I once visited a friend in Los Angeles who has an obsession with mecha and anime characters. His room is filled with figurines from Mobile Suit Gundam and Genshin Impact. I thought to myself: “Wouldn’t it be cool if someone combined these two interests?” Now, that’s just what Bandai Namco has done with Synduality, a new mixed media project that features multiple stories.
Along with an anime called Synduality: Noir and a spinoff novel called Synduality: Kaleido, there’s a video game coming called Synduality: Echo of Ada. It’s an online survival adventure game that lets you scour a postapocalyptic wasteland with a cute anime companion at your side. At a recent preview event, I played three hours of Synduality: Echo of Ada and spoke with producer Yosuke Futami about its gameplay inspirations, as well as its surprising Fallout influences.
The story of Synduality: Echo of Ada follows humanity in 2222 as it rebuilds society following a world-ending event called Tears of the New Moon, where a toxic rain wiped out 90% of humanity. Humans retreated underground, founding the city of Amasia. Unfortunately, that thriving city eventually collapsed for unknown reasons. Now it’s up to a group of skilled pilots, called Drifters, to travel to the surface and collect AO crystals and other resources to help power up the city again while fighting off Enders, a hostile species of monsters.
While there is quite a lot of background lore and exposition revealed at the very start of the game, the information is made entertaining as it’s presented as a public service announcement. The game’s loading screens are shown in a similar fashion, drawn like a 1960s cartoon. It’s an art style you’ll see in other games like BioShock and, most recently, Helldivers 2.
There’s another game inspiration that’s a bit less obvious at first glance. Futami compares Drifters’ trips to the surface to walking out of a vault in Fallout.
“The way that you saw the public service announcements, think of it as like propaganda for wanting people to go out and get resources for everybody else,” Futami tells Digital Trends. “Going outside is very dangerous, and we wanted to make the act of going outside feel a little less dangerous by using that very cute ’60s art style.”
Futami notes that Echo of Ada and the anime, Synduality: Noir, have separate stories. This way, players won’t have to play the game or watch either the show in order to understand what’s going on with the other. However, doing so would provide a fuller understanding of Synduality’s world as a whole.
In Echo of Ada, players take control of a mech called a Cradlecoffin and have an AI companion with them called a Magus. You never even get to see your own character as they load up into the Cradlecoffin. In an interesting twist, you don’t customize your own character, but rather the Magus itself. Like so many other character creators in other games, you can adjust the Magus’s gender, clothing, and appearance traits such as mouth shape, height, and face length. It’s a clever way to keep the aesthetic focus on the cute anime companions and hook those Genshin Impact players in.
In a nutshell, Echo of Ada plays pretty much like Escape from Tarkov. The gameplay loop revolves around going out, collecting resources, and coming back. You can also use the money you’ve earned exchanging AO crystals or fulfilling other objectives for parts to build facilities like a craft station in your hideout.
The catch is that players need to return back to the base before their Cradlecoffin battery runs out, which effectively acts as the game’s time limit. There are some big consequences for not making it back. Your pilot has to eject and you lose everything in your inventory, including your weapons, parts, and resources. This adds a lot of tension to your excursions on the surface, and helps make sure that you’re playing smartly and not being too greedy.
There are no features like squads or team drops. In this sense, Echo of Ada is a solo game. Players can still stumble upon each other out in the field, though. Whether it’s mining for crystals, taking down enemies, or just simply exploring, there’s always the potential for emergent gameplay. Most of the time, at least in my session, all of the other Drifters minded their own business. In some instances, players will actually engage with other Drifters to drop their loot. If done too many times, the aggressor gets a bounty boot on them. It’s an interesting way to shake up the cooperative atmosphere Echo of Ada wants to promote.
“I took heavy inspiration from roguelike titles,” Futami says. “Since those games are usually one player, I wanted to see what would happen if you could interact with other players while going through that same roguelike process.”
What separates Echo of Ada from its peers like Escape from Tarkov is that it has a single-player campaign. I played two story missions and they felt reminiscent of an Armored Core game. The missions I played were much more streamlined and focused on combat. These story missions also provided much more insight into the fall of Amasia and more lore about Drifters, making the campaign a much more engaging way to tell a story rather than just having a multiplayer component.
In multiplayer, players are able to pick what kind of system specialization their Magus has, such as Anti-Enders or Anti-Cradle, which boosts the offensive and defensive capabilities against them. In story missions, the specialization is automatically chosen depending on the objectives. I took down Enders and other enemy mechs to complete my objectives, like going to an area to extract data about Amasia’s past. While Echo of Ada isn’t on the scale of FromSoftware’s fabled Armored Core mech franchise, the campaign did scratch my itch of wanting a traditional story mode.
Futami says that both the single-player campaign and the multiplayer are separate, except in the case where players will have to make progress in the former in order to unlock more areas in the latter. Having individual modes was also a way to deter cheaters.
“Cheaters could use it in a way that’s very hurtful to the PvP multiplayer aspect of the game. We had ideas of merging the two,” Futami says. “But in order to kind of keep the cheaters at bay, we kept them completely separate.”
I’m curious to see whether Synduality: Echo of Ada’s multiplayer can evolve and prevent the gameplay from becoming stale, and how the single-player campaign fleshes out the genuinely interesting lore of the Drifters, Magus, and Amasia. If it can pull that off, it could find a lot of success as a mash-up that once felt like a dream.
Synduality: Echo of Ada launches on January 23, 2025 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.
