Classic Without Revelation
The events of Echoes of the End take place in a world called Ema — a harsh and cold land inspired by Icelandic landscapes. Once upon a time, the Emian Empire flourished here, whose power was based on a combination of technology and the magic of the ancient Guardians — stone colossi that store the life energy of the world. After the civil war, the empire collapsed, leaving behind only fragments — disparate settlements and states desperately fighting for control over the remnants of their former power.
One such fragment was the land of Noi-Siruv — the homeland of the main character Rin and her half-brother Kor. The hostile Reigendal stretched out nearby, where the Dalians settled — a people dreaming of reviving the empire and subjugating the energy of the Guardians.
Rin belongs to the number of "descendants" — people who can directly control ancient energy. Their strength is innate, but unstable: one wrong move can turn into a disaster. Therefore, people like Rin are feared and shunned. She lives in seclusion and, together with her father, guards the Guardians, acting as a guardian of balance.
After the death of her father, Rin continues his work, patrolling the area with her brother. During one of the sorties, they witness an attack by the Dalians, who decided to destroy one of the Guardians. Trying to protect the monolith, Rin engages in battle with Zara — the bearer of the same power as her, but serving the enemies. The skirmish ends in defeat: Kor is captured, and Rin herself miraculously survives.
She is rescued by scientist Abram Finley, who came from the neighboring settlement of Mir-Sey. He claims that he was familiar with her father and went to Noi-Siruv when he stopped receiving letters from him. Abram becomes Rin's partner, helps her recover and continue her journey to save her brother and stop the Dalians.
The lore of the game is revealed through notes, diaries and relics that Rin finds in chests, traveling through picturesque, albeit linear locations with small branches. Some of them contain interesting information about the peoples of Ema, the technologies of the Guardians and their connection with magic, but most only create a sense of depth without affecting the perception of the plot. The campaign is divided into 10 chapters, each with its own theme and visual mood — from volcanic caves to snowy plains.
Vaguely Beautiful
The locations as a whole look atmospheric and sometimes really impress with the scale of the landscapes. Despite the noticeable reuse of assets, each zone differs from the previous one — in architecture, climate or selection of decorations. There is enough variety to not get tired of the same type of views during the 12-hour campaign.
At the same time, the visual component remains extremely heterogeneous. Some scenes impress with the level of detail and neat work with light, while others give out the budget — with blurry textures and uneven geometry. Echoes of the End is trying with all its might to look like an expensive blockbuster at the level of Sony exclusives, but it is obvious that a small Icelandic studio — 40 people, not counting the dog — does not have such resources.
This is especially noticeable in animations. In some scenes, the movements and facial expressions of the characters look convincing, in others they lose their naturalness, sometimes causing the effect of the "uncanny valley". This is especially striking on the face of the main antagonist: she is outwardly attractive, but in some scenes her excessively wide, almost porcelain smile looks unnatural and even a little frightening.
The main problem with animation is the lack of a sense of weight. Rin often seems to glide across the surface, and physical inertia and reaction to the environment are almost not felt. Because of this, the movements look implausible, and the eye involuntarily clings to these inconsistencies.
In technical terms, the situation is similar. After the patch, performance has noticeably increased, but it cannot be called stable. On a bundle of RTX 4070 Super and Ryzen 5 7500F, the game on average holds about 40–45 frames per second without upscaling, and DLSS in "Quality" mode raises the indicator to 65–70. And this is, perhaps, the worst optimized game that I have launched this year — and in between I managed to try out almost all the major releases, even those that I did not write about.
The only plus of such optimization is that it is December, and I am not cold: while I am writing a review with the game running in the background, the video card confidently heats the room, resting at 99% even on pause. The picture looks decent at the same time, but it is far from the feeling of "nextgen". It's scary to imagine what awaited the players at the release, however, to the credit of the developers, I did not encounter any serious bugs, and the only crash occurred only during the final battle.
