Echo from the Void

Echo from the Void is a top-down 2D action-exploration game built in Unity 6.2 with URP, soaked in the visual language of retrofuturism: blinking LEDs, monolithic computer banks, flickering status screens, and massive industrial machinery buried in darkness.

The game draws from three defining references: the suffocating dread of Aliens, the grounded sci-fi tension of Half-Life, and the brutal, almost casual violence of Starship Troopers. That combination puts it in a very specific emotional register: military, desperate, and deeply hostile.

The setting

A remote corporate colony that has gone silent.

The closest military vessel, already en route to the front line of a war threatening humanity, is ordered to investigate. Vanguard units are deployed with a simple mission: enter the colony, assess the situation, and report back.

Power is still running. Lights still turn on. Automated systems continue doing their jobs.

It’s the people who are missing.

As the Vanguards push deeper into the complex, that silence slowly gives way to signs that something went terribly wrong.

Welcome to Kuroi Complex. Welcome to the hell of planet RF-636.

Gameplay

Echo from the Void mixes fast top-down combat with exploration and a mission-driven campaign, playable solo or in local co-op.

Players take the role of Vanguards, with different classes, weapons and abilities designed to complement each other. Combat can quickly shift from small encounters in confined corridors to large-scale fights against overwhelming numbers of enemies.

Exploration is just as important. Leaving the safest route can lead to additional supplies, weapons, information, or opportunities that may make what comes next a little easier.

The pixel art style keeps things grounded and slightly abstracted, which actually amplifies the horror rather than softening it. There is something unsettling about a monster rendered in clean, readable pixels coming at you through a dead corridor.

Why this game

Everything started during the pandemic. I needed a way to escape my apartment and keep my brain busy. At first, I was simply trying to learn pixel art, drawing a few ground tiles that are still present in the game today.

But it quickly became clear that if I wanted to keep going, I needed something bigger to build around them. And the thing I knew best was video games.

So I started prototyping a small project around those tiles. Then it escalated.

I wanted to play with my friends. I wanted something we could experience together on a couch instead of through the internet, so the game was originally designed around three-player local co-op, with the hope that we would eventually be able to sit together and play it.

The pandemic ended, but the project kept growing. And somehow, it never stopped moving.

After years of building gameplay systems for other people’s visions, Echo from the Void is the first project that is entirely mine. No roadmap, no publisher, no compromises.

It is also a love letter to a very specific era of science fiction: the kind that believed the future would be enormous, loud, analog, and extremely dangerous.