Echoes of the End Review

Echoes of the End is the debut title from developer Myrkur Games and is published by Deep Silver. At first glance, at least based on the title, it looks like it has something new to offer, or at least familiar but in a comforting way. But before the tutorial was even over, I was deeply concerned with how negative the familiarity felt, in a way that made it difficult not to compare it to its betters.

By the end, however, Echoes of the End pulled together a story and even a few gameplay moments that were meaningful to experience, but not so meaningful that it’s worth crawling through a boring first half to get to an improved back-half, especially when there are elements that never really improve.

Echoes of the End puts you in the shoes of Ryn, who is also a vestige, a person who has the potential for incredibly destructive power, and who is so dangerous to others around them that they can’t even touch another person. Right from the top, when Ryn is surveilling an area with her brother Cor, she denies grabbing his hand to help her up a cliff, and Cor refers back to a previous incident where Ryn gave Cor scars because of her powers.

The more we learn about what it means to be a vestige from Ryn, the more we discover that Ryn has basically been told she’s something to be feared all her life. It’s pretty much all that defines Ryn as a character. She’s scared of her power and is seemingly angry at herself all the time for even having it. She only seems to be able to make peace with herself by using her strength to fight against the threats that her countrymen, and more specifically her brother, cannot overcome alone.

But just as we’re getting to know more about her relationship with Cor, who is perhaps the only person that Ryn can be comfortable with, he’s kidnapped by the game’s antagonists, Aurick, the leader of an opposing nation’s invading force, and Zara, a vestige who is using her powers to try and destroy the magical protection wards that have kept Ryn and Cor’s nation safe for years.

The fact that Zara is succeeding at destroying the wards is cause for concern, but not so concerning that Ryn thinks twice about throwing herself into a fight with Aurick, Zara, and their legions. It’s at this early point in the game that we are introduced to Abram, a scholar who was traveling to Ryn’s homeland to figure out what happened to Ryn’s father, as he was, unbeknownst to Ryn, pen pals with her late dad, and became worried when the letters stopped coming. That’s at least what Abram tells you at the beginning, but you don’t have to be a scholar to figure out that there’s more to his character than he’s letting on.

You soon learn that Abram lost his daughter several years ago, and with that knowledge the fractured parent-child relationship that Abram and Ryn each represent one side of that will be healed over the course of the game’s events, reveals itself in the narrative. Abram is a parent looking to fill the gap left by his lost child, and Ryn is searching for a father to give her the kind of compassion she believes she never got.

That at least sets the groundwork for what becomes a bit more of an interesting character-driven story by the end of the game, no more of which I’ll spoil here, though even with what I’ve already shared, you might be able to predict how it ends. And that’s part of the problem I keep swinging back and forth on with Echoes of the End.

Its narrative is very familiar, because its themes, and even the look of its setting, can’t help but resemble another recent series of games that have a similar visual language and character explorations, which, if you haven’t yet guessed, is the 2018 God of War reboot. Is Echoes of the End bad because it is predictable, and in a post-2018 God of War world, tries to execute its own spin on what Sony Santa Monica proved was a winning formula? Not necessarily, but it’s also not good because of it. It might be a comforting, C-grade story by the end that has a few B-grade moments and even one A-grade moment before the credits roll. But it misses the mark more than it hits it, and it only starts getting close to the target once you’ve reached the fifth chapter and are officially in the back half of a 10-chapter game.

You’ll notice that I haven’t mentioned the gameplay yet. That’s because I’m trying to talk more about the good, or at least the half-good elements to find in Echoes of the End, before getting into the bad and the janky.

So, sticking with the good, and with the story for a bit more, I’d be remiss if I didn’t compliment the voice acting, which was perhaps the main reason I came around to Ryn and Abram even before the story got more interesting in the latter parts of the game.

The gameplay elements that fall into that ‘good’ descriptor are its puzzle and platforming mechanics, but again, these only get interesting towards the back half of the game. Even worse for a puzzle game fan like myself, some of the more interesting puzzle mechanics are introduced in one chapter, never to be seen again. Some puzzle elements are layered on top of each other in the final chapters to make for the game’s most fun-to-solve challenges, but they’re so few that it feels more disappointing than anything, because I can’t help wondering why they didn’t explore more layering between the puzzles and platforming.

I can appreciate that those puzzles and platforming sections in the latter half of the game were included at all, but I walked away from my time with Echoes of the End wondering why the ramp-up to those challenges was so poor. I’m also left wondering, and bemoaning, how quickly the game was prepared to give me the answer. At least Echoes of the End had the courtesy to let me press a button to ask for a hint, and I only recall a few times in the early part of the game where my companion, whether it was Cor or Abram, spilled the beans on what to do before I even had time to begin figuring out the puzzle in front of me. As a side note, achievement hunters would do well to avoid the hint button, since there are several puzzles where you’ll get an achievement for solving them without any help from the game.

