Welcome back to Cooperative Cthulhu Month! We’ve seen some new games in the past few weeks: Horror on the Orient Express (cooperative Cthulhu Clue) and Cthulhu Rift (a simple roll-and-write). This week, we head to the opposite end of the spectrum and take a look at a big, massive game in an H.P. Lovecraft-esque Universe called Abyss Echo: The Forbidden Rite!

Abyss Echo is a cooperative Escape Room type game …. well, maybe it’s more of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Game. Or something else? Well, it was on Kickstarter back in July 2025. It promised delivery in April 2026 and it was basically on time (it might have been a month or two late).

The reason it took me so long to get to this game: I had the hardest time getting a group of people together! This is a BIG game! And it requires a bit of commitment!

From the box (above): you can see an estimated 25h+ playthrough! Zoinks! I wanted to try to get a dedicated group together to play this so we could commit to the game (if we liked it).

Abyss Echo was on my Top 10 Anticipated Cooperative Games of 2026 at the #2 position!!! Did we like it enough to continue playing?

Unboxing

I went ahead and backed at the ALL-IN level, which game me three boxes of stuff!

The Stretch Goals box (see above) was pretty much just “extraneous”.

It was mostly just “thematic” stuff which added to the vibe of the universe, but really did nothing for gameplay. If I had to do it over again, I would NOT have gotten all this. This box in particular really wasn’t useful. It looked cool.

The second box was a “Miskatonic Archive Box”: see above. It was a little more useful, but I’m still not sure I would have picked it up either.

The most useful thing was a notebook extender. But even that wasn’t that useful. The thing we LIKED the most was the thematic CD of music!

I don’t know; if you can get this box for a reasonable price, it might be worth getting.

The main box was the Abyss Echo: The Forbidden Rite box! See above!

This is a pretty big box of stuff.

There is a lot in here but it’s all really nice! A lot of it STILL seems extraneous!

The most important part of the game are the 4 parts of a story: see above.

Because this is a Cthulhu game, you must track you Sanity! See the San Tracker!

As you unlock things in the game, you will read from the Redacted Archive. When you “finish” the game, you will read from the 13 Echos … there are 13 endings, depending on where you get and your SANITY!!! If you ever die early, because you know, NO SANITY, you reading ending 0!

There’s also a little notebook that you will hold all your papers as you investigate: It is the centerpiece of the game.

Gameplay

I hesitate to call this a game: it has a few “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” moments, and a few dice rolls, and some combat. But the majority of the game is reading text out loud for everyone. This feels like you are in a Lovecraft-based book club, where everyone takes turns reading from the book!

As you read, characters will be introduced. See above. It’s cool! The characters have story and depth and they are interesting: the little pop-ups help you see them in your mind’s eye!

The book is the most important part of this game: it’s the story. You start off in Chapter One. Based on what we’ve seen so far, it looks like each Chapter will take “about 6 hours”, so in a 3-hour game session will finish half a chapter. This does jive with the expected playtime: 25 hours+ of content! (8 sessions of 3 hours each?)

Over the course of the night, you pass the book around and people read from it and tell the very thematic story of students at Miskatonic University. It’s VERY thematic; it feels like the style of H.P. Lovecraft, but maybe the text flows a little more easily.

Let’s be clear: we read the story for a 3 hours and made a few dice rolls and a few Choose-Your-Own Adventure decisions. And that was 3 hours! It feels more like a “shared narrative” and less like a game.

Reactions

A group of me and 4 friends took one crazy evening to take this for a test run; our first session was abut 3.5 hours (.5 hours setting up, 3 hours playing). We made it about halfway through Chapter 1 (we think).

We have decided we will continue to the end of Chapter 1 and see if we want to continue from there. We liked it enough to continue moving forward for now.

I bought Abyss Echo as an expectation of an Escape Room game with elements of a Mystery in a Cthulhu universe … and I was completely wrong what this was. I was right about the theme, but the “game” is much much much more about reading. Much much more about reading!

Worries or Thematic Elements?

We did encounter some inconsistencies in the game as we read. Olga’s hair was first described as blonde then very black? And she drank Vodka but then it was Bourbon? We hope this is the game messing with us and not a translation issue (the game came from Hong Kong). After all, as our grip on reality loosens, you could see the game “thematically” being inconsistent so as to screw with you …

We just hope it’s not translation errors, but thematic immersion. We hope?

Legacy?

Is this a legacy game? There are stickers you put on a map. There are things to open. There are actually spaces to scratch-off (see Rodrigo has one space scratched).

So far, it sounds like it is will be a Legacy game, with the stickers and scratch-off, but it feels (from what we’ve seen) that it could be reset with just a little effort? Not sure. I think “nominally” this a is a Legacy game for the moment, but it’s not clear it has to be. I need to see more.

Conclusion

Abyss Echo was not at all what I expected. I thought it was going to be an Escape Room with Mystery/Detective elements; it’s really not. Abyss Echo is really an interactive novel with just a few points of “game” interactions (roll dice, make decisions, fight monsters), but generally you spend the vast majority of your time reading the text aloud to become part of a story set in the Miskatonic University.

Stepping back away from the disappointment of initial expectation, this was a wonderfully thematic group novel. My friends and I had fun reading aloud the text and immersing ourselves in an H.P. Lovecraft-esque world of Misakatonic University. The text was pretty good (it was thematic) and the characters were pretty interesting. And it was creepy … just like you expect in this world.

Be aware: H.P. Lovecraft has a stye that can be a little wordy/turgid and it really turns some people off. This H.P. Lovecraft writing style influences the text in Abyss Echo, but it is a little more modern. Still, if you hate H.P. Lovecraft’s writing style, this style and text might really turn you off.

We still have plenty of material to get through, and so far, my friends seem willing to continue playing. Will we make all the way through all 25 hours? Or will we stop after Chapter 1?

If you find yourself interested in this, just be aware of what it is and isn’t. There’s a lot of reading! And I think I recommend ONLY getting the base game: all the other boxes were almost useless.

Be on the lookout for Part II for our final summary. It may be a while if we play through the entire thing, or it may be over quickly if we decide this isn’t for us! Only time will tell!