Echoes of the End, the reverberation of an empty room – PS5 Review

Echoes of the End is the debut work from Myrkur Games. The Icelandic team offers an experience that highlights the beauty of local landscapes, nodding to the linear action-adventures typical of the seventh console generation. The presentation is impressive for a project of this scope, but the illusion shatters at the first deviation from the rails, resulting in a package that is narratively disappointing and ludically inconsistent. But let's take it in order.

The story of Echoes of the End takes place in a medieval fantasy universe. We play as Ryn, a Vestige, a small group of humans capable of using magic and interacting with the Aegis, enormous crystals that (I believe, they are never too clear about it, Ed.) stabilize natural elements and keep the devices of an ancient, now-vanished civilization active. These Aegis practically represent the last bastion against the assaults of the usual evil empire, whose expansionist aims still elude me. From what little we can gather, they don't seem interested in the technology buried among the ruins, and all the areas we visit are barren, inhospitable, and full of monsters. Good for them...

Anyway, during a patrol, Ryn encounters an imperial infiltration platoon, who are tampering with the Aegis using their own Vestige, Zara. The two fight, but Ryn is defeated, and her brother Cor is kidnapped, because the imperials apparently need a “guide”. Our protagonist then sets off with the scholar Abram to thwart the evil plan and save her brother. As a premise, it works, but the script doesn't stray much from the starting point.

For a title that calls itself “cinematic,” there are a lot of gaps where absolutely nothing happens. After clarifying the objective in the prologue, a long and verbose pursuit of these imperial forces begins. For some reason, they are always ahead of us, even though we climb mountains, cut through infested caves, and open millennia-old barriers. Where on earth does this army pass every time if there's only one path and only acrobats and Vestiges can get through!? Then we finally catch up to them, and for whatever reason, we're forced to detour, lose sight of them, and the cycle begins again.

The plot of Echoes of the End seems more like a checklist of places to visit than a cohesive story. All the locations are beautiful, to be fair, but they are narratively connected like the worlds in a random Super Mario Bros. game. The story itself, however, is unconvincing. Ryn is the classic modern stereotype of the “strong and independent” woman: surly, condescending, and perpetually frowning. Upbringing and circumstances? Very true, but there's really nothing else to define her character, and her only unresolved issue, the tired old daddy complex, resolves itself out of nowhere by the grace of the Force ghosts, who help her understand things (and the fact that I think of Boris while writing this is not a good sign, Ed.).

Abram is already more interesting due to his knowledge of the game world, which allows him to fill the silences between one journey and another. His background and growth aren't exactly new, while the inevitable sarcastic comments and one-liners between the two become boring after a while. The villains, for their part... exist. They are evil and do evil things; there's no attempt to justify them, and any attempt at dialogue is quite sterile. They even exit the scene without much fanfare, just like that, suddenly.

Echoes of the End lasts something like 10-15 hours, and yet it fails to maintain a consistent line throughout its duration, not just narratively, winking left and right only to lose pieces along the way. The performances are excellent, but the material they have to work with is truly lacking. The potential was there, the ideas too, but the easier path was chosen, delivering an extremely generic result.

From a gameplay perspective, Myrkur Games' title proves equally eclectic, with the pros and cons that come with it. The adventure starts out like your neighborhood triple-A game, with narrow passages to change areas, scripted sections, and those obligatory “panoramic” sequences, where your pace slows to a walk and the camera focuses on the horizon to make you admire something I would have noticed perfectly well on my own. Not to mention the presence of the usual AI-controlled partner to open gates, overcome height differences, and activate distant devices, as well as provide chatter.

Frankly, if Ryn had found some kind of electric glove, Abram wouldn't even be needed, also because the levels don't seem designed to accommodate “normal” people, given that most of the time we see him flying to the next checkpoint with a magic grappling hook (not even PS1-era Spider-Man), or he teleports directly to our side when we're not looking. I imagine that back when the game was conceived (development was quite long), The Last of Us and God of War were in vogue, so it had to have a sidekick for the protagonist.

I was already yawning after ten minutes, but then Echoes of the End introduces a puzzle-platforming component, in the vein of sixth-generation Prince of Persia games, and you start to breathe a little. Interaction with the environment is limited and actions are very guided, but moving crates around and rotating bridges to create a path for us or our colleague is quite interesting.

