Echoes of the End is an action adventure game very much in the vein of the modern God of War series. You’ll find rocks to squeeze through, boats to explore watery areas, and other familiar bits of design between the two, but where Echoes differs the most is that it’s a fully linear game – imagine that? There’s distinct levels to complete and then move onto the next one rather than a huge open world to traipse through! The end result is a good game that could have been great… if it was more polished.
The game begins with a brief yet ominous cutscene of a giant crystal thing being broken by a lady with magic powers. Then you meet your character, Ryn, and her brother Cor as they are checking on a ward – a smaller version of the giant crystal you just saw destroyed. Ryn is a vestige, someone with a dangerous power that is a remnant of a past age when this was common, but are now feared by people who don’t understand them. She is able to use this remnant power to check the ward, which unsurprisingly keeps enemies from invading because…magic. It doesn’t take long for Cor to end up kidnapped by the ominous magic lady, called Zara, and her boss Aurick, triggering a quest for Ryn to rescue her brother and stop the strangers.
It’s pretty standard fantasy stuff really, but the way it’s told and, most importantly, the relationship between a few of the characters help to elevate it a bit. Abram, who shows up immediately after Cor is kidnapped in one of those incredible narrative conveniences that you sometimes get in games like this, is the highlight along with Ryn. They have a lot of conversations throughout gameplay and they’re well written and introspective enough to have stopped me from continuing until it stopped just in case I trigger something that cut it off. I can’t really go into what these conversations are about due to spoilers, but just know that dialogue and story here are a highlight that I really enjoyed. There’s a moment or two that get genuinely emotional as well.
The game is often shockingly pretty. The landscapes of Aema are modelled on Iceland and are just disproportionately gorgeous. It’s not perfect, you’ll find a couple of low quality textures and, late in the game, a very low frame rate and slightly blurry fire animation that is used repeatedly in one particular area, but even then it’s a small fault in a beautiful landscape. There’s some variety to be found as you travel your way through snow, sand, and all the other usual suspects, though there was an acidic bog type area that I thought felt novel, even if it didn’t last too long. You might have seen them before, but some of these areas are amongst the best looking I’ve seen in games for a while, especially the massive, sweeping backgrounds that provide a staggering sense of scale.
Graphics and story are the only areas I can point to with little to fault in them unfortunately. Combat can be a lot of fun, and I was particularly glad that the attack animations of enemies weren’t incredibly deceptive in regards to parry/dodge timing, allowing me to pretty easily dodge incoming combo attacks. The powers you get, which include moving people around, slamming them into the ground, telekinetically throwing objects at them, aren’t unique, but are pretty entertaining and effective use of them can absolutely demolish a group of enemies you would struggle against without them.
That said, things don’t seem to flow properly. It feels like there’s moments in certain animations where your inputs are not registered – if you dodge an attack and press L2 to start aiming your telekinetic powers, it just doesn’t, instead leaving you standing there like an idiot not targeting anything, causing you to take a sword or talon to the face. This happens rarely and sometimes it happens with jumping or air-dashing. Now imagine carefully lining up a big jump and your double jump, a basic tool of the gaming trade, just doesn’t trigger when you press the button. It happens rarely enough that it doesn’t spoil the experience, but it’s hugely frustrating when it does.
Echoes of the End is a pretty challenging game on the regular difficulty. That’s fine when it works properly, but if you’re dropping my attack and dodge inputs then it’s only annoying. Because of this, dropping the difficulty made the game far more fun due to being more forgiving of “my” mistakes in combat. It’s a real shame because I enjoy it most of the time, there’s little more fun than hitting people in the face with their own friends. There are a few other complaints, mostly in regards to enemy variety, whilst there are a few different types, they’re used enough that they can get a little repetitive.
There’s a lot of puzzling to be found in Aema as well, with mostly positive results. Now, if you don’t like puzzles in games then you won’t like this one, as there are quite a few and, being a linear game, they’re mostly all necessary to progress. I, on the other hand, only mind poor puzzles in games and I’ve mostly enjoyed them, but for one series of puzzles that involved leaving a “ghost” of yourself that you could teleport to later, which I found to be a bit shallow after the first go. The puzzles in a general area/level tend to have a shared mechanic that you’ll move on from to another in the next, so at least any you won’t like won’t stick around for too long.
One issue is that dropping jump inputs in puzzles that involve jumping is very annoying, but thankfully it doesn’t happen too often and, when it does, you’re just teleported back where you jumped from, missing a bit of health. Even more rarer than this, you can slide off the edge of a platform if you’re not careful, but I only had this happen twice. In spite of these considerations, I have really enjoyed more of the puzzles in this game than I would normally expect, with a few that really stumped me at first before I worked my way to solutions that were particularly satisfying.
And then there’s the bugs. I’ve had a couple of crashes in my twelve hours of play – it’s not a very long game, there’s a trophy for finishing in under ten hours – but by far the most egregious bug happened to me twice. You know when you squeeze through a tight gap in a wall in what used to be a subtle loading screen? Well, twice when I did that in this game, I fell through the floor into the grey void below the map. There was also a bit where I landed my boat on an island, then stopped playing for the night. When I restarted the game I went through this island only to find no boat waiting for me at the dock, stopping me from progressing, potentially dooming Ryn and Abram to a Castaway-style existence where they are each other’s volleyball. This was fixed immediately in perhaps the most perfectly timed patch ever, which started downloading the first time I restarted the game to see if it would fix it.
While there are rough edges and frustrations from a lack of polish, I still really enjoyed Echoes of the End. Improving the flow of combat, working out some of the glitches and that poor fire animation would go most of the way to realising the game’s potential. The story is good and the characters, particularly Ryn and Abram are very well written and performed. And it all happens in a stunningly gorgeous, Icelandic fantasy world.