Echoes Of Elysium Hands-On Preview – The Sky’s The Limit

Echoes of Elysium doesn't begin the way you'd expect a survival game to begin. At least, you don't physically start where you'd expect to be in a survival game. Mostly, you'd expect to be plopped into a forest of some sort, with nothing but trees and possibilities in front of you.

The possibilities part remains, but instead of trees, you enter into the world of Echoes of Elysium on a ship, floating in the sky, ready for you to get everything moving. Starting high in the sky is jarring, if nothing else, and it immediately sets your relationship with the opening hours of Elysium in a different light than your relationship with the opening hours of most survival games.

That's because it's pretty cool. Your mileage may vary on how much you like that, but at least when I first looked around at a big blue sky, with flying islands on the horizon and crafting materials floating upwards through the air, I thought it was a cool way to kick off a survival game.

I also have a sense that any game that starts you off with a jetpack can't be that bad, but this whole opening, while cool, is where the issues with its setting immediately appear.

As part of its inclusion in the June 2025 Steam Next Fest, I got to check out the demo for Echoes of Elysium ahead of the demo's release. I want to say off the top that there is plenty I like about Echoes of Elysium, and I know that this is just a slice of a game that, when it does arrive, will launch into early access.

It's not going to be finished, it's going to evolve and change, and everything I might have a problem with could be gone from the game in a year. Also, the version I've been playing in this demo is specifically focused on building and crafting, so there's not much to do beyond exploring, gathering resources, and building your ship.

That said, as jarring and exciting as it is to begin your journey already in the sky, it's just as jarring when I started to feel the pain points with being anchored entirely to your ship, with the game's current pacing structure.

You can't go anywhere. At least, at the beginning, you can't. Your ship has no fuel, so you need to go through a multistep process to make fuel, and then you can fly around, and still get nowhere. Your ship moves so slowly when you start that it might as well not be moving. And when you get to the islands, at least in this demo, there isn't much to do.

The saving grace is the fact that you can perform this bunny-hop with the jetpack, by using it to gain some distance and then cutting it to rebuild stamina while you fall for a short time, and then activating your jetpack again. Executed correctly, you'll never run out of stamina and can travel longer distances than you probably should be capable of without a ship. But at least it's faster than your ship.

There is a benefit to being slow, which is the fact that the game is easy on the eyes. The art style reminds me of The Falconeer, a game I loved playing primarily because it was nice to just calmly fly around and take in the sights. I can still appreciate that in Echoes of Elysium, but it would also be nice to get somewhere, even in the demo, just to see a glimpse even, of what it looks like to be tens or even hundreds of hours in, with a more complete ship and everything else the game has to offer.

It sounds like I'm complaining a lot, and maybe I am, but the truth is that nothing I've played so far in Echoes of Elysium has me extremely worried, or thinking that the game is bad. I just think even with this version of the game that's just focused on building and crafting, it's too slow to start, and that developer Loric Games will need some time to build it and work out pacing issues.

I think it has a very strong foundation and is already shaping up to be a pretty good game, to be clear, that has a strong setting and a good art style. On a conceptual level, I appreciate that you're anchored to your ship and that your experience in the game depends almost entirely on how much time you put into making your ship exactly the way you want it.

Everything funnels into making your ship, or (eventually) ships, exactly how you want them. It's nice to immediately have a connection to your base of operations in that way, and I felt immediately engaged in wanting to play longer just to build up my ship, rather than explore more of the narrative or do plenty of quests. Not that there's a lot of that in this demo, or any, from what I saw, but my time with the demo was perpetually looped within its opening hours.

 

I hit several bugs that soft-locked my progression and made me restart my game, which didn't always fix them, a couple of freezes, and a hard crash back out to my desktop. Things like enemies and resources clipping into the ground on islands, my ship clipping into the bottom of an island, which meant I couldn't reach it when I jumped off of it (I also couldn't pilot it out). Location-based text that did not disappear from the middle of the screen, well after I had left the location; these were all issues that happened at least twice, but nothing bothered me too much. It's an early access title, it's not going to be perfect, and while I saw all these issues, they weren't ruining gameplay sessions by happening constantly in the time I put into the demo.

If you like MMO survival crafting games and a bit of ship building, then it's worth your time to check out the demo when it's available, but for now, the sky being the only limit to Echoes of Elysium is both a bit of a blessing and a curse. Hopefully, one day it's just a blessing.

Tested on PC. Preview build provided by the publisher.

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