Echoes of the End

Echoes of the End may be one of 2025’s best surprises. While it has a bit of jank that leads to occasional frustration, it’s easily offset by gorgeous visuals, a great story, fascinating lore, engaging combat, smart puzzles, and excellent traversal mechanics. I desperately hope Myrkur Games continues to build and grow what has the potential to be an incredible franchise.

The Icelandic studio Myrkur Games delivers a fun and extremely well designed first game with Echoes of the End. The real standouts are the world and its inhabitants but the rest of the game doesn’t have to hide behind them. The game does suffer from extremely basic combat that only gets better if you invest your skill points in new and much more exciting moves that will make fights a lot more interesting. Puzzles are relatively barebones and don’t demand any creative solutions. If you still struggle there is a very handy and well implemented hint system though. Overall Echoes of the End suffers in many tiny aspects but the game as a whole comes together rather well.

The debut from Iceland doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel of the action-adventure genre. Instead, it looks back, stripping away modern hybridizations and leaning on the classic pillars of platforming, puzzles, and combat. None of these elements stand out as exceptional, but none fall flat either. Its true strength lies in a heartfelt story, a likable duo of protagonists who grow over the course of their journey, and the stunning Icelandic landscapes that bring flavor to an otherwise grounded fantasy. With a runtime of around ten hours, it never outstays its welcome, even if it’s a game you’ll likely forget soon after finishing.

Nothing about Echoes of the End is original, but it’s worth a look if you’re a fan of flashy action and environmental puzzles.

Echos of the End represents an ambitious fantasy action installment, featuring a broad array of mechanics and a nascent narrative. However, among the industry's leading titles, it exhibits several critical vulnerabilities.

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.

The games it apes work because they're easy to engage with and paced to banish boredom. Here, everything takes ages and is sprinkled with tiny irritations. Appropriately, given its title, the game can offer only a muted reverberation of its inspirations, with the exception of recreating their flaws quite capably. [Issue#415, p.102]

Echoes of the End is a very impressive game that I highly enjoyed. The story and visuals are superb, with fun gameplay. Very easy to recommend to fans of narrative adventure games. I played on PC (3070 + Ryzen 7) and it ran smooth for the vast majority of my playthrough without crashes. I finished the game in around 14 hrs or so.

Not a bad game at all. It was a nice surprise for the most part to be honest. My problem with this game was the bugs mostly one i had that forced me to download a save game because the updates didn't solve it and i was stuck at the end of chapter 7. The game itself has flaws of course like repetitive combat and is perhaps 2 or 3 chapters too long.

about 99% of the game is Fighting Or Solving a mildly annoying puzzle that blocks your path forward And... thats it Its really bare bones I did not enjoy playing this

The amount of jank in this game is baffling. i get there is a lot to be put into an open world game. but the animations are stiff. you get teleported to the correct position the game needs you to be even with something as simple as the tight wall sidle. what broke the camels back for me was how easy i managed to fall out of the map just trying to figure out a jump puzzle. maybe im spoiled but i have played ps1 games with less jank

ПЛЮСИ:1. UE5 - а значить дуже приємний візуал2. Цікава бойовкаМІНУСИ:1. Дуже мерзотна головна героїня, вона не "сильна жінка", а просто бидло. Не викликає жодної поваги або співчуття до неї.2. Загадок більше ніж іншого геймлпея. І не те щоб вони складні, їх просто забагато - одна з основних причин чому дропнув гру.3. Зараз би у 2025 році не зробити Українську локалізацію.4. Десь криві аниімації, і в цілому видно, що гра не відполірована.5. Ціна. Ні, хлопці, вона не може коштувати 1000+ грн. Максимальна адекватна ціна - 400-450грн.