Each chapter also dares to introduce a new mechanic to spice up the experience. Not all of them are fully convincing, but variety is certainly not lacking, with magnetic ceilings, illusory walls and bridges, and piles of sand that stick to the wall and can be manipulated to create platforms. The level design, by the way, takes care to properly expand each concept, proposing increasingly complex challenges. It must be said, however, that as a setup it can get tiring in the long run, as each mechanic is exclusive to that particular chapter, we will always see it applied in the same location before being abandoned forever, and some parts drag on a bit too much.

It's not exactly the title to test your reflexes or grey matter, but from this point of view, it does a good job of entertaining the viewer. Unfortunately, between one traversal and another, you're forced to draw your sword, and that's where the problems begin. The combat system is the Achilles' heel of Echoes of the End. On paper, we have a third-person model that combines melee weapon combos plus magical abilities and dodges with i-frames (no, it's not a soulslike). As long as we have mana available, it's (almost) always a blast, because we can hurl enemies away, throwing them off ledges or making them collide with each other, or even throwing objects picked up from the ground, creating vortices and other amenities. Then it's time to recover fuel with sword slashes, and that's where more than a few cracks emerge.

Where to start? Soldiers and monsters all attack at once, crowding together, yet despite Ryn's wide movements, our blows don't hit more than one at a time. No big deal, we have infinite stamina to roll out of the way or circle around them, but in that case, we encounter tracking worthy of Elden Ring (in a negative sense) and shooters with aimbot. To this, we add that after a couple of hits, enemies decide to ignore stagger and hit through our attacks, making it impossible to execute the more complex techniques and rendering the entire melee combat skill tree useless. True, we can also keep hitting amidst the blows and heal ourselves regularly by draining the first unfortunate victim within reach, but it's all haphazard, there's no shred of finesse.

We have a counter, whose timing changes like a horoscope (better not to rely on it), the manual lock often gets lost, or targets random enemies, and I'm pretty sure the game “eats” inputs from time to time. You can never switch from sword to magic and vice versa fluidly; trying to approach it as a “serious” action game is suicide. This results in disheartening hordes, despite the potential of a modern Dark Messiah, and long, frustrating boss fights, despite elementary patterns. The early game is the worst phase, then it improves with the acquisition of new skills, however, the occasions where you truly have fun in battle are few.

Returning to the longevity discussion, the aforementioned 10-15 hours thus alternate between narrative moments without particular bite, leaps into the void, “parkour” and intriguing, albeit undemanding, environmental puzzles, and a cobbled-together combat system. Serviceable, but nothing I'll remember in the years to come. A New Game+ mode, to learn all the abilities and wreak havoc from the beginning, or a chapter selector, to retrieve missing collectibles, would not have been unwelcome. Given the pace, however, I don't have much desire for a second run...

From a technical standpoint, Echoes of the End is a little gem. The scenarios recreated with Unreal Engine 5 are carefully drawn and extremely realistic; atmospheres, special effects, and lighting are no less impressive (except for some low-resolution and choppy flames in the last chapter, they must have forgotten them). In my opinion, some more “fantasy” areas would not have hurt, compared to the natural landscapes, ruins, and caves more or less already seen elsewhere. It must also be said that the game is a scripted corridor, full of invisible walls and not very prone to exploration. A paperweight, in short, but a very beautiful one. The character models and facial animations are also not bad, although Ryn sometimes has strange spasms in close-ups that make her seem more annoyed than usual. Hilarious, if nothing else.

On Steam, I've read numerous negative reviews regarding limping performance, but at least on PS5, in Performance mode, Myrukur Games' title holds up without uncertainties. Just remember to turn off motion blur, it tends to “smear” textures during cutscenes. As for bugs, the game has a habit of crashing when fiddling with graphic settings. Getting off the boat, you sometimes fall into textures, and if you're “curious” enough, you can get past architectural barriers and get stuck in walls. The ability to resume from the last checkpoint would have been useful. Finally, regarding the audio, I've already praised the excellent English voice acting. The soundtrack, on the other hand, adopts the evergreen orchestral pieces with an epic flavor. Functional at the moment, but not very memorable.