Sofie: The Echoes Review

Sofie: The Echoes is a third-person action-adventure game that offers a compelling premise: a mother lost her husband and son, and now, she’s on a quest for revenge. The opening cinematic immediately gave me Taken vibes, the 2008 action-thriller featuring a dedicated father on a similar hunt for his kidnapped daughter. I was definitely interested to see what lengths Sofie would go to save her family. Would our heroine’s story end with a touching reunion, or would physical foes and inner demons shape her family’s fate into one of tragedy?

Unfortunately, the best of the game’s storytelling resides in that first cinematic. What I played didn’t align with the advertisement that this would be a narrative-driven experience, as the environments, level design, and dialogue don’t tell a story. The end product consists of running through linear paths, jumping over obstacles, and fighting enemies without much context attached to your actions, as you’re objectiveless much of the time.

There is a dream-like atmosphere present that evokes the feeling of playing through Sofie’s inner mind, as enemies would pop up out of nowhere and levels would transport me to vastly different settings, which I’d normally enjoy, but in this case, it felt too detached from the narrative, and there’s a significant lack of environmental clues. The first area, for example, has you traversing a hospital littered with guards and zombies, but even though I played through it multiple times (after having to restart due to bugs), I’m still wondering how this setting has anything to do with Sofie and her family, which ultimately made it feel like a generic, dilapidated hospital. Later, I was taken to a war-torn town with crumbling buildings and more zombies, and my confusion persisted. I’m all for embarking on a relentless journey, and even a disorienting one, but the execution has to be solid, and I don’t think Sofie: The Echoes hits that mark.

When it comes to gameplay, Sofie: The Echoes falls short by a lot, especially when it comes to basic controls. Sprinting feels awfully wobbly, for instance, so much so that it feels like a hindrance, sending me involuntarily into desks and walls rather than getting me to my destination. Unresponsive inputs were also a frequent problem, whether I was attempting to take cover behind a box or use a healing station. Many deaths were actually caused by trying to sprint away from enemies, as the control wouldn’t register or it would, but I’d run into something due to the wobbliness, as mentioned earlier. Other times, it just felt like standard controls were missing, such as being able to peek out from cover to shoot.

The way the game uses its enemy AI really took me out of the experience overall. In the first level, you’re given the queue to run and vault over an obstacle as a tutorial, but what you’re not told is that you’ll suddenly get shot at from behind if you stand in place too long. For some reason, guards just pop up out of nowhere, even though you don’t have a gun yet and haven’t spent more than 60 seconds getting your bearings, which doesn’t serve as a great introduction to enemies. What sucks is that if you get hit by a bullet or bitten by a zombie, there’s a significant pause between when you can control Sofie to get away — you’re essentially frozen in place for a good second, and I’m not sure if that’s intentional or a bug. Regardless, you won’t be able to make quick reactions once an enemy hits you, and it’s not a two-way street, as these guards and zombies soak up bullets without flinching.

Additionally, enemy behaviour was a primary reason I couldn’t get immersed in the experience. Their movement is stiff and unnatural, and their pathfinding is quite poor; for example, I took cover behind a box at one point, and they just kept running at the box endlessly. Their “search” animations did have a tendency to sync up, as well, which I noticed after shooting a stray bullet to draw attention. I couldn’t help but feel like they were just things programmed to attack me rather than living adversaries who had something to do with the kidnapping of Sofie’s family.

The lack of polish is quite clear, especially when it comes to bugs. These include shots not registering, enemies shooting through walls, NPCs and Sofie clipping through barriers, and weapons not spawning (which happened way too often). Unfortunately, my playthrough came to an end early on as I hit a game-breaking bug that removed my gun mid-level. The linear path of the second zone took me to a spot where I had to interact with a tipped-over shelf, pushing it to get by, but after doing so, I clicked to aim my gun and only brought up Sofie’s fists; the gun stayed holstered at her side (clipping into her body, I might add). My HUD still noted that I had a gun and ammo, so I tried pressing “R” to reload, thinking that would cause Sofie to hold the weapon — nothing happened. Then I picked up spare ammo on the ground, which actually caused part of my HUD to disappear, exacerbating the problem. I couldn’t continue since the game put an enemy directly in my path, and reloading simply put me at the auto-save point with the tipped-over shelf, which would trigger the gun bug consistently, a hard lockout from progression. At that point, I had already been experiencing significant frame drops and stuttering, and I was so disenchanted with combat that I was a little relieved the game forced me to stop playing.

I had high hopes for Sofie: The Echoes, but it was ultimately unenjoyable. When the game worked as intended, I couldn’t get past the lacklustre storytelling and poor enemy AI, and when it broke, I simply couldn’t continue at all. In its current state, this isn’t working well enough to buy and needs a good deal of time back in the oven.