Indie developer Cococucumber is, for the first time ever, trying its hand at a sequel with Echo Generation 2.
Where the first turn-based romp channeled ‘80s and ‘90s vibes to create a nostalgic adventure that looked like Stranger Things was tossed into a blender with voxel graphics and classic RPG gameplay, the sequel is going a totally new direction. The sideways prequel skips the cozy small-town feel to drop players straight into a B-movie, cosmic horror story where they play as the missing father from the first game.
Its first trailer, which debuted as part of today’s November 2025 Xbox Partner Preview, teases a much more horrific experience for Cococucumber. We sat down with game director Martin Gavreau and studio producer and director Vanessa Chia to learn more about Echo Generation 2’s inspirations, how fan feedback helped guide development, and why the team decided to revisit one of its existing universes from a new perspective. You can see everything they had to say in the interview below.
IGN: Tell me about what people are going to see on Thursday. Tell me about this trailer and what exactly Echo Generation 2 is.
Martin Gavreau: It's very different than the first game. We were not sure how far we could go with it, because when you do a sequel, you have many options. You could say, 'Let's just do more of the same,' or you do something entirely different, or anywhere in between. There was a bit of an existential crisis of 'What do we do with this?' We felt that we wanted to see how far we could expand on this world-building. The first game, except for a very short moment, everything is within maybe a 5-10-mile radius of a small town, you know? The sequel, it's much more than that (laughs). It's much more. It's across the galaxy. We visit a different planet, we visit a different dimension, a different time era, and also, what's at stake is much bigger than, 'OK, I want to figure out what happened to my dad.'
You think about the first game, you start just playing with your sister in the street with a raccoon, and then at one point, you fight a mech with the cannon and lasers. You're supposed to be just a kid infiltrating a military base. There's a ramp going up to there, and we wanted to have this ramp up on another scale. Sometimes, in some classic RPGs, you start in your town and you end up fighting gods. So it's like, 'Let's go all the way there.'
So, the trailer, what we're going to see is part of the story. We're not revealing everything. There's big story moments that are not in the trailer that we want to keep. I don't think we're going to reveal them even later, before launch, we want to keep a lot of surprise. We're not playing as a kid anymore. We're playing as the father who disappeared, and it's before the first game. I mean, when you you play with time travel, is it a prequel? So it's a part of a prequel/sequel in some ways. There's some connection with the first game that, I think, people who played the first game, will definitely see a lot of connection, but in an expanded universe that happened across a different time.
We're going to jump back and forth between the future and the past. Really, really bigger scope and more complex plot to...I don't want to spoil it, but there's a much bigger issue happening across the galaxy. We, of course, want to go back home because we're getting trapped. To go back will become eventually, of course, still a goal, but what's the point of going back if you're going back to ruins? You don't want to come back to your Hobbit town and the Shire, and then it's all burned and destroyed. So you want to make sure that you go on a journey of adventure, but also you're going to come back to a world that is still, you know, intact and exists.
Echo Generation 2 obviously has some connections to the first game, but it also seems so different. I am wondering, why a sequel? Why a sequel to Echo Generation instead of something like Ravenlok or Riverbond?
Gavreau: I mean, I would love to do a sequel for Riverbond and Ravenlok. Revisiting those games and expanding on them would be a fantastic opportunity. But why do Echo Generation? There's always a bit of a business decision, because there's always a risk associated with making any game, but we're small in the studio, so it's what we feel like doing. We sit down and we talk all the team, share a bit there, you know, their ideas and what we like to work on, because there's always a possibility also to create a new game, no? And it's the same thing with making a sequel, and everybody loved making the first one. I think it's just the desire to go back to this world and expand on it.
We started the production right when the pandemic started, five years ago, already. So it just coincided, where we entered production for it, and at first there was a lot more unknown about, 'Is the whole world gonna collapse? Is everybody gonna die?' We used the game as a small safe haven structure. When I'm at work, we don't talk about politics, we don't talk about the vaccine or the virus. We just...we are living Echo Generation, and we live in that world, to our little bubble of imagination with these cute characters and talking raccoon, you know? It kind of helped us keep our sanity throughout the events of the pandemic, I think.
Maybe there's a special kind of association with it emotionally, and we felt like the story was not finished, that we had so many ideas that we couldn't put in the first game, that were left on the cutting room, so to speak, that we were really excited to go and work more on it. I think that was probably the reason after Ravenlok to go back to Echo Generation. Now, I don't think it's going to be an Echo Generation 3 after that. We have other plans, and there's been a different thing that we've been working on. Between all the games you can do, you have to commit to one, and everybody felt inspired. It's such a long amount of time not to make a game.
It's not going to spend a week or a month, it could be years, and it's what you live with every day. You ask yourself, 'Do I want to live with that world every day? Do I want to explore?' It's a long-term relationship, in a way, because even after you launch, you need to patch it. It's many, many years. I want to make sure that not only me is on board, and I love to do it, but everybody who has to work on it will find something interesting. It was not easy not to make a sequel. We realized it was harder than we thought, but we really wanted to make that game.
Echo Generation really wears its inspirations on its sleeves. Because Echo Generation 2 is so different from the get-go, what are some of the other inspirations for this game specifically? The movies, games, books, and shows that helped influence its development?
Gavreau: That's great that this could be seen, that you could observe those things in playing the first game. We're not hiding it, and we wanted to use different ones for the sequel and go places we didn't go before, like cosmic horror, for example. So if you think about, you know, the Call of Cthulhu and things that are more kind of like, 'What's out there in space? Is there forces beyond what are really there, and we're just not connected with them, and what if they discover humanity? So there's part of it is cosmic horror, but part of it also is Star Wars (laughs). We wanted to keep the same feeling of the first game. We wanted to use a lot of different inspiration that doesn't seem like they're going to work together at first.
