Somber Echoes (PC) Review

Somber Echoes, from developers Rocket Pocket Games and Lav Games, is a Neo-Cyber-Greco-Roman Metroidvania heavily inspired by Greek myth and legends. And, as with most Greek myths and folklore, it’s heavy with tragedy and self-fulfilling prophecies.

Set in some far-flung future aboard the space vessel Atromitos, Somber Echoes follows the relationship between twins Adrestia and Harmonia, whose bond is destroyed by a prophecy that states one would kill the other. While Adrestia sought to support her sister, Harmonia was mentally destroyed by the revelation, which set her on a dark journey that led to a cataclysmic event aboard the Atromitos and the death of Adrestia. But a mysterious force has other plans for Adrestia and brings her back to stop her sister from destroying the universe.

Her journey will take her from the depths of the Atromitos, through a devastated ship with few survivors and hordes of monstrous, inter-dimensional beings and mutations. But do the gods look favourably upon this quest?

The developers have combined Greek myth with a heavy, sci-fi horror vibe, and utilise a variety of storytelling methods to track Adriesta’s journey from the bowels of the Atromitos to its’ pinnacled end. There are plenty of text-based memories to discover and in-engine cutscenes with a narrator that describes her progression or interactions with other characters.

While this technique lends the game the feeling of a story been told to you, but it does leave the characters as blank slates. There’s no clear vision as to who these mythological characters, reinterpreted for this sci-fi world, are and their place in it. Perhaps it was the developer’s intention to portray them as puppets on strings, as the prophecy seems to dictate, but it does leave the onus the player to refresh their knowledge on mythology if they want more depth.

As a result, the story felt like the weakest element for me but, thankfully, the wonderfully realised world and addictive gameplay more than made up for it.

Whereas most Metroidvania’s throw a ton of abilities and weapons at you, Somber Echoes strips this back to create a more streamlined experience. The main movement tool in your arsenal is the “Aether Lantern” – an ability that lets you spawn a ball of light to spring-shot you over large distances that your standard jump won’t make, or to ride along specific walls. Coupled with boots that let you slowly descend, this opens up the game’s many pathways in interesting ways, especially in the late game when you need to chain moves between Aether Lanterns to reach areas you can’t otherwise.

The game doesn’t aim for a hard-core platforming experience as much as it does for precision-based one that favours a constant flow of movement across the environment. There are more than enough areas that require you to precisely time jumps, glides, or wall-rides to reach new areas. The further in you go, the more these moves need to be chained together. The platforming may not be hard, but it looks spectacular and is an immense amount of fun when you’re crossing large areas in a blink.

Combat also feels stripped back but no less satisfying. The rhythm is built around blocking and parrying attacks, either with the shield or by hitting projectiles back towards enemies. As you upgrade your weapons and abilities, more moves do become available, such as a double attack for your heavy axe or being able to reflect projectiles when shooting out of the Aether Lantern.

Regular enemies don’t pose much of a challenge and feel more like they’re there to break up the platforming and provide you with the currency for upgrades, or small bits of health to recharge your armour. Bosses put up a much stiffer fight, as they’re all based around pattern recognition and a good deal of parrying to defeat. Overall, Somber Echoes places fewer enemies in the map than you find in regular Metroidvanias, and the onus seems to be more on the exploration, platforming, and storytelling.

Exploration and interpreting environmental storytelling are thrilling thanks to some stunning Unreal Engine-powered visuals. To call Somber Echoes good looking is an understatement. The game is positively gorgeous, mixing classical Greek and Roman architecture with a more than healthy dose of Sci-Fi aesthetics. The game is fantastically lit, with the Atromitos bathed in perpetual shadow broken up by the light from raging fires, glowing conduits, and neon signs providing – all of which provide warm relief from the ship’s many terrors that lurk in the shadows. Classical architecture and statues are juxtaposed wonderfully with neon signs. Where the traditional storytelling may fail, the environmental details more than makes up for it.

These darkly lit corridors, debris strewn streets, and abandoned biomes give Somber Echoes its horror vibes. It channels, from an atmospheric point of view, games like Dead Space and the excellent Event Horizon movie.

Thankfully, the games beauty doesn’t come at a severe cost. Performance felt smooth across the board, regardless of the amount of detail in the background. Visual options are kept to a minimum, allowing you to choose your visual quality pre-sets, an FPS limit, resolution, and V-Sync. Steam Deck owners can rejoice as there’s a toggle mode for this, and playing with a controller is as simple as plugging one in as the game recognises and maps it automatically. Most PC owners looking for granular control over the visual options may be let down by this, but I personally enjoyed the simplicity of being able to swop between well-defined Medium and Ultra settings without having to do a whole bunch of tweaking.

Somber Echoes has a few issues, such as UE texture pop-in and the early part of the game that feels too it time-consuming as you hoof it back and forth across the map between multiple locations. Thankfully, you eventually unlock Fast Travel points to minimise this.

Wrapping up, while Somber Echoes narrative didn’t quite hit home for me, the gameplay loop and presentation more than made up for it with stunning visuals, sublime exploration, and platforming action that felt neither too easy nor too hard. If you’re a fan of the genre, this is a Metroidvania worth braving a spooky space vessel for.

Somber Echoes was reviewed on PC using a code provided to gameblur by the publisher.