Somber Echoes – PS5 Review

Somber Echoes comes to us from Tønsberg based developer Rock Pocket Games, their location being known to us having flown into Sandefjord to the south with Ryanair last year. For the rest of you, it’s roughly 100km southwest of Oslo and was an ancient capital of Norway. Never mind that somber is US English and by all rights we reckon the game should be called Sombre Echoes, it’s a canny Metroidvania at any rate.

You play as a demigod named Adriesta who at the outset of the game is effectively left for dead in the bowels of the spaceship Atromitos before the events of the game. Upon waking with no memory of what has transpired after an indeterminate time, Adriesta finds that everything has gone to hell in the intervening period. This also conveniently means she’s bereft of all her powers in typical Metroidvania fashion.

Her sister Harmonia is anything but harmonious and her sister’s influence has wrought havoc throughout the ship with all manner of shenanigans having taken place while Adriesta lay dormant. At the outset you don’t even have a weapon, nor the ability to deflect attacks. Thankfully both of these shortcomings are addressed and you’ll be tooled up soon enough. Pwopa nawty.

Ostensibly you’re supposed to be seeing off various corrupt entities in the ship, though practically this translates to themed biomes within the ship’s corridors. All well and good at least, the first area being all fire and brimstone with a face off against a fire entity for example. What Somber Echoes gets right is some very well-placed checkpoints, immediately before bosses.

In other Metroidvanias we’ve played of late, you often have lengthy areas to retread before you can have another attempt at a boss fight. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was guilty of this to some extent, though at least that didn’t include any enemies on the way. This means that boss encounters gain that just one more go feeling which is unusual, making what might otherwise turn into a chore, anything but.

It makes for great learning of attack patterns and eventually defeating the minibosses and bosses. It feels like any deaths are generally down to your lack of paying attention, as opposed to cheap tactics. Yes, if you’re in the wrong spot when a boss goes into their next phase you’ll rapidly come unstuck, but you’ll prevail.

Upon defeating a primary boss you’ll gain a power back in fairly typical fashion, though Somber Echoes also does a good job of dripfeeding other little upgrades your way as you progress. Generally, these come by way of finding artifacts that let you enhance existing items such as your sword or your shield. Even if you’re not able to reach them to start with, the in game map automatically shows you where items are so you can backtrack once you’re able.

Your main means of evasion to start with is the parry, mapped by default to . Time it right, within a generous window, and you’ll stun your attacker allowing you to attack them without much fear of immediate retaliation. Your arsenal will have extra offensive items added as you progress including the very handy spear. As well as being a decent ranged weapon it also has the handy feature of rendering an enemy more susceptible to attacks as it stays stuck in them. Very handy then.

Somber Echoes is as much a matter of traversal as it is combat. You’ll gain a handy way to surf electrical conduits via a power penned lightstream, it made us recall Super Metroid’s ball mechanic a little bit, only without the little bombs that you could detonate. You can use it to destroy turrets if you find the other end of the conduit that the turret sits on, it’s really satisfying. You can also upgrade this ability by finding an artifact that lets you chain together multiple hops within this lightstream state. It lets you reach another section and naturally, another miniboss.

This one in particular felt thrown into the mix a little soon after you’ve had the double hop ability, not to mention that it seemed to be invulnerable to our attacks when we first tried tackling it. In that regard, Somber Echoes does suffer a little bit from the same problem that others in this genre do. That being the occasional difficulty spike that seems unsurmountable at times. It is less acutely felt than the aforementioned The Lost Crown admittedly, but it does make your progress feel sporadic.

As a result, we found ourselves being stuck at pinch points on several occasions that necessitated a break from the game, not least because we had another game on review that we also had to turn around. The thing is, despite the game reckoning we’ve completed just under half of the story, we’re eager to continue as even though we’re stuck on this sub-boss we mentioned, there’s enough scope to backtrack a little and regroup a little.

The biggest help being the excellent and uncluttered in game map that shows very well where you can potentially progress. Coupled with the handy fast travel system that lets you from area to area with ease, you can revisit previously unreachable areas in a refreshingly straightforward manner.

Many of the issues that we’d normally have in games of this sort aren’t really evident here, for example miserly checkpointing or long marches after cheap deaths and all of this from an otherwise unheralded Norwegian indie.

If we’ve any gripes at all, the lady acting as the narrator and voiceover has a rather idiosyncratic way of pronouncing some of the script. English clearly isn’t her first language and given her earnest delivery, it’s a bit jarring to our ear at least. We think she’s actually Greek, so to flip it around, her English pronunciation is probably a lot better than our Greek.

In conclusion, Somber Echoes is a tidy Metroidvania in a spaceship with a distinct mythological Greek flavour. It doesn’t fall foul of the same traps as many similar games in the Metroidvania genre and for that it should be applauded. The in game map is excellent as is the general presentation on display here. Yes, there’s the odd difficulty spike but it is mitigated by well placed checkpoints and the fact that you don’t feel hard done by if you fail. A retry is seconds away without any lengthy retracing of steps needed. If anything, it’s a shame that this will pass many players by as a result of being unheralded.