Echoes of Elysium kinda feels like someone made a game exclusively out of the sky island portions ofThe Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Set in a world inspired by Ancient Greek myth, the co-op survival RPG takes you to a sea of islands above the clouds. There, you and as many as five of your friends begin to build up a flying ship and fight villainous sky warriors who travel the blue yonder in aerial boats equipped with much heavier artillery than your own. I hope you’re not afraid of heights.
Survival Of The Flyest
Scavenging pieces to build and improve your ship is what keeps the core loop of the game looping. You have a glider that allows you to fly around collecting wood and other materials, which you can then use to improve your ship. You can zip out to floating islands to get food, find treasure chests, and fight ancient robots (again, there’s a whole lot of Tears of the Kingdom in this game’s DNA).
I’ve played the game twice, first in a quick 20-minute session on theGDCshow floor. Then, in a more leisurely hour-long session with some of its developers at Loric Games. In both sessions, I got the feeling that Echoes of Elysium has cool new ideas, but left wondering if its execution can get to a place where the actual game is as cool and new as the game’s pitch.
That said, the pitch is extremely cool. It’s a game where you live out the fantasy of being a sky warrior by building a sick airship so you and your friends can rule the skies. Brian Johnson, Loric’s CEO, co-founder, and creative director, highlights the airship emphasis as the primary thing that separates Echoes of Elysium from ocean-bound co-op multiplayer games likeSea of ThievesandRaft.
Building A Hangar In The Sky
“It’s about surviving on the airship. We’ve seen airship games before, but you spend a lot of your time on land and you’re not really building your ship. In our game we really want the player to feel like the airship starts to becomes a character that you and your friends build and build together,” Johnson tells me. He gives one example that sets my mind racing. “Eventually you might build a ship that doesn’t actually move. It’s just a stationary base in the sky that you’re going to and from with all your other ships.”
That’s an awesome idea, but I wasn’t able to see anything quite that epic in my 80-ish combined minutes with Echoes of Elysium. I was still in the ‘Link running around in his underwear’ or ‘Steve punching trees for wood’ phase. I flew around with my glider, falling to recharge its thrusters. I fought bots and collected their parts. I built out my airship, adding curved wooden pieces that gave it the form factor of a sailing ship. I found blue crystals and converted them into fuel to keep the ship’s furnace burning.
It was the basic stuff you do at the beginning of a survival game. But zipping around between sky islands does make the scrub phase feel novel, and the occasional appearance of an enemy ship infuses the early world with danger.
Echoes of Elysium is only a year-and-a-half into development, and it feels like it at times. The build I played at GDC was pretty stable, but the one I played from home was a bit shakier and needed to get restarted to fix some bugs while we were playing.
The concept is strong enough, though, that I can see it garnering a devoted audience when it hits early access later this year - especially if the Loric dev team, which includes veterans of BioWare and Bethesda, is able to build substantially on this impressive foundation before the game hits 1.0.
