How to play
- Goal
- Get every relic taken, by you or your echoes, and stand on the way out.
- How it ends
- Won when you stand on the way out with every relic taken. It cannot be lost: a pass in which a guard catches you begins again, and your echoes are kept.
- Record
- For every hall, the ten fastest escapes (the clock of your last pass) and the ten best scores, each proved by replaying the run.
- Walk with the arrow keys or WASD, eight ways (hold Shift to dash). On a phone drag anywhere: the thief walks the way you drag.
- Press Space (or the Rewind button) to turn back the glass: what you just did becomes an echo, the hall starts again, and the echo does it again beside you. A plate is pressed while you or an echo stand on it; a gate is open while every plate of its colour is pressed.
- Get every relic taken, by you or an echo, then stand on the way out yourself. T takes the pass again, U undoes the last echo, R restarts the hall.
Controls
| ← ↑ → ↓ · W A S D | Walk, eight ways |
|---|---|
| Shift · J (hold) | Dash: faster, and heard |
| Space · E | Rewind: this pass becomes an echo |
| T | Take this pass again |
| U · Backspace | Undo the last echo |
| Drag | Walk the way you drag |
| Dash · Rewind buttons | On a touch screen: hold Dash, tap Rewind |
| M | Hide or show the map |
| P · Escape | Pause (it costs nothing) |
| R · ↻ | Restart the hall with no echoes |
The thief, the guards, the plates, the gates, the floors and the walls are painted art from the Morass warehouse, some of it made for this game; the music, "Echo Thief", is a round composed for it. The simulation uses whole numbers only and a run is just the hall and the controls of each kept pass, so every browser plays it back identically and the records worker re-plays each one, building every echo from the pass before, before it enters a Top 10. Your bests stay in this browser under morass.echo-thief.v1. A district's floor and walls are fetched when you open a hall of that district. A gamepad works when one is connected. No ads or analytics run inside the game.
Watch how to play
About Echo Thief
A heist you carry out with your own earlier selves. A gate bars the way to the relic, and its pressure plate is on your side of it: you cannot stand on the plate and walk through the gate. So you stand on the plate, turn back the glass, and the hall starts again from its first moment with an echo beside you, walking to the plate exactly as you did. Now the gate is held, and you go through.
That is the first hall. After it, echoes do more than hold plates. Two relics lie at opposite ends of a vault: send an echo for one while you fetch the other, and be out in half the time. A gate wants two plates pressed at once. A plate hoods the braziers of a lit vault, so an echo standing in a side room lets you cross in the dark under a sentry's eyes. A second gate stands behind the first, its plate beyond it. The guards see your echoes as they see you: one that walks into a lantern is chased and dispelled, and its plate is let go. Or you can use that, and send an echo to be chased while you slip past.
There are 60 halls in six districts, each allowing one, two or three echoes. No hall is lost: a pass in which you are caught simply begins again, and any pass can be taken again or an echo undone. Every hall has two top-ten boards: the fastest escape, which is the clock of your last pass (so echoes that dawdle cost you time), and the best score, which pays for raising no alarm and for echoes you did not need. Before a hall shipped, the build found a complete run of it in which nobody is ever noticed, and played that run through the game itself.
