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beatricethebaeddelwitch · 3 hours ago

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No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it's still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You're still alive.

Arches is the companion, the foil, the refutation, the answer to Echo. As such it is Echo's compliment, but it is also a standalone story complete with its own themes and sentiments. If Echo was about the establishment of a perpetual, vicious cycle, then Arches is what bisects that circle to create its own thesis. Its ending is, appropriately, a momentous occasion of great violence, followed in an epilogue by residual trauma where the protagonists learn to move on from what has been permanently lost, and learn to live with what is no longer there. This is a running theme that defines much of Howly's writing; where Arches becomes distinguished from his prior work is in the final word (the fact that there even IS a final word), a definite ending and a nail in the coffin. Entropy brings the cycles of Echo to an end. Spoilers for the game's events below.

The thing that immediately struck me about Arches' tone was its use of third person, a unique choice for visual novels that usually rely on first person to immerse the reader in the player character. Even when Echo Project's games have shifted perspective and have demonstrably illustrated even the player characters to have a distinct voice and identity independent of the player making their choices, it continues to utilize the first person. It enables the reader to understand the world as the characters themselves perceive it, in all of their insight and blind spots, and implicitly adopt the character's view as their own. The use of third person, by contrast, establishes a stark objective reality; you see just what the author wants you to see, unfiltered by the biases of the author's character(s). When events happen, they occur and unfold just as what's being described, with extremely little room for interpretation. From the beginning, the finality of Arches' tone carries its series of events to a solid conclusion. It also creates a barrier that establishes a clear distinction between the player's own perspective and that of the characters.

Narratively, Arches' tone is closely aligned with the traditional western mode of storytelling; there is a beginning, a rising action, a climax, a falling action and conclusion. There are clear delineations within the storyline from which there are points of no return, moments where definitive changes that do not resemble past patterns are established. The fractures created by the trauma are neither recursive nor fractal in nature. Instead, they are clear differentiations from what has come before that establishes something new, and not simply because it occurs last at the end of a sequence. It is newness in a truly semantic sense; it is the emergence of something alien, unknown, and unlike anything that has happened before.

Devon's initial impulse to bring Cameron along to Echo is in pursuit of this unknown, his questions about the afterlife as a result of familial tragedies driving him to know what cannot be understood. To this end, he thinks his boyfriend Cameron might be able to use his latent psychic ability as a means of connecting with and grasping this reality. Cameron agrees to this proposition out of a desire to help provide some sense of closure with his counterpart, despite his own traumas surrounding his latent talent.

The tables soon flip, however, when things go sideways shortly after Cameron and Devon enter Echo. Demons from both Cameron's past and Echo's interact in strange and terrifying ways that immediately spell greater trouble looming on the horizon. Devon immediately regrets his decision to go to Echo, but Cameron by contrast is drawn into the dark amplificative powers of Echo to harness his unique ability. He experiences terror, but also curiosity as his powers manifest more powerfully; Cameron glimpses the lives of many who have died in Echo, and when their attempt to escape Echo runs into hardship, he becomes prone to wandering off in pursuit of being able to master his newfound ability.

Part of Cameron's drive to master this ability is tied to his sense of identity, purpose and value. Having come from impoverished conditions in the pacific northwest, suffering from drug addiction that took his life of his mother (the sole parent in his life), and having failed in his attempts at a music career, Cameron finds himself working at a call-center and tries to make ends meet with his boyfriend. Devon, by contrast, excelled academically at Pueblo, and pursues a much more promising career in the sciences. Cameron's gnawing sense of inferiority and inability to succeed in his field of passion drives him to pursue meaning and self-worth in his only remaining distinguishing characteristic, his psychic powers. By the end of the visual novel, Cameron accomplishes his goal. It is not for the better.

Caught in the crossfire of these game's events is a mutual friend of Cameron and Devon, Arturo. His initial role as a happy-go-lucky sort ready to help the couple out of their bind initially sees him bonding closely with Cameron's desire to explore the unknown, but being caught in the consequences of this decision forever shatters the amicable dynamic they once had. His character arc is framed more in the context of casualties, helpless to affect the greater consequences of the decisions made by the pair of protagonists.

