Why You Didn’t Like … Echoes of the End

If you grew up watching the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, you are intimately familiar with the Venger Manoeuvre™. The villain, bathed in dark magic and supposedly possessing world-ending power, takes one minor hit from a teenager with a glowing stick, delivers an angry aside, and dramatically teleports away to fight another day. It is a cornerstone of Saturday morning cartoon villainy, and truly charming when you’re twelve.

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This trick also worked well for Skeletor, but absolutely does not work in a high-stakes fantasy epic. When you are playing a gritty, modern action-RPG as a hard-ass battlemage, and the big bad falls to one pixel of health only to drop the mic and majestically escape the locked arena while you stand there clutching your sword like a spare prick at a wedding, it leaves your satisfaction so dry that no amount of foreplay will ever rehydrate it. It doesn’t build tension; it grabs the concept of tension by the throat and strangles it in front of its weeping children. Which brings us to the … let’s call it ‘experience’ of playing Echoes of the End. This game is a true masterclass in how to undermine your own hero.

The Flintlock Hangover

After coming off the high of Flintlock: Siege of Dawn, I craved a fix for another action-adventure game. I wanted one that might feature a strong lead, a fun mix of characters, and a cool combat system. This is why I shouldn’t have played Echoes of the End.

Perhaps I’m being overly harsh, but the delta between the games developed by A44 and Myrkur is… vast. Both are scrappy triple-I studios, but they have completely different approaches to game manufacture. Flintlock gave us three main highs: excellent character work with Nor, Enki, and even the bark-level NPCs; a tight, crisp combat design rewarding skill; and an impactful story grounded in war, loss, and redemption. The game designers built a brutal arena system where they knew each move had to have impact or you took a dirt nap, and the abilities were designed hand in glove with those encounters.

Myrkur, on the other hand, skipped the reading. They gave us just the one weapon and a fairly unapproachable collection of abilities. In Flintlock, Nor wasn’t an unlikeable bint and Enki wasn’t a clueless sap. In Echoes of the End, Ryn has the charm of a sandpaper dildo, and Cor is a man so aggressively beige he makes tap water look spicy. When Cor is replaced by Abram, he sticks around for about the same duration as a deadbeat dad heading out for smokes.

They might have a great story, but nothing about the seven hours I spent with the game made me give enough of a shit to stick around to find out. If this is the videogame equivalent of the Netflix show that gets good after five seasons, I dropped out in season three.

A Protagonist Made of Barbed Wire

If we’re thinking about narrative single-player games, the real hook has to be the story. You need something about the world, or the people in it, and critically, a strong protagonist who can carry the components on their shoulders.

In our intro, we meet Ryn, a Vestige capable of mighty feats of wonder. She uses this fantasy-meets-Reykjavík world’s version of magic. Ryn and her brother Cor cruise through the opening scenes, and the entire time she is ragging on him for doing things like, I dunno, walking and breathing. It’s unclear if she likes him, let alone loves him.

But the good news for Cor is that this is nothing personal. Whenever Ryn meets anyone, her first instinct is outright hostility, rudeness, and an almost mythic level of outward twattery that defies belief. She’s not a strong female lead: she’s a huge asshole, and we’re given no reason to like her, let alone root for her.

It’s an easy problem to fix: give her something the player can relate to. Even the maligned Forspoken pulled this very trick. Frey is prickly like a sea urchin, but she loves her cat Homer, and it’s her love for that cat that leads to her early-game low point. It humanises her. We can see how the harsh world has made her hard in turn, but it hasn’t made her monstrous. Luminous Productions made Frey more relatable by hiding her empathy behind a frail curtain of anger and resentment, and in the first ten minutes we’re hooked on her.

Ryn is just… angry. At everything! She clearly has daddy issues, but the nature of those is so opaque they might as well be buried in a lead-lined coffin at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. She’s a double-ended dick, so why would we want to find out more?

Mechanics, Puzzles, and Health and Safety Violations

Which I guess is a good time to consider the gameplay components of this narrative did-not-finish title. Ryn has two basic ways of murdering: her Vestige powers, and her blade. The combat is mechanically serviceable… at first. As time grinds on, you begin to see the problems.

Skills in the tree seem quite niche; the squeeze isn’t worth the juice. Deep into the sword line, there is an ability where you attack three times with a light strike, then close with a heavy finisher. In theory, this should kerb stomp the enemies, teaching them fear and respect in equal measure. In practice, the long run-up means using it is highly situational, to put it mildly, and the payoff is about as satisfying as a warm handshake from a leper.

Worse, the controls are outright broken at the atomic level. You will probably see my gameplay where Ryn’s just facetanking, and I can assure you I’m blocking, but the controls are as non-responsive as a three-day-old corpse. You’re not fighting the enemy; you’re fighting a controller that seems to be communicating with the console via smoke signals. This is not a God of War-like success story. The Vestige powers are cool and all, but not impactful enough, and also endlessly fiddly. The combo to pick up an enemy and toss them is simple: pull the trigger, point the thumbstick, and boom… right? But, much like the block, this also works like it’s being paid by the hour. I swear I haven’t come closer to twisting a controller in half in a long time. Throughout the fights, I found it was just better to rely on my sword, dodging, and good looks, which is no way to play a game where you’re a spellslinging battlemage.

