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.

Echoes of the End brings gorgeous landscapes that stay in your mind long after the game is over. Puzzles make you think and have a reliable hint system if you struggle to find the next steps. The story doesn’t get off to a good start, and no character actually sounds convinced of their motivations. Puzzles are more dominant than combat, and this isn’t advertised. If you love spending your time with puzzles, you can have a decent time here.

In Echoes of the End, you step into the shoes of Ryn, a powerful energy user known as a vestige. While helping her brother Cor with one of his patrols, he’s kidnapped by enemies. Partnering with Abram, an unexpected family friend and scholar, Ryn journeys to rescue Cor. Along the way, she learns the value of trust and forgiving herself while discovering the truth of her powers. She must also fight against various hostile enemies that seek to use the powers of a vestige for their own goals.

Despite the promise of a heartfelt tale of trust, redemption, and sacrifice, I felt the story was hard to understand. Many details aren’t properly explained at first, and even reading in-game journal entries doesn’t help much. Characters speak as if you already know what’s going on rather than providing useful exposition. I made various assumptions to fill in the gaps, but eventually handwaved events because it was easier to understand.

The story also takes time to find its stride before the themes kick in. Even then, I often felt that characters developed for the sake of the plot rather than from a development they learned from. If you aren’t patient, you might give up on the story because you wonder where the gravitas is. Stick to the end, though, and the tale finds its momentum, delivering more humanising moments and a stronger narrative.

Gameplay consists of fighting enemies and solving puzzles. Failure is common as you fight your way through enemies and die in unforeseen circumstances. Puzzles are not intuitive, and it takes careful thinking to analyse your options. The balance between the two isn’t even as puzzles are more dominant, even with the long combat scenes.

Combat is creative and demonstrates the power of Ryn’s abilities. You can drain life from enemies, throw them against each other, or push them back. Taking advantage of an opening due to your quick thinking is fun, and I liked seeing the various combinations. There are few wrong answers in combat, and even throwing enemies at Abram is a viable strategy. Fighting is full of action, and the animations are smooth, especially during finishing blows.

Unfortunately, button prompts aren’t too responsive, and you are often locked into your actions. There were many times I tried to parry or dodge, and I was forced to take several hits. I found it frustrating that I couldn’t dodge when I’d like, or the game wouldn’t read a parry properly. This meant I had to actively dodge in advance, which made combat painful. I feel that better responsiveness would elevate combat to greater heights.

Combat has a skill tree that lets you investigate different parts of combat. However, none of the upgrades make a big difference, and it’s possible to beat the game without upgrading. While it’s great that the basics can carry you to the end, it also feels like combat didn’t seem important. Using the environment to your advantage, like a puzzle, is more important than skill, and it shows. I felt gameplay was more focused on the puzzles than having good combat.

Each problem you encounter isn’t too difficult to solve, and there are always hints if you get stuck. With some time and discovery, you can easily put together a solution. I felt the game found the Goldilocks spot when it came to difficulty. Nothing was too easy that you could breeze through, but no puzzle was too hard that you tore your hair out. The difficulty makes each conundrum motivate you to keep trying even if you don’t succeed, since the answer is often nearby.

However, the number of puzzles makes the game feel less like an action-adventure. While Echoes of the End does promote itself as having puzzles, I felt that there were enough that, apart from boss fights, combat takes a total backseat. You spend more time solving puzzles than fighting, and failing is what makes the game take a while. I thought it was a shame that the focus was so much more on puzzles instead of action, and never found a balance.

It’s made worse by the fact that Abram turns out to be fully capable of bypassing several puzzles. Seeing this happen several times made me feel that many of them were pointless. While NPCs bypassing puzzles is necessary to allow you to proceed properly, it looked like cheating to me. It made the puzzles look like a stalling mechanism to prevent you from seeing the lack of action.

Fortunately, most of the game takes place in amazing environments where you can feel the painstaking detail. Stepping outside brings you to gorgeous landscapes that sear themselves in your mind. Internal locations have great lighting that lets you see the details in caves and buildings. Even after you put the game down, it’s hard to forget what you’ve seen because the detail is impressive.

This is also contrasted by the voice acting, which doesn’t sound great. For a tale of trust, redemption, and sacrifice, no one actually sounds emotional. Hearing the words for the first time, I almost thought people were just reading from scripts. This hurts crucial moments like when people are taken away or a character is in deep despair. It almost sounds like they are brushing off deeply poignant moments, which hurts the narrative.

Echoes of the End has a lot going for it, but I also feel that it has an equal number of elements working against it. Combat is enjoyable, the visuals are amazing, and the puzzles are the perfect difficulty. But the story takes time to get its footing, there are too many puzzles, and the voice acting is a letdown. If this were a 3D puzzle game, it would fit right at home. But as an action-adventure title, I think it doesn’t reach the high bar it set for itself.