Heroine of Sword and Magic
Despite all the picturesqueness of the world, it will not be possible to freely explore it. At the heart of Echoes of the End lies an extremely linear structure that rarely lets the player go further than the designated path. Linearity is felt almost physically — in the form of illogical cliffs and invisible walls.
The narrative remains sluggish. The story moves progressively, but without increasing drama and tangible turning points. At the release, the narrative also suffered technically: players complained about the desynchronization of cut scenes, disappearing sound and frozen characters, which made even the simplest emotional scenes look clumsy.
Now there are almost no such problems — I only encountered a repetition of the same script phrase when I passed by a certain section in the fourth chapter for the second time.
It is important that the script has not changed with the patch: the developers did not rewrite the dialogues and did not add new scenes. Therefore, the plot remained the same — functional, devoid of bright emotions and unexpected twists. Echoes of the End tells a story that exists for the sake of the game itself, and not vice versa.
She, like her characters, does not strike with depth or uniqueness, but does not cause rejection, providing sufficient motivation to simply go from point A to point B. In the end, the plot here is far from the most exciting part of the adventure.
It is much more interesting to watch how Echoes of the End works in action. The combat system is simple, but diverse enough not to get bored. It is based on melee attacks with a sword, supplemented by magic — in fact, telekinetic techniques that allow Rin to throw enemies back, throw objects at them and use the power of the Guardians in battle. By combining physical and magical strikes, you can creatively deal with opponents: throw them off ledges, throw them into walls or at each other, lift them into the air and drop them back to the ground.
The basis is the usual light and heavy sword strikes, dodges and parries. The viscosity of movements in combination with light awkwardness resembles the original Dark Souls, and the lack of stamina adds dynamics to the system. In some moments, Rin literally flies up to strike, involuntarily reminiscent of God of War (2018), and the ability to parry even attacks from behind allows you to confidently withstand the onslaught of several enemies.
However, they don't overwhelm with crowds of opponents here. Most of the clashes are small battles against two to four enemies and separate battles with bosses. The variety of opponents is also small: Dalian infantry, knights with shields, mages, archers, several types of goblins and insect-like creatures with similar attack patterns. So there is no need to wait for revelations here either.
At the release, according to reviews, the game suffered from delays when changing animations and problems with response: strikes often did not register, dodging worked with a delay, and parrying was more a matter of luck than timing. After patch 2.0, these shortcomings have almost disappeared.
On normal difficulty, the parry window is wide enough to reflect any attack (except those marked in red), and the visual indication around the heroine helps to repel even enemy projectiles that are not visible due to the distance. In short, life has become more comfortable, and crushing enemies is really fun for a while.
Nevertheless, most bosses remain easier than a fight with a group of five to seven enemies. Their attacks are not too fast and predictable; in the worst case, I defeated some from the second attempt. A nice detail — even those who have two phases and a double health bar have an intermediate save that allows you to start the battle immediately from the second phase.
Only the battle with the antagonist Zara is truly memorable — the rest pull at most for the role of mini-bosses. Even a second meeting with her Dalian accomplice turns out to be easier than a similar fight in the initial chapters — not without the help of Rin's new abilities.
With patch 2.0, costumes and relics appeared in the game, some of which are opened simultaneously. They allow you to change the appearance of the heroine and at the same time enhance her abilities: reduce the cost of magic, reduce the damage received, increase the damage dealt or expand the parry window. These are pleasant, but not critical bonuses.
Rin also has four branches of pumping, allowing you to focus on your preferred style of combat. However, the build system remains conditional: it is impossible to completely abandon the sword in favor of magic — all abilities work in one bundle, and improvements only shift the accents. You can invest in health, new combos or energy recovery when parrying, or you can bet on magic. However, in any case, you will have to wave a sword to replenish mana, which ends too quickly.
