Somber Echoes is a platform heavy side-scrolling Metroidvania with progressive mechanics and an extensive interconnected maze of a world to explore. It feels a bit like playing Ori, if Ori was set in a dark, mostly destroyed spaceship and had multiple endings, each with their own boss battle. 

Co-developed by Norwegian based indie Rock Pocket Games and Lav Games, it’s part sci-fi, part post apocalyptic, and also draws from Greek and Roman mythology for both the story and impressive 2.5 D visuals built in Unreal Engine 5. It was originally released for PC on January 21st and later on PS5 and Xbox on July 8th, 2025. Playing the main game takes an average of 4 hours, even with the different endings which don’t require you to repeat much gameplay. There are side quests you can take on that will add an additional 10, and completionists will apparently need about 18 in total.

Story

The game’s story follows the player's character Adrestria, and is told with both text based memories and narrated cut scenes. The gist is Adrestria and her twin sister Harmonia once lived together on a space station named Atromitos until a prophecy, stating one would kill the other, caused Harmonia to turn evil. She killed Adrestria, destroyed the ship, and filled it with all kinds of evil looking creatures. You begin as the newly resurrected Adrestria, and while you’ve lost most of your memories, you do know one thing: you need to find your sister and stop her before she also destroys the universe. I learned all of this early on, and while I interacted with every memory and paid attention to the cutscenes, I struggled to follow the rest of the story, maybe due to my lack of knowledge of Greco-Roman mythology. As a result, I never really felt connected to the characters. I continued to seek out the memories anyway, mostly to hear the great accent of the voice narrator who hails from Greece.

Gameplay
 

As typical in Metroidvanias, you begin with basic movement skills. You’ll earn upgrades and new abilities with progression, allowing you to go back to explore previously unreachable areas. In addition to skills you’d expect like hover boots, Somber Echoes also has a unique movement mechanic called an Aether Lantern. Once you morph into Lantern form, you can set up jump points and launch from one to the other to cover long distances. You can also attach to and glide along electrified walls found throughout the map. Last but not least, with the help of balls of energy called Supernovas, you can supercharge your Lantern, aim, and travel until you reach a jump point or are stopped by a solid structure. 

Exploration

Also common in the genre is the sheer amount of exploration needed. Atromitos consists of multiple biomes, and besides looking in all of them for Harmonia, you'll also need to search for resources required to upgrade health, weapons, and gear. If you want to take on the side quests, you’ll also need to find NPC survivors hidden in secret rooms, pieces to a necklace, and the blacksmith to put it back together.

A fast travel system is in place to help with the expected backtracking. There are passageways that act as shortcuts, zipping you through walls to get you from one place to another. You’ll also uncover gates, shuttles, teleporters, and rest points (these also allow you to save your progress) that together enable inter and intra-biome travel. 

Even with these tools however, there were times when exploration became tedious or downright annoying. Some sections didn’t have enough travel points and making your way to one could feel like work since enemies respawn. And if you died before you could get back to another rest point, any progress made since your last save was lost. 

Puzzles

There are multiple platforming puzzles in the game. Some simple ones have you moving structures into positions where they act as landing points for crossing wide expanses. More interesting to me are Supernova puzzles. These are areas that contain walls which can only be destroyed by launching into them in charged up Lantern form. The challenge is figuring out how to get yourself from a Lantern-charging Supernova to the wall, and requires precisely chained platforming skills. It almost felt like I was building an elaborate mousetrap at times, and was very satisfying when done correctly.

Combat

Combat is fast paced and there's a good selection of weapons to use. You’ve got a shield for blocking and parrying. There’s a sword and a two handed, hard hitting (albeit slow charging) axe for melee attacks. For ranged, there’s a bow which goes through multiple enemies but takes health with use so meh, and a spear. All are upgradeable although it felt like an unreasonable amount of exploration was needed to upgrade each at least once.  

Your main weapon here is your sword, but my favorite was the spear. This is because one of the upgrades caused it to return to my hand regardless of which unreachable spot my bad aim sent it. Unfortunately it came with downsides. The response time was slow, so much so that it wasn’t as helpful during faster battles as it could have been. And, inexplicably, it seemed like I needed to be facing towards it for the function to work. 

While there’s no dodge movement mechanic, you can use your Lantern form during battle to your advantage. After morphing, you can project away from enemies in any direction, even into them dealing damage. You can also set up a jump point, project there and hover out of reach of enemies. With upgrades to this ability you can also use your ranged weapon while hovering in air. 

Enemies

As for enemies, the game is somewhat sparingly filled with low level, post apocalyptic looking plants, creatures, and zombies. There are also turrets and random humans shooting laser beams or lobbing bombs. Other than rare times when I’d find myself in a cramped corridor with a horde coming at me, nothing I encountered was particularly hard to beat. 

Boss battles on the other hand I found more interesting. Each had their own unique set of attacks which I needed to observe for a while in order to figure out the patterns. Once I did, the fights were a nice rhythm of parry/deflect and attack. While challenging, I wouldn’t call boss battles particularly adrenaline-inducing. If this is a requirement for you, there is an option to replay them on higher difficulty levels. 

Audio/Visuals

Somber Echoes is absolutely gorgeous. There are seven visually distinct biomes with looks that range from fiery destruction to lush greenery to cool blue futuristic. All are incredibly detailed. If there’s a negative with the scenery, it’s that it’s a bit dark in places. That said, the darkness didn’t cause me to have problems differentiating enemies from the environment. I actually thought it added nicely to the mood. Speaking of the enemies, creatures were all well designed and their look fit the biome where they were found. I particularly liked the bosses which were oversized, scary, and sometimes grotesque. 

The sound design is almost as good. I liked the music but really loved the sound effects.  Ambient noises made environments ‘feel’ cramped or expansive for example. And creatures often made sounds that you knew meant they were about to do something bad, kind of like those spitting dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. 

Overall, the combination creates great cosmic horror atmosphere. 

Conclusion

There were some issues for me, the biggest being the ratio of exploration to, well, everything else. And while the story didn’t hook me, it also didn’t impact my enjoyment of the game and it served as the foundation for the stunning visuals. I can imagine some players might find the frequent need for precise, chained platforming moves annoying. I did not. On the contrary, I got tremendous satisfaction out of figuring out how to move through the puzzles and tricky areas. If you’re a fan of the genre or are new to Metroidvanias and want to try one, I think Somber Echoes is worth the $25 price tag.