We have also part of Cyberpunk. We have Blade Runner. We went for more of the sci-fi inspiration. We have 2001: A Space Odyssey in there. There's also X Files, because it's so fun to have. There's this kind of giant biomass that we teleport experiment again, like The Fly from Cronenberg. So, we went to inspiration that is more in the horror and sci-fi side, even if there's a bit of fun in there. I got fascinated, too, with this idea of the Backrooms. So maybe we have a little bit of that in there. That there's this other reality next to us, where there's this kind of mind maze, where you can get lost.
It's going to be a much more violent and scary game than the first one. Maybe not for kids entirely so much anymore. I think our rating is going to be probably 16 or 18 plus. We don't really think about it, but just when we fill out the questionnaire, whatever happened happened. But there is more blood, more gore, and it is pixel and voxel (laughs). So it's not as scary, maybe, but it's kind of fun in a way, like when you see the scientist getting smashed up with the blood. There's this playfulness with it, like B-movie playfulness that you have in movies like Tremors, and we wanted to capture that cool.
Why is launching day one on Xbox Game Pass the right move, specifically, for Echo Generation 2?
Gavreau: Well, the first one was on Game Pass. A lot of fans and people who discovered the game are on Xbox already, so it just feels like a logical way to do something similar with the sequel. Other than that, for us, I think it's our fourth game that's going to launch on Game Pass. We've we had this amazing relationship with Xbox that we had a chance to have their support. When you are on Game Pass, it comes with a lot of marketing support, like being part of a show or social media. Independent video games don't always have a publisher.
We don't have a publisher, so this kind of support really helped the game to get discovered. There's so many people on Game Pass that if you see a title that you're not familiar with, give it a chance, try it out, and see if you like it. It really helped open a lot of opportunities for the game to be played, and the end of the day, as a game developer, that's what you want. You want to be able to share your creation with as much people as possible. I think with Game Pass, definitely, it's been incredible to have all this interaction and this communication with the community on Xbox.
Were there any major points of fan feedback after the first game that you specifically want to address with Echo Generation 2?
Gavreau: Oh, yeah, definitely. Some of them, we address in the Midnight Edition. When we started the sequel after Ravenlok, we were thinking, 'Why don't we address some of those issues that some people had playing the game and make a special edition of the first game?' That was going to help us get back in that universe and see if it's possible to improve it in some ways, for quality of life. We really listened to player feedback. Also, something narratively, the first game, it was fun for being episodic, and also at the same time, there's a cost, and the cost is maybe the overarching main story suffered a bit from it. We still keep this episodic format in some ways, but there's a much stronger connection around the main story.
This is one of the things we tried to improve. Hopefully, we'll see if that works. Another one is to make the combat faster. The combat is so much faster now, the way we designed it. It was one of the design guidelines from the start. We need to be able to fight and resolve things much faster. If you want to stop and think you can, but if you want to go fast, it is possible to go very fast through the animation or the options given to you.
Going into a deck-building mechanic, now, also keeps the combat interesting throughout. What we saw is, sometimes, people, they find a companion, they love one move, and they just keep playing with that companion and that one move. Well, hey, there are a lot of different interesting moves that we designed, so if we add the deck-building mechanic, now you can adjust depending on the enemies you encounter. Maybe your deck will work against a certain environment, certain types of enemies, but you need to adjust it in other situations.
You need to keep adjusting your combat style, depending on enemies and depending on the type of cards. You have to have more variety on that side. Those were some of the feedback we tried to improve and implement on that side, for the combat and the story.
I don't think I saw a release date. I'm assuming, obviously, that's not something you can give me, but is this a game we see in 2026, or is there any kind of window you are targeting?
Gavreau: I was just talking this morning with a team member and what they were working on next, and they're like, 'I'm done.' (laughs) How can you be done? How can you be done with the game? Let's have a look.
But we're pretty advanced. I think we want to make sure we have enough time to polish everything. We want to make sure that we have time to balance all the combat and the journey, but the game is pretty advanced. How early depends on how fast we can go through the last phase of making sure the game is properly balanced, and everything runs smoothly.
(Editor’s Note: Cococucumber clarified after the interview that Echo Generation 2 is targeting a 2026 release window.)
Is there anything else you'd like to add about Echo Generation 2, the process of getting here, leading up to this reveal, and what it's like to finally pull back the curtain?
Gavreau: It feels strange, because we started working on it so long ago. We started working on it right after the first one was launched, and then it's been in and out. We were exploring different types of gameplay and prototyping. It might be, maybe, four years? I don't know, three or four years that this game has been, in some ways, in development? It feels a bit strange that, finally, we're going to be able to talk about it. We're very excited to see if people are going to remember it or be excited for it.
I think it's four years since (Echo Generation) launched. So you need to come with something new. You need to take some risk. This is what we decided to do with the game. Maybe some people wanted to have something very similar. But this is not exactly the decision we took. We decided to take more creative risk for the story and the game mechanic. Hopefully it still feels like an Echo Generation game, and the fan will embark on this journey and find it interesting, but it's, in many ways, going to be very different.
We were talking about the references, but the tone and the journey, the adventure, the combat, the speed of it, and the violence of it, and the excitement to to travel across the galaxy into to end up finding all those super powerful entities, I think, for us, it's super exciting to be able to finally share some of it, and soon, when it's ready, the game. I would like to talk more about certain things - I cannot at the moment.
Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He's best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).
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