In January of 2023, Forspoken released and a lot of people were mad and disappointed in it. Despite being published by Square Enix and being developed by the team behind Final Fantasy 15, it got middling to bad reviews from nearly every outlet. But worse, it had a cultural reputation of being…well embarrassing. It’s tired style of humor and middling combat that clashed with it’s impressive graphical fidelity and clearly high budget made sure that the name, Forspoken, would forever live in ironic infamy through memes. Sure, I thought the game looked really cool and I liked some of the talent behind it, but that’s not why it hurt me to see the game face plant so hard. I can count on one hand the number of black women main characters I’ve seen in a game, let alone have actually played as. Seeing a massively hyped, and marketed, AAA game starring yet another black woman excited me most, even if I historically don’t love fantasy games. But, I was willing to let my desire to love it’s protagonist and my love of it’s fluid movement mechanics lead me to fall in love with it. But once it was adorned with the scarlet letter of mediocrity, I lost all urgency to play it.

In July of 2024, Flintlock: Siege of Dawn was released and…a few people thought it was…alright. It was another flashy looking fantasy action game with a black female protagonist, but this one was developed by a smaller studio and made on a AA budget rather than one Square Enix could provide. But where some games defy those lower expectations, this one barely cleared that hurdle, getting consistently decent to middling reviews from all of the few outlets who gave it enough attention to review it. Once again, I saw some seemingly satisfying gameplay that I got to experience through the eyes of a type of protagonist I’ve already mentioned is so rare. But unlike Forspoken, I did pick up Flintlock on Game Pass only to discover that…I fell inline with most critics on this one. I never quite found a rhythm with it’s combat and, in those first 3 hours I spent with it, I spent more time replaying combat encounters and getting lost in levels than enjoying the narrative or unlocking upgrades. I abandoned it for games that excited me more, but to this day I hope to come back to it and finally see something that compels me within it.

In August of 2025, Echoes of the End came out and…well almost no one cared enough about it to remark on it. A few sites reviewed it, but the big ones like IGN and GameSpot ignored it. The few who did review it gave it midilling to decent reviews, with issues with gameplay pacing and combat feel being the biggest issues. And because it was already a game without much attention on it, the room temperature reception to it killed it in the cradle. Even I, after seeing an impressive few clips of gameplay pre release, didn’t even know it had released until several weeks later.

This is because Myrkur Games did something expected, but in a way that was hard to see coming. They kept working on the game after release, tightening up the combat, tweaking level design and puzzles, and squashing bugs as best as they could. The culmination of this post-release work lead to the re-release and re-naming of the game as the Enhanced Edition, and this bold choice to present the game as so fundamentally different from it’s release version that a name change was necessary was enough to get me morbidly curious enough to try it out myself. How much better could this game be after only a few more weeks of work?

Well, ladies, gentlemen, and enbys, I am here to confirm, after showing so much interest in these fantasy action games with black female protagonists that release to middling reviews, I have finally found one that I like, and maybe even love.

You play as Ryn, who is a vestige, which just means she’s one of the few who can wield ancient magic. This ends up being a pretty big deal, and is the catalyst for a lot of familial drama she processes and experiences throughout the game. But the effects of her powers also reach outside of the family with your near game long companion, Abram. He not only explains a lot of lore and backstory to the player and Ryn, but also serves as a bit of a mirror to parts of the family with which Ryn has complicated feelings about. This drama, told in the margins of fairly bloody sword fights and magical puzzle platforming, is quite engaging thanks to great character writing and at least one well done narrative twist. By the end I came to like it’s characters and world quite a bit, even if some of the resolutions are just a bit too story book for a narrative that is otherwise grounded in a slightly more dark and bleak tone.

Much of that tone comes from the decapitations and bloodshed from combat, as even I didn’t think this was the kind of game to have melee executions. They do serve to make the combat a lot more satisfying and varied, though, as traditional melee combos are deprioritized over flashy abilities that you use while balancing your mana meter to unleash them all. Once I unlocked enough upgrades, I quickly found my groove with the combat and was hitting parries and absorbing health from soldiers and creatures alike. However, for as solid as the combat is, the platforming may actually be more fun.

