Why I love Sonic Epoch

Many folks see the fact that Sonic Epoch was referenced in episode 3 and take this to mean that maybe I am poking fun at the game. After all, it seems incredibly common for people on the internet to viciously criticize this game; both its MSDOS and GBA versions (the latter of which I actually helped do some music and sprites for).

Of course, because of my contributions to the GBA version, that version of the game will have a special place in my heart, and I have mad respect for Rob for making a relatively long and complete game experience on that platform in a relatively short amount of time! That said though, what I really want to talk about is the PC version…

Though the gameplay is much less polished than the GBA version, and is thus a worse gameplay experience in many ways, let me say that I don’t see the PC version of Sonic Epoch as a “game”—I instead see it as an interactive experience. There are a lot of reasons why the PC version feels that way and the GBA does not, in my view, and I’m not sure anyone has tried to really figure out why that is, so that’s what this blog post is about.

Instead of sprites and tile art, like you see in most 2D games, PC Sonic Epoch used screenshots of the show to create oddly low resolution and uncanny looking art for both the characters and backgrounds. This uncanny quality paired extremely well with the incredibly dark, shocking, and surprising story and dialogue.

The game looked and sounded like SatAM in many ways, even having voice clips annd music clips from the show, but in many ways it was also totally off—the experience while progressing through this strange piece of media was like SatAM meets David Lynch.

At the very beginning of the game you see Robotnik working on what is basically Metal Sonic or Mecha Sonic—but it’s neither— it’s “Sonic-2”. This alone is a strange twist, defying your expectations. Then, when Sonic faces his robotic doppleganger within minutes of starting the game, we see him not only immediately bested, but reduced to a bloody pulp. The sense of danger and horror from this opening scene alone helps set the tone for the rest of the game.

Epoch constantly defied expectations that the show instilled in your mind, thereby pulling you deeper and deeper into a world of shocking, disturbing, and surprising twists and turns. One in which the moral center of the cast, the most psychologically stable, and bravest freedom fighter (Sally) is left psychologically unstable and morally corrupted. One in which your friends are not only unsaveable, but you have to actually kill them, one by one, in their roboticized forms. When the game did crazy things, the characters responded in ways that felt genuine and vulnerable—yes they didn’t sound like cartoon characters at times, but what they were dealing with was no longer bound to the rules of a rated G cartoon, and thus their “uncharacteristic” responses felt authentic and earnest.

In some ways, Sonic Epoch is a metaphor for growing up and the stark transition from a sheltered child to a suddenly unprepared teen—newly aware that the comforting stories we tell ourselves about how the world works aren’t true, that there is real danger to be aware of and there are real tragedies that no hero will ever save people from.

Sonic starts out as his chipper self at the beginning of the game, but as you progress through this house of mirrors, you see him face the trauma that lead to Sally losing her mind, and you can honestly see how Sonic might eventually lose his mind in the same way. That’s the meta story of Sonic Epoch on PC, imo, and it’s beautifully poetic and groundbreaking.

In the PC version, there is no hope of a “good ending”, only a progressively more and more traumatizing tumble down a rabbit hole of hell where Sonic eventually loses his will to fight or possibly even live. GBA didn’t follow that playbook. It set itself up as a standard hero story where Sonic stays chipper and Sally slowly improves mentally. Sonic doesn’t need to kill all his friends and things eventually work out in the end. That makes for a fun game, but that doesn’t stack up to the absolutely insane and truly remarkable surreal, existential horror experience that is the PC version of Sonic Epoch.

That’s why it was more than a game imo, and in that vein, I highly recommend folks peruse ScaleyFoxy’s incredibly detailed let’s play of the game.

Scaley has not only touched every corner of this game, but every version ever released of it. In my view, these YouTube videos are the definitive way to experience the game as a newcomer, since the playing of the game is honestly secondary to the exploration of it.