In many ways, Cameron and Devon's one-time "success" story (a term I'm admittedly using VERY loosely) is in stark contrast to the inevitable cycles of failure in Echo. It begins with a loving couple entering into a horrific unknown, and emerges from that time with their relationship and their lives changed but intact. It is the exact opposite of Echo, where Chase comes back to reunite an old friend group that has largely gone their own way after having already begun to fray, and having it more or less fall apart by the end.

Part of me had wished to see the Arches cast interact with the Echo gang beyond the cameos featured in TJ and Flynn's endings, but I understand why the meetup isn't suitable for both narrative and thematic reasons. Cameron and Devon, being external to Echo, represent an outside party who barrel headfirst into Echo's cycle and come out of it changed. They are fundamentally different people than those born in Echo, who are trapped in Echo, who die in Echo. The two visual novels, despite being closely tied to each other, are like oil and water. Those who are in Echo's cycle are bound to it; those who are witness to it are affected but not trapped by it. To involve the main Echo cast in this arrangement would create a thematic dissonance, whereupon the characters of one story are used to tell another, fundamentally different from the one they had illustrated before. It is, in fact, for the best that none of the main characters of Echo make an appearance save for whatever remains of a particular manifestation of Flynn. If any of them had remained in Echo by the time of Devon and Cameron's arrival, it would only portend a grim and tragic fate.

The characters that DO recur from Echo exist to tell a very specific story. They are the last, dying breaths of the cycle, the last embers, the cinders that burn themselves out and expire. The inevitability of Echo's slow death was already something known even by the start of the events in its own game, but at that time the cycle was still quite alive and well. The last surviving residents of Echo shown in Arches choose to remain there of their own volition, fully accepting the pain and suffering that comes from doing so.

Of the two Echo characters that comprise the cycle, one is primarily witness to it (Duke) and the other actively perpetuates it (Brian). Much in contrast to his assertions to some sort of alternate leadership in Echo, Duke by this time is largely isolated and worn down by the forces of the town, having experienced the mass hysteria of Echo and yet being one of two that decided to remain in spite of the horrors of that week. Highly reactionary and prone to violence, Duke uses threats and acts of force to try and keep people away from Echo while trying to contain the evil within. Despite his unilateral and brutal approach to the problem, Duke's heart is shown to have at least some semblance of compassion, after turning around to save Arturo's life after he sustained a life-threatening shot to the head by Brian. His self-destructive tendencies are kept at a strictly personal level, and his last observed act was to save Arturo's life even if it seems to come at the cost of his own.

Brian, meanwhile, continues his predatory, psychotic behavior that extends his own self-destructive habits to the livelihoods of everyone around him. Where Duke had begun to avoid Brian, Cameron, Devon and Arturo all stumbled into the picture, inadvertently threatening to renew the cycle of tragedy in Echo. After Arturo's brush with death, Devon is imprisoned and Cameron is forced into a very bad drug trip as Brian attempts to use Cameron's abilities for his own ends. When this fails, he finally settles on a few last acts of sadomasochistic violence culminating in double-murder. No one in the cast of characters at this moment is able to stop Brian, despite Devon's heroic acts to try and defy the fate they're seemingly destined for.

At this moment, one of the key features of the Echo Project's flagship trilogy manifests; Cameron glimpses a future where he is shot to death before Devon kills Brian, and in witnessing this future, alters it by pushing Brian's gun just before the trigger is pulled. A single act of defiance, in combination with a eucatastrophe, splits the timeline.

It is important to note the second part to the dynamic, the eucatastrophe. The term, first coined by Tolkien, is more than just a moment of deus ex machina that results in a favorable outcome: in his words, "we see in a brief vision that the answer may be greater–it may be a far-off gleam of echo of evangelium in the real world." For it was by a confluence of tragedy, indeed the accumulation thereof, that finally caused the cycle to collapse on itself. The cycle of entropy, the snake that devoured its own tail, died as a result. Put in literal terms, Brian's drug abuse and wanton violence had caught up to him in a moment of karma, and he dies not with a bang, but with the whimper of a heart attack. Cameron and Devon did not prompt this series of events, they were merely witness to it, and that becomes the mercy by which they survive: bruised and bloodied, but alive. Whether by stroke of sheer dumb luck or providence, Devon and Cameron are spared the consequences of the cycles of Echo.