The final point in the ‘good’ category, I can’t deny that Echoes of the End is easy on the eyes across all 10 chapters. Some, like the chapter that takes place entirely in a volcano, and the one on a frozen lake with a Northern Lights-esque skybox all around you, are more engaging to stop and marvel at than others, but overall this is game is a visual treat, especially if you have a PC that can really push the graphical limits of a modern release.

With ‘the good’ unfortunately exhausted, it’s time for the bad, and the bad is the combat. I found it entirely unengaging, lacking in enemy variety, and thanks to the jank that was constantly present in all aspects of the game, it was difficult, if not impossible, to get into any flow with Ryn and her movements across each encounter, boss fights included. A key element of this is the game’s poor lock-on function, which could very well just be broken, so you might find this review a year after this game’s launch and have no idea what I’m talking about because Myrkur Games patched it up. But as it currently stands, the lock-on doesn’t seem to really work, and I was fighting the camera as much as I was fighting the barrage of lackluster humanoid enemies in front of me.

Any flow to the combat that could be found came from stunning enemies with your powers to slam them into each other, or inflict damage with several other mana-based attacks while you picked them off, because the enemy AI possessed no thought other than ‘charge at player character’ when in a fight. It got boring quickly, even if parrying made me feel overpowered from the start without levelling up, and some of the final-blow animations that played when I defeated the last enemy in an encounter were occasionally cool to look at.

Unfortunately, the skill tree you’ll progress through did very little to add spice to the combat, and honestly, while it might’ve been an early judgment, I sort of figured that would be the case when I saw the first upgrade you unlock is your bog-standard Heavy Attack. Maybe this is reductive, but if you’re gating any aspect of my character’s combat progression with a mechanic that comes as part of the default package in any number of third-person action games, that signifies a shallow combat system in my eyes.

Credit where it’s due, some of the very final skills you earn in the tree make it a little more fun to toss enemies around, but there’s nothing in Echoes of the End’s combat that makes me excited to get to the next enemy encounter or boss fight. I was instead left thankful when one ended, because at least I might get an interesting narrative scene afterwards, or a fun puzzle to solve.

Finally, the janky, which, surprise surprise, runs through every element in Echoes of the End. It’s perhaps even a meme at this point, but this is yet again an Unreal Engine 5 release that is a poor technical showcase at launch that’s doing its best to distract you from the hitches, texture pop-ins, stutters, frame rate drops, and everything else under the sun short of the game crashing. I played pretty much all of my 15-hour playthrough on my laptop, which sports a Ryzen 9 6900HS and a mobile NVIDIA RTX 3070Ti, at 1440p at Medium settings, and even dropping the graphical preset to Low didn’t solve my issues.

Frankly, by the end of my playthrough, Echoes of the End felt like I was playing something that launched in the mid-to-late-2000s as a seventh-generation console release. That can have its own brand of charm, if, like me, you were going through some of your more formative gaming years at the time, but that doesn’t mean it’s worth spending your money on. Also, that charm wore off whenever an invisible projectile hit me in the middle of an attack animation. It almost didn’t matter that I could parry them later on in the game, since I couldn’t see them coming in the first place.

And invisible flaming rocks are just the tip of the iceberg for the constant glitches I was fighting beyond the enemies in front of me. At least when I stopped to look at the scenery, which was so often that most of my screenshots are stills of Ryn staring into the horizon, it was nice to look at.

Ultimately, Echoes of the End delivers a C-grade experience that’s trying to be flashy enough for an A. It may be visually appealing, and the back half of the game’s narrative might have some solid character moments, but the technical issues and the seventh-generation-esque jank run the whole experience down.

The combat, unfortunately, never lifts it back up, with rote gameplay that doesn’t try to be innovative, and doesn’t get the tried-and-true elements right either. The few fun and intriguing platforming and puzzle sections, along with a story that is able to stick its landing, aren’t enough to save it, in part because it’s questionable if it is worth sticking around to see those parts, when you could spend your time, and money, playing something that doesn’t take half of its runtime to get interesting. I can appreciate that this is a small team’s debut game that they put a lot of heart into, but that doesn’t excuse how lacking the overall package is.

PC version tested. Review code provided by publisher.

5.7

WCCFTECH RATING

Echoes of the End

Echoes of the End has more bad than good to it, and the jank of its technical issues running throughout all aspects of the game bring down even its best elements, like its strong visual presentation, character-driven storytelling, and some fun platforming and puzzle challenges. The combat both overall fails to innovate and pass the standard bar for interesting, and as a whole package it’s likely not worth your time when you need to get five-chapters deep in a 10-chapter story to get to its best bits.

Pros

• Character-driven storytelling that sticks the landing by the end
• Strong visual presentation that’s great to look at throughout
• A few fun puzzle and platforming challenges, particularly towards the back half

Cons

• It puts its worst foot forward and takes five chapters into a 10-chapter game to get better
• Fraught with technical issues that bring down even its better elements
• Combat that both doesn’t try to innovate and isn’t able to stand up with modern action-adventure standards
• Lack of enemy variety that, once again doesn’t improve until later chapters
• Uninteresting boss fights that are more often than not repeat fights against the same key characters

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