Emotions shape the world around you. That’s the premise of Neosis Echoes, a cyberpunk sci-fi open-world survival craft action game that features more keywords in its SEO than it does devs working on the title.
The three-person team at French studio Vectaris Interactive have great ambition. They aim to establish a new genre with the release that received its first full trailer on Wednesday. We caught up with Boris Hoechstetter, studio co-founder and game director, to explore the aspirations and development behind a game that wants to turn your character’s shifting emotional state into a dynamic gameplay feature.
Each of those influences brings something different to Neosis Echoes. Dune inspires the story and factions, while Mass Effect influences the gameplay and the kind of science-fiction universe we want to create. With No Man’s Sky, it’s the survival gameplay and sci-fi setting. Cyberpunk 2077 feeds into the cyberpunk side of Varos: the megacorporations, the dystopian atmosphere and the emphasis on action.
We see Neosis Echoes as an action survival game, which is still a fairly unusual combination. Plenty of survival games have combat, but it isn’t always the main focus. We want action to play a more prominent role alongside survival, and we hope that balance will give the game its own identity.
Yes, Returnal is an influence, although we wouldn’t count it among our main inspirations. It’s more of a reference for the fast-paced, dynamic combat. Tron is also an inspiration, especially musically. I’m currently composing the game’s soundtrack under my artist name, Extra Terra, and getting that sound identity right matters a lot to us.
Evan Draxell owned and ran Draxell Corp on Earth, 300 years before the events of the game. That’s the corporation whose logo you see in the trailer. Players will also come across some of his technologies, including those behind the Transcendants: humans whose minds have been transferred into artificial bodies.
He travelled to Varos in stasis as part of the megacorporations’ race to establish colonies and secure Echorium, a resource that greatly improves computational efficiency and also reacts to human emotions. When he arrives, he has no memory of his past. You’ll have to discover who he is, why he lost his memory and what secrets his own corporation holds.
What makes Evan interesting is that he hasn’t always been a good man. His ambition and need for control hurt others. Neosis Echoes is, in many ways, a story of redemption: facing who he was and whether he can become someone different. We’ll leave the rest for players to discover.
Reactive Survival is built around what we call the emotion loop. The player’s actions and what happens to Evan influence his emotional state. That state affects how the environment responds, and those responses feed back into how he feels and what the player decides to do next. This can affect enemies, plants and other vegetation, the weather, wildlife, and even some of the dialogue options available to you.
For us, the innovation comes from the different survival strategies this creates. Your actions can change the conditions around you, opening up possibilities while also asking you to adapt. Evan’s emotional state becomes part of how you interact with the world and decide what to do next.
The idea came out of a conversation between Leila Ancelin (CEO, Co-Founder & Marketing Director) and me. We were imagining a game where the player’s actions could meaningfully influence the environment. That led us to explore emotions as the basis for that interaction, and to Echorium, a strange resource that reacts to them. It gave us a way to connect the game’s world and story with the survival experience we wanted to create.
We’re only three people, so we want to be realistic about the scope. Neosis Echoes isn’t a AAA production. Our ambition is to develop this idea on an indie scale and bring something fresh to the survival genre.
Yes, damage is one factor, but there’s more to it than that. Repeated hits can build up Evan’s stress and gradually push him towards a more negative mood, changing how you approach the situation. Hunger and thirst matter too, alongside prolonged danger, setbacks and certain narrative choices. His emotional state reflects both what happens to him and how you look after him.
There are ways to recover as well. A visit to a bar or nightclub can help improve his mood, and your base will offer spaces and facilities for meditation and emotional recovery. Rest helps him recover physically and emotionally, while these activities give you opportunities to relieve pressure and move back towards a more positive state.
Players will also be able to influence these states deliberately, using pills and certain implant systems to induce or stabilise a particular state for a limited time. But that control comes with trade-offs.
For example, a positive-mood pill works for five minutes, then causes an emotional crash into a negative state. A negative-mood pill also lasts five minutes, but wears off into a neutral state. The time limits and possible after-effects mean you have to think about when to use them.
That’s how these systems fit together: combat pressure, survival needs, recovery and deliberate emotional control all influence one another. Managing Evan’s emotional state becomes part of how you survive, prepare and respond to the world.
There are three main emotional states: positive, neutral and negative. Within the positive and negative states, there are different levels of intensity, from Euphoric at the most positive end to Ruthless at the most negative.
One example is the weather. A negative emotional state can bring rain that weakens certain enemy robots. The cacti you see in the trailer also respond to negative emotions by firing spikes. You can use that tactically, luring enemies close to them and using the plants’ attacks to your advantage.
Your abilities add another layer to those decisions. The implants you acquire and upgrade give you abilities tied to Evan’s negative, neutral or positive states.
Negative-state abilities can be extremely powerful, but consume health. Neutral abilities offer straightforward damage, while positive abilities can restore health or deliver powerful attacks. Both neutral and positive abilities draw on Focus, which changes with your actions in combat.
Our aim is for each state to offer useful options and meaningful trade-offs. A negative state is not simply a punishment for playing badly, and a positive state is not automatically the best answer to every situation.
It matters when you’re gathering resources, too. Certain resources, including some crystals, change colour and properties in response to Evan’s emotions. That can affect how you gather them and use them in crafting or upgrades, so emotional state has a role to play beyond combat.
Here, “loop” means a continuous feedback loop between the player and the environment. Your actions influence Evan’s emotional state and how the world responds. Those reactions then change the situation you’re in and the decisions you make next.
So we’re not talking about the run-based structure of a roguelike, where death ends a run and you start a fresh attempt. It’s about how the game’s systems keep influencing one another while you play.
This has been an insane year for top-quality games. How difficult is it for a three-person dev team to make an impact right now? What are your main fears, and what constitutes success when release arrives?
As a team of three, our biggest challenge is getting noticed when there are so many great games out there. Our main fear is simply going unnoticed. For us, success would mean finding our audience and being able to keep developing the game.
Ha, AI is a thorny subject in the games industry! (laughs). All of the game’s artistic content, including 3D assets, level design, music and sound design, is created by our team and the freelance artists we work with. Human creativity matters a lot to us.
That’s been our approach since we started development almost a year ago, when AI tools were less advanced. We’re starting to experiment with AI for debugging and getting a better understanding of code architecture. We already use it to organise our ideas and documentation, including our game design document.
It’s particularly useful as a personalised learning tool, and we may also use it for QA in the future. For us, video games bring art and technology together. Art is a way of communicating something personal, so replacing that expression with machine-generated work doesn’t make sense to us.
We’re happy to use AI as a tool, but we want the creative vision to remain human.
That question of what makes us human is central to Neosis Echoes. Its world includes factions of synthetic humans, AIs and humans who have transcended their original bodies and taken on new forms.
If machines can surpass human capabilities, where does our value lie? What place do we choose for ourselves? The future we depict is more dystopian than the one I personally expect. I’m still optimistic about what lies ahead, but the choices we make about AI and our place alongside it already matter. Neosis Echoes gives us a way to explore them.