The arches that Cam uses to guide Devon, who carries him out of the mine, lead not to heaven (as Cameron's mother believed) but to something more akin to Elysium, at least if you were use ZA/UM's depiction of the word. The salvation that comes to the pair is not a deliverance into a better reality; it is a return to what they had once known and lived in all their lives. In an odd twist, it was not the world that had changed for Cameron and Devon when they had experienced the horrors of Echo, but themselves. The two must learn to adapt to the world all over again.

Cameron and Devon struggle to hold onto whatever remains of their lives. Cameron, though now in much greater command of his psychic powers, is put on a literal mind-numbing number of medications for a plethora of mental disorders that arose as a result of his ordeal. His physical injuries sustained from that time also have forever robbed him of his ability to pursue his passion even as a hobby; he completely loses his ability to play the guitar. Cameron struggles to make things work at his call center, unable to deal with the high stress environment and interpersonal obligations inherent with the role. The price for Cameron's actualization of his one unique trait came at the cost of almost everything else; the passions that offered some shred of happiness, and even his ability to function as an adult in a capitalist economy.

Devon was also not spared his share of scars, both physical and mental, but the greatest change in his life comes in the form of having to accommodate Cameron's exacerbated mental health struggles, though in some key tragic points Devon is also able to empathize with Cameron's struggles, having begun to encounter a number of them himself. Their support for each other is much more closely tied together as a result. It is mutual by both necessity and desire to see the other well, and this steels their resolve through the new troubles they encounter throughout their relationship.

Cameron's relationship with Arturo, however, never recovers. Following his brush with death in Echo, Arturo suffers several motor and speech issues that he, with the support of his girlfriend, slowly begins to adjust to, but with the knowledge of Cameron's psychic powers he is never able to look at his former friend the same way again.

The visual novel ends, as with many of Howly's works, on a bittersweet note. But Arches' bittersweet ending is a resolute one; in it, we see Devon accept the world and the consequences of the choices Cameron and he had made for themselves for what they are: a past set in stone that has irrevocably affected their future. But that future is as of yet uncertain, neither bright nor bleak. For all of the ending's ambiguity regarding the afterlife, the certainty of the ending comes from the lesson's learned and the response of the characters to this uncertainty. They resolve to walk into that uncertain future together as it unfolds for them, to live presently, and to persist through what they have witnessed and suffered through.

The positivity of this ending, as gut-wrenching as it is, becomes even more reinforced as a result of what Cameron glimpses; the alternate timelines he sees with his psychic powers imply a great deal of the possibility of Devon being the carrier for Echo's cycles beyond its former borders of the town. With Cameron dead, Devon's life changes dramatically, becoming defined by his loss and an eerily similar echo of his former boyfriend urging him to seek out other Echos found throughout the world in an effort to prevent their awakening. If there is anything that Echo has taught me, it's that this very act would result in the tragedy it sets out to avoid. It would be a resumption of the cycle, a new circle, perhaps on an even greater scale than before.

Cameron's act of defiance to delay the inevitable, while not the sole act that saved his or Devon's life, yet resulted in an ideal outcome given the alternatives glimpsed at in the epilogue. Again, we see a highly existential sentiment conveyed in the Echo Project's works, but the argument on this theme is the opposite side of the coin from Echo. Persistence in the face of futility is not seen as a horror in Arches, but as markedly human. To be human in Arches is not a horror.

Like a coin, I find it difficult at times to balance, or otherwise reconcile these somewhat contradictory theses that Arches and Echo set out to establish; both make valid points as to the flawed nature of human beings, but the conclusion of that instability falls one way for Echo and another for Arches. There is nothing inherent to Cameron or Devon that would make them any more deserving or equipped to survive through the horrors of Echo intact, save for sheer moments of luck, and successfully managing to climb the rickety ladder of socioeconomic and material conditions that allowed them to retain their grasp on a life spent together. Romance is not the point of either Arches or Echo, but being integral to the human experience it carries significance that has to be factored into any analysis. Again, the line about true love from Disco Elysium surfaces in my mind.

Ultimately, this is what I appreciate most about Howly's writing. It captures the human experience through inhuman characters, through inhuman means. Chronologically, Arches falls at the opposite end of the Echo trilogy, but as final words go it offers a foundation for encouragement and hope, even as it recognizes that foundation to be socioeconomic in nature, and not simply from the will to persist in the face of overwhelming odds. It is a measured hope. It is dialectical materialism made into gutwrenching poetry.

#echo vn #arches vn

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