The game also feels overly… gamey. Combat arenas are conveniently littered with spiked walls. These should be clear health and safety violations in any workplace, but no, Team Clown Car has them installed everywhere.

Then come the puzzles. Echoes of the End is positively infested with them, and they aren’t so much hard as annoying. In one sequence, I needed to take Ryn across some platforms. She has to yank them out of the wall, at which point a magical mystery timer starts, ending with them sliding back into the wall. With the control issues, I fell to my death, like, five fucking times, got ennui, and cracked open the gin after putting the game down for the night.

The Invisible World and Stolen Skill Points

Eventually, Ryn meets Abram, a sort of part-scholar, part-Wikipedia character designed to provide cool combos in combat and exposition when out of it. Abram is a nice guy, so naturally Ryn is a walking migraine to him as well. It was so refreshing having him along, though, because she is so relentlessly full of bastard energy that we needed a balm for the abrasion of her personality.

Not to worry, though, because one thing leads to another and they have a falling out. We could hope the writers suggested Ryn was so unlikeable that her companions might leave, but that’s not how it went down. However, that’s not the worst part of this misadventure.

See, the game provides five skill trees, then… deletes the one called ‘companion’ when Abram heads off. You better not have levelled up his abilities too far, because when Ryn walks it alone, the points you’ve put in his upgrade path are ones you can wave goodbye to. It’s the mechanical equivalent of a game inviting you to a dinner party and then forcing you to pay for the groceries. Again. I can imagine how you might hit this situation and want to end it all: it’s a fair and rational response, because in a 10-chapter game, you’ve hit chapter 7 and wonder what you did to the universe to earn this kind of karma.

It’s possible that after a short platforming-only game sequence Ryn and Abram kiss and make up, but that will remain one of the unsolved mysteries for me. Seven chapters left me tired, boss.

Abram’s exposition doesn’t help much anyway, because the world-building is pretty invisible. There are some Dalsman dudes who are bad, and they’re different from the dudes you’re allied with, who are apparently fine. There are some scholars in a city somewhere. Magic exists, but how it works isn’t explained. Why people are Vestiges isn’t explained. Why it’s risky for people to touch Vestiges, why people don’t like them, why they’re called Vestiges, why Ryn hates everyone… none of it is explained. And so on.

The Gloat, Scamper, and Verdict

We’ve touched on this before, and we’re going to interrogate it again: you are playing a magically imbued battlemage, yet the game treats your victories with the exact same narrative weight as a teenager pulling a rubber mask off a real estate developer. Scooby-Doo did it better, though.

The enemy boss encounters are some of the frustration focal points, but not because they’re hard. Repeat: not hard, just… annoying. When you fight the big bads, Aurick and Zara, you will pound them into the ground fairly easily. Then, with just a pixel of life left, they’ll flex and exit stage left.

It was the repetition that did it. When you meet these two ass-hats, there’s a big gloating scene. You fight Aurick first; he gloats as he prepares to throw hands, then mocks you as he runs away. You keep missing out on killing Zara, but each time you see her, she taunts you. Then you punch her lights out, and she gloats and runs away. In all these scenarios, the magically-powered Ryn somehow doesn’t drop rocks on them, throw her Vestige-imbued sword, or any of the other things she can do. She’s just like, “Wow! Well, I guess we’ll see them later,” and moves on with her life.

When I beat the Zara encounter and the boss caught a quick overnight to Fresno, I’d had enough. When Ryn and Abram had their falling out right after, I decided not to continue dating Echoes of the End anymore. If anyone still used Facebook, they’d have seen our relationship status move from ‘it’s complicated’ to ‘intensely annoyed’. I decided I’d rather perform self-dentistry with a rusted pair of pliers than play more of this.

Falling Outro

I guess Echoes of the End is a good-enough-looking game, though the pop-in is egregious. The sound is fine, although the volume is erratic. Aldís Amah Hamilton and Karl Ágúst Úlfsson both do solid work as Ryn and Abram respectively. They’re actually good performances, but dragged underwater by a script that has fewer flotation devices than the Titanic.

Which is the real tragedy here. Writing a cohesive fantasy world is hard work, and building a responsive combat system is even harder. But when you ask an audience to invest their time and money into your world, you owe them a basic narrative contract. Give us a protagonist we don’t actively want to feed to a woodchipper. Give us mechanics that reward investment rather than torching it to the waterline. And for the love of all that is holy, make your villains stick around long enough to face a sword.

Echoes of the End doesn’t honour that contract. It’s an effigy of squandered potential. The bones of something interesting are somewhere in here, but buried under a protagonist built entirely from hostility and herpes, controls designed by someone who has only ever seen a controller in a museum, and boss encounters that treat your victories like a passing nuisance. The only reason you should check this game out is if you’re getting paid for it… and even then, ensure you’re on a good hourly rate.

If you want a scrappy, character-driven action-RPG that marries story to feeling and fun, go play Flintlock: Siege of Dawn or Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden. If you really want to watch an overpowered villain teleport away like a techbro CEO avoiding a congressional subpoena, just go watch some old Dungeons & Dragons cartoons. At least there, the Venger Maneouver™ was still considered innovative.

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