The rise of indie development over the past decade or so has been fascinating to watch, as the ease of releasing games on digital storefronts like Apple’s App Store has brought so many experiences to gamers that probably wouldn’t have seen the light of day under the traditional models of game development’s past. Case in point: In September of 2013, developer KickBack Studios released Lost Echo ($3.99), an ambitious 3D adventure game for mobile. The game was created by just two people living in Greece, and as such it was rough around the edges in a lot of ways but also mind-blowingly impressive in others. While Lost Echo never quite set the world on fire, it did sell decently and cultivated a really dedicated set of fans. KickBack then spent the next few years releasing frequent updates to the game that polished out a lot of those initial rough edges. While we never officially reviewed Lost Echo back then, we did point out when it got one of its larger updates in November of 2015 alongside a launch on Android and an official teaser for Lost Echo: Resonance, which was intended to be an epilogue of sorts to the main game.
So here’s where things in the indie development world get weird. Lost Echo: Resonance was meant to be a pretty brief additional chapter that would tie up some loose ends in the main game and offer a more definitive ending. It was initially expected to take around 6 months and at maximum up to a year to complete, and would be...