Separately, you can develop the skills of your partner. Abram — aka the local Atreus — helps in battle: stuns enemies with electricity, knocks them off their feet, opens up the possibility for finishing and even holds opponents in capture. But he is important not only in battles. Abram's abilities will also come in handy when solving puzzles, which make up another noticeable layer of the game along with simple platforming.
Don't Rush — Think
In between battles, the player is waiting for a more relaxed exploration of locations with short sections of parkour and puzzles, for solving which you have to use magical abilities — and a couple of convolutions.
The first tasks are simple: the heroine uses telekinesis to move blocks, create bridges or open locked passages. These scenes resemble the early "divine" puzzles from God of War — they do not require logical feats, but they keep attention.
With the appearance of Abram, new tasks also appear: his ability to impose stasis allows you to freeze objects in time, which helps in solving puzzles. In two of the ten chapters, there are also boat sections where Rin and Abram move between fragments of the location on a vessel, solving the next puzzles — Mr. Kratos, as they say, sent greetings.
Gradually, the heroine opens up new abilities like a double jump and a dash in the air — also banality, but they give the authors the opportunity to introduce a new type of interaction in each chapter. This is how the game maintains diversity without overloading the structure.
By the sixth chapter, tasks with manipulating gravity and changing perspective appear, in the seventh Rin controls water flows, connecting them into a single system to open the way forward, and closer to the final, the creation of an astral copy of the heroine and switching between layers of time come into play.
All this is accompanied by simple, but sometimes entertaining platforming — like a budget fantasy version of Uncharted. Here are runs along the beams, and swinging on ropes, and activation of mechanisms to overcome the obstacle for a while, and sliding on the ice — in short, a standard set of tricks that supports interest in the transitions from arena to arena, from puzzle to puzzle.
When you try to summarize the impressions, you want to say that puzzles are sometimes fascinating, but do not strike with ingenuity. They are diverse, simple and do not irritate, but they lack depth and development — as, however, this can be said about the game as a whole. Some mechanics appear only for one chapter, and then disappear without a trace.
For example, after solving a couple of tasks with controlling water flows, you will no longer meet them until the very end. The developers clearly wanted to add as many types of tests as possible, but these ideas rarely add up to something really exciting — as if the studio was afraid to overcomplicate the game and, as a result, simply did not bring it to mind.
Diagnosis
Echoes of the End is a game that tries too hard to be more than it really is. She desperately wants to seem like an expensive, complete linear adventure, and I will not tire of repeating: this is really "God of War at home".
Structurally, they are surprisingly similar — a chamber narrative about the journey of two heroes in a harsh Scandinavian setting with alternating battles, platforming and puzzles (some of which are literally copied), with a partner who helps in battle and gives tips when solving problems. The division into chapters, the architecture of the levels, the change of battles and short pauses, the gradual disclosure of skills, opening up new types of interaction with the world — all this creates a feeling of a scenario familiar to the last trick.
The only difference is in scale, confidence and skill of execution. Here you can clearly feel the lack of experience, budget and a little ingenuity — something that would allow you to bring the gameplay to perfection or at least try to pull out the story. In some moments, everything adds up successfully, and the usual cycle "arena — puzzle — platform section — arena — boss" works as it should, immersing in the rhythm. But more often you stumble upon the feeling: "they didn't finish it here", "they didn't finish it here", "they didn't push it there".
As a result, Echoes of the End lacks its own face, which would allow it to become something more than a budget copy of a large AAA blockbuster. It is not catastrophically bad, but it cannot be called good either — too many irregularities, strange decisions and minor failures that prevent it from rising above the level of "just not bad".
Such a project would look more appropriate somewhere in the catalogs of PlayStation Plus or Xbox Game Pass — as a temporary entertainment that you go through in a couple of evenings and delete without regret. And if you suddenly wanted something "in the spirit of God of War", but more modest, — a periodic 40% discount may be a good argument in favor of buying. Most likely, Echoes of the End will not anger or disappoint, but it will not leave a trace after itself — like a snack in a roadside diner, which you forget about in a couple of hours.