The PlayStation Report: Echoes, Eyes, and EverQuests
Welcome back to The PlayStation Report! We’re spending some time running our way through Sony’s list of IP to determine how healthy they are. This time, we’ll be tackling both E and F. Not a whole lot going on with these letters, and what is here is pretty well off the beaten path, for the most part. But sometimes that can make it easier to keep alive, right? Who doesn’t love weird PlayStation games? Let’s get started. It’s time for The PlayStation Report!
Echochrome
We kick things off with a game that I honestly haven’t thought about in ages. Echochrome is a puzzle game that started life on the PlayStation 3. It’s all about messing around with perspectives, and moving this little dummy character around in some mind-bending environments. It’s like if someone made a video game out of M. C. Escher’s illustrations.
Health rating: Basically Dead
Echochrome never exactly took the world by storm, but it did perform well enough to get two followups. Echoshift hit PSPin 2009, and then Exhoshift II came out in 2010 as a PlayStation Move-enabled release. Remember PlayStation Move? Ahh, the good ol days when everyone was trying to make their own Wii Remote. Anyway, Echochrome was a neat experiment, but I’m pretty sure it’s cooked.
Everybody's Golf/Hot Shots Golf
You probably know this one better as Hot Shots Golf, but for some reason it’s called Everybody’s Golf now. Well, it’s always been called that in Japan and Europe, so maybe they just wanted to make things more uniform. Regardless, Everybody’s Golf is a fantastic approach to golf. It was originally developed by Camelot, and was a pretty huge success. Silly golf games are fun. Who knew?
Health rating: Could be Better
The most recent game in this series was Everybody’s Golf VR back in 2019. As it’s now 2025, it’s officially time for some concern. I don't think this series is dead by any stretch, but Sony has been turning their noses up at their B-tier franchises quite a bit lately, so it’s possible that this one’s just going to be on ice until one of the suits determines that people actually like these games and they could probably make some money if they produced more. There was a 6-year gap between releases from 2011 to 2017, so this kind of wait isn’t completely unprecedented, but it still makes me nervous.
EverQuest
It’s crazy to think back on it now, but EverQuest quest to be THE online game to play. It basically brought the concept of an MMO to the masses, and opened the door to the likes of World of Warcraft in the process. In case you weren’t around during its heyday, it’s a fantasy MMO where you team up with various people online to perform tasks, complete quests, and the like. It was massively successful.
Health rating: Pretty Good
EverQuest isn’t anywhere near as popular as it once was, but it’s still alive and kicking! There were sequels, spinoffs, comic books, and more, but it’s my understanding that it’s the original recipe that’s still out there keeping people busy. Its most recent expansion, The Outer Brood, was just released in December 2024, and the game shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.
Extermination
Remember Extermination? Sure you do! Well, actually you probably don’t. Or at least you didn’t until you saw the box art here. Extermination was a 2001 Survival Horror game for the PlayStation 2 that had a bit of a rough ride to market. When it landed though, it was met with generally favorable criticism thanks to its impressive visuals and enjoyable gameplay.
Health rating: Basically Dead
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Considering this was an original IP survival horror game, a genre that has tendency to sell pretty well, it’s honestly surprising that Spony never went back to this well. It’s possible they don’t actually own the brand. It was developed by a company called Deep Space, which no longer exists, but it was co-developed by Sony themselves, and they published the thing, too. I have to imagine the crowded survival horror market and this game’s forgettable box art probably had something to do with its permanent shelving, but I guess we’ll never know. Extermination has been exterminated.
The Eye of Judgment
Before PlayStation Move, Sony had a camera peripheral for the PS2 called EyeToy. This evolved into the PlayStation Eye for PS3, and the killer app for the thing was The Eye of Judgment. It’s a collectible card game (which was all the rage at the time) where you place cards in front of the camera and they come to life on your TV screen. It’s honestly a pretty cool piece of tech, and for those who liked collectible card games, it was a good time.
Health rating: Basically Dead
The Eye of Judgment got one followup on the PSP in 2010 called The eye of Judgment: Legends, but that seems to be about it for the brand. This doesn't seem to be the kind of thing Sony wants to pursue anymore, and honestly, who can blame them? Collectible card games can be big money makers, but they require a decent amount of maintenance. Although, with the rise of online digital card games, maybe there’s a chance Sony will take another crack at this without the camera? I doubt it, but anything’s possible!
Fat Princess
This is one of those games I kind of can’t believe exists. In a world where there’s an entire sect of the internet that has devoted their lives to complaining about how women in video games aren’t sexy enough, a game based around an explicitly overweight princess is downright odd. It’s basically about feeding cake to a captured princess, thereby making her fatter and fatter. It’s weird.
Health rating: Basically Dead
Fat Princess actually caught on to a degree for a while there. Best I can tell, the last release was 2015’s Fat Princess Adventures for PS4. I can’t shake the feeling that in the current landscape, this isn't the kind of game that would really fly with modern audiences. I imagine Sony is just as happy to let this one slowly fade away.
Folklore
This is another one of those cases where I’m not 100% what Sony’s stake in the brand is. Folklore was developed by Game Republic, which closed its doors back in 2011. Sony published the game themselves in all regions, which makes me thing they have some stake in it, but that’s hardly solid proof that it’s theirs. Regardless, Folklore was a PlayStation 3 action RPG with a distinct Celtic flare.
Health rating: Very Dead
Folklore sort of flew under the radar back in its day. It reviewed okay, but it just never really caught on. There was apparently some sequel talk at one point, but since Folklore itself didn’t perform so well, those were all cancelled. With the original studio behind the game closed, and the game itself largely forgotten, this one’s about as dead as game franchises get.
Frequency/Amplitude
Frequency is awesome, and while you’ve no doubt heard of the games it eventually evolved into, the original release is a bit on the obscure side. It’s a rhythm game where a series of notes travel toward the screen in a giant tube that you have to rotate around. As the notes approach the front of the screen, you have to zap them to the rhythm. Each part of the cylinder represents a different part of the song, like the drums, synth, guitars, etc. When you play enough of a track correctly, that part of the song will continue playing on its own for a few measures, and the goal is to finish the song with as much music playing as possible.
Health rating: Basically Dead
Frequency got itself a sequel called Amplitude. The big change in that game was making the playfield flat. So the notes came toward the screen on a flat road and you had to play them to the rhythm of the song. And if that sounds an awful lot like Guitar Hero, that’s because it is! Frequency and Amplitude were developed for Sony by Harmonix, and concepts they created for these games formed the basis for Guitar Hero, which then led to Rock Band. Those games have a whole lineage of their own though, and while their DNA can be traced back here, they aren’t actually a part of the same series. As for Frequency, Sony hasn’t touched the idea since the whole Guitar Hero craze happened. Which is a terrible shame, because there’s still a lot of fun to be had with this kind of game. Sadly, I’m fairly confident this one’s dead for good.
And that wraps things up for this edition of The PlayStation Report. There’s a lot of “Basically Deads” on here, but it’s still a little less grim than usual! Join us next time where we’ll be tackling the letter G, where there are at least three genuinely well liked and very much still alive franchises to cover. That should be a nice change of pace! See you next time!
