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.

Echoes of the End offers an engaging couple of days of play, thanks to its intriguing story setup and well-paced mix of combat and puzzles.

For $40, you’ll get 15 or so hours of a lite Icelandic folklore version of the modern God of War games. It comes with caveats – finding the right difficulty and looking past annoyances with puzzles and combat – but I’d recommend giving Echoes of the End a go.

There is a lot I enjoyed about Echoes of the End. Great characters, incredible vista, and fun puzzles. It's a shame that the combat can become frustrating, and some technical issues prevent it from reaching its full potential.

Waiting for the end to come

In a world ravaged by human hubris, you must journey across a land to rescue a kidnapped family member. In Echoes of the End, you’ll navigate beautiful environments while fighting dangerous enemies with your supernatural powers. Those powers are vital to helping you solve environmental puzzles that coincidentally fill every part of the world. Spend most of your time solving these puzzles while dealing with the occasional boss fight.

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.

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.

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.

Echoes of the End is the epitome of a serviceable but ultimately underwhelming PS Plus or Game Pass fodder game. The game is visually striking, to be sure, but performance issues detract from the overall graphical splendor. Then, as for the gameplay, despite the puzzle design being a constant highlight, the shoddy combat and platforming lead to quite jarring peaks and valleys in the action. The onus is then left on the narrative to make this endeavor worthwhile, and while there is impressive character depth, the core narrative is a paint-by-numbers fantasy tale that does little to set itself a...

Echoes of the End makes a strong first impression with inventive puzzles and focused combat, but its uncompromising appetite for challenge and precision is painfully difficult to overcome, and undercuts the power of its protagonist in the process.

Echoes of the End is a character action game that incorporates a lot of 3D platforming and puzzle-solving. While the game itself looks okay and, from the outside, even seems like an interesting, if niche, indie title, I found a considerable amount of flaws in its design.