Echoes of the End Review – Heavy on Puzzles, Light on Action

Echoes of the End Review

I have complicated feelings about puzzle games. I have no beef with games like The Talos Principal, which is clearly a puzzle game. Or games like Portal or It Takes Two. Where things start to get thorny is in action-adventure games or RPGs where the puzzles are nonsensical, irrelevant, or illogical. Games like Breath of the Wild or Indiana Jones and the Great Circle do puzzles right. They make sense in context, they don’t slow the momentum, and they don’t ruin replay potential. Echoes of the End advertises itself as an action-adventure game, but in reality, it is a puzzle game first. Its action and combat elements are a distant second.

Promises Kept and Promises Broken

To be clear, there’s a lot to enjoy about Echoes of the End. For example, the game has a strong narrative. You play as Ryn, a young warrior with magical power who is on a quest to rescue her brother Cor. Like her late father, Ryn has the ability to harness and manipulate the energy of towering magical crystals. There’s a warring faction — also with a powerful mage — that also wants to control the energy crystals. After the game’s tutorial prologue, Ryn teams up with Abram, a scholar with powers of his own.

While the narrative’s basic premise is fundamentally the hero’s journey, the texture and nuance come from Ryn’s complicated relationships with her brother, father, and magic itself. Ryn is one of those characters who finds magic a two-edged sword, especially when it is uncontrolled. Echoes of the Ends spends a lot of narrative time exploring its characters’ past mistakes.

A great many video games with strong stories have been ruined by bad writing or acting. Echoes of the End features strong performances from its handful of leading characters, and the game’s writing is well above average for the genre.

A Great Big World

Echoes of the End’s narrative is a confident one, and it is nearly matched by the game’s graphics and environments. Evocative ancient ruins stand beside beautiful waterfalls. Far vistas and lighting effects are magical. Likewise, the game’s magic spells look impressive.

Quests involve travel and exploration. In Echoes of the End, getting from point A to point B invariably involves a series of puzzles. Sometimes these work well, as when Ryn or a companion uses magic to clear an overgrown tangle of vines to allow a bridge to drop. Many other times, solving a puzzle means running through a lot of busy work. Figuring out the solution can be fun. Working through the steps often isn’t. As the game progresses, the puzzles become more complex, but the mechanisms for solving them also become more tedious.

Puzzles in Echoes of the End are at their best when they present a logical challenge because the environment has changed. They’re at their worst when they suggest terrible engineering on the part of the builders and slow the game’s momentum. Which, unfortunately, is much too often.

Flat Combat

Echoes of the End follows a strict structure: explore, puzzle, combat. While the game bills itself as an action-adventure game, its “good” combat — when Ryn has access to some impressive skills — is gated behind a repetitive first half. There isn’t much variety to enemy types, and the game’s implementation of Soulslike combat falls short of its models. Some basic elements, like a heavy attack or a more reasonable parry window, are locked in a skill tree.

While switching between Ryn’s magic and melee abilities can be fun, the game’s camera and lock-on systems often get in the way and need some additional refinement. On the positive side of the ledger, combat animations look good and flow together reasonably well.

Potential for Fun

Echoes of the End is a mixed success. Its narrative, characters, and performances are excellent, and the world is impressive. Some of the game’s more logical environmental puzzles and its late-game combat are engaging, too. Unfortunately, the game’s overall pace is undercut by repetitive gameplay structures, far too many busywork puzzles, and flat combat that takes too long to get interesting. There’s a lot of great stuff in Echoes of the End, but it’s impossible to ignore what doesn’t work as well.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***