce the big plot points, the twists, and the exploration of the self. There’s a great ‘orange segment’ style tracker on the included bookmark (where you also handily track devices you’ve found). Each time that you meet the entity or return to the agency you fill one in. Get six of either and it’s time to face the end game, a final prompting process that will guide you to whether you won or lost.

I, it turned out, won. At the cost of many of my memories and maybe a too-long indulgence of some of the darker elements of the entity, which I won’t spoil here. I can’t promise that this will be the same for you.

Project ECCO sometimes feels as much a ritual as it is a game. Tentative steps at the beginning soon become leaps and strides through time, occasionally spinning out into wild and unmoored ravings. You’ll find the game pulls stuff out of you that you had no idea was in there. It’s magic to fully submit to the questions this little book – and the seven associated devices – throws at you. If you’re looking for an experience that sits between an occult ritual and TENET then Project ECCO has everything you need to support you in summoning whatever demons you have momentarily forgotten about.

— Christopher John Eggett

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🎲 What We’re Bringing to The Table

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