The game borrows a lot of the platforming tool box from God of War, Tomb Raider, and even Ratchet and Clank to make for a move set that is always fun to use. Some of these moves, like a teleport like move that zipps you towards points in the environment, double as combat abilities as well, which just makes the elements of gameplay satisfyingly lock into each other. Even segments where you are sliding down a surface can be chained to get you across gaps and directly into some combat arenas, which feels really satisfying to do. In fact, much of the trophy list of the game encourages the player to break the cinematic flow of the game in subtle little ways similar to this, like whiffing the first rope swing in the game, or beating the first encounter with the final boss despite it being designed for you to fail for narrative reasons.

Aspects like these, and others like puzzle design and the prominence of collectables and costumes, just make the game feel like a video game in the most complementary way possible. Games that look like these so often seemed ashamed to blatantly include things like jump pads and see-saw puzzles in their game as they want to be recognized as a form of art higher than other titles. But Echoes of the End is modest enough to include things like this and just let it ride, because it improves gameplay pacing and makes the game much more enjoyable as an interactive experience.

However, that doesn’t mean the game is not a looker. The thing that caught my eye initially before I even requested review code (thanks to Myrkur Games for supplying one!) was just how much this game looked on par with God of War, The Witcher, and it’s other higher budget contemporaries. Upon further inspection, the price paid for this graphical fidelity is Unreal Engine, which means that while the game looks great in it’s default 30FPS mode, the 60FPS performance mode looks too rough on a base PS5 for me to recommend, despite me prioritizing framerate in nearly every game I play. But that ultimately is a small price to pay, as some of the environments in this game are really stunning.

But while I’m on the topic of looks, I must mention the elephant in the room more directly than I have up to this point. This game really is, at the end of the day, a God of War clone. It’s a 3rd person fantasy action game with a talking companion character. It has massive set pieces, a few massive boss fights, and all collectables are located in chests or in glowing lights on the ground. The cast is small, father hood is a strong narrative theme, and the design ethos of hiding collectables in ways that reward impulsive curiosity (as Noah Caldwell-Gervais mentioned in his God or War Retrospective) is ever present. The game has so thoroughly copied Sony Santa Monica’s homework that some of my earliest impressions with the game actually made me sceptical that I would like it at all. I’ve played every God of War game, with sole exception to the Java phone spinoff: Betrayal, so what more could this game do that I haven’t seen in any of those games?

But the thing about games that are derivative of classics is that, even if they aren’t as great as thier inspirations, getting close enough still makes for a great time. I’ve been outspoken about the fact that I have never cared to play a Zelda game before the open world entries, but I’ve loved the Darksiders series for providing that style of game instead. I’ve still have yet to play more than the first hour or so of a Metroid or Castlevania game, but Grime and Guacamelee are some of my favorite games of all time due to how well they implement the metroidvania pillars. Echoes of the End can never top God of War in my heart, Kratos has resided there too long and looms to large for that to be the case. But I’m glad to say that the slight twists and iterations implemented here make the game, if not better than God of War, then meaningfully unique when compared to it.

One of the few people who openly stood up for (read: enthusiastically enjoyed) Flintlock: Siege of Dawn was Luke Plunkett over at Aftermath. He said, in so many words, that Flintlock is all a game in 2024 needs to be. I don’t agree with that specific claim, as I didn’t love my time with Flintlock, but Echoes of the End is one of the dozens and dozens of reasons I agree with that sentiment. This game is modest, not only due to the “hire this man Nintendo!” Unreal Engine graphics, or the very gamey design of levels and gameplay, or the 10-15 hour runtime. But it’s modest because it is a project with a scope that matches the size of the team that made it. In a world of hundred million dollar budgets for games that demand market saturation lest the people that made it lose their jobs, it’s nice to see a game like this not only get made, but also be pretty damn good.

Final Score: