Somber Echoes

Somber Echoes is a beautiful but boring game. It's not the fault of the art team - they knocked it out of the park. Every background is filled with gorgeous Roman art. Vast cities, raging fires, Romanesque hi-tech trains, and esoteric biological experiments line the background. The background is filled with sweeping vista after sweeping vista, and I want to go to those places and explore them. I want to see the Roman city, the verdant forest, the hi-tech laboratory - they look genuinely cool. But I'm not playing in the background, I'm playing in the foreground. And every foreground is the same. The screenshots show you the open areas, but they are only 10% of the game. The other 90% of the game - the part not in the screenshots - is in a series of repetitive mazelike corridors. Each room twists and turns, with multiple dead ends with nothing secret inside and a hidden room that has a small reward. And then you go to the next room in the zone, where you fight the same enemies in the same fashion in much the same hallways. I can't distinguish any of the rooms I visited from each other. It all sort of blurs together in a way that it [i]doesn't[/i] in Hollow Knight or Prince of Per…

Somber Echoes is fine. You, the player character, are brought back to life at the bottem of some type of scifi greek mythology spaceship and must climb up it again. While there is more to the story, it is told entirely through a narrator in the past tense. Encounters with NPCs or flashbacks are explained/narrated to you rather than actually happening (think, instead of an NPC saying "Thanks" you have the narrator say "The NPC thanked you". This may work for some players but for me it never truly clicked so my incentive was to just play the game regardless of the story. Fortunately the game mechanics are fairly solid with very few if any friction elements. The game has a relatively clean art style so it was always easy to differentiate between gameplay sections and background fluff, some interesting movement mechanics (think Metroid Morph Ball but in mid-air), weapon/attack variety (although I admit I never used the bow or axe), and enough collectables to make exploring feel worthwhile. I appreciate as well that the bosses in the game are not health sponges. Rather the difficulty with them lies in figuring out the mechanics (when to block/parry, where to hit, when to attack, etc)…

I thoroughly enjoyed this one. The art design was stellar, the combat fun, and I even liked the story (which is very rare for Metrodvanias). I've heard complaints about the fast travel system, and while I see what people mean, it wasn't a deal breaker by any means. I have one, petty complaint: I do like trying to get all the achievements, but the amount of grinding necessary to get enough currency to upgrade all weapons is truly excessive. Again, I didn't need the upgrades to fight the final boss, I just wanted them for the achievements. I should have let it go, because I managed to make myself like the game less by grinding.

It looks like it should be good, but nothing in it caught me. The combat is slow and clunky, and the levels are pretty boring. It's a shame because the game looks beautiful and has great potential mechanically, but it just didn't hit the mark IMO

Its a solid C+ metroidvania. The combat is very basic and the doesnt really do anything to set itself apart. Nothing feels bad but nothing feels amazing either.

Unique art style and good level design.