I am very tolerant and patient, but when a game is so fundamentally broken that I cannot play it any longer, something is wrong. Sofie: The Echoes, developed and published by Working Games Studio Ltd, should have heeded their company name and continued “working” on their “games” longer in their “studio” before releasing them.

Knowing nothing of Sofie: The Echoes, I looked up a few things before playing and was pleasantly intrigued by what was advertised. It looked a little rough, but what drew me in, more than anything, was the idea of a narrative-driven third-person action-adventure delving into adult themes of trauma, anxiety, substance abuse, grief, sexual abuse, and self-harm. I was on board this emotional roller coaster.

Sofie: The Echoes has you playing as Sofie, a wife and mother looking for her missing son and husband. From the get-go, Sofie: The Echoes introduces you to a world of confusion, where the further you progress the more maddening the environments become. I was ready to dive deeper into the story, keen to discover more of what was happening as the story unfolded. My curiosity had me hooked, but unfortunately, I never got there.

Not only is the gameplay frustrating, but it is also massively buggy. You begin at a tutorial level and the tips are very sparse, leaving you to guess what action you should take, but when it came to the game, it felt like the tutorial meant nothing. What little it did teach me didn’t function as intended, and after trying to push through for five or so hours, I flipped my keyboard off the desk and walked out of the room.

To provide an example of the most common issue, there are times when you need to pick up an object, and doing so should equip it, but this doesn’t happen. Instead, the item is gone, so you can’t use it, and this will either leave you trapped and unable to progress or in a situation that’s much harder than intended.

Being harder than intended matters in Sofie: The Echoes as there are no difficulty settings, so approaching situations is important to survivability. Again, during my time with Sofie: The Echoes, the game would frequently bug out, so enemies wouldn’t register being hit, or they’d one-shot me while I was at full health. Having said that, being at full health didn’t seem to mean anything anyway – once you took a hit, you would become stun-locked and unable to move.

All you can hope for is that your weapon is pointing in the direction of your assailant so you can kill them before they kill you. Even then, this seems somewhat pointless as well, is because losing health stops you from sprinting, which means you’re next attacker will almost certainly be your ending.

Sprinting will help you traverse the realistic sets quickly, and due to their size, it is important that you have the means to move fast, and loss of health isn’t the only thing that will slow you down. There is a variety of clutter sprawled around on the sets, and this too will slow you down, constantly breaking your flow, so you’ll either have to reinitiate the sprint or find a healing station, hoping to heal yourself just enough to be able to sprint again.

The game almost constantly auto-saves, which may seem like a good thing until you realise there is no way to reload previous saves. If you have a bad encounter, like I did, and get checkpointed with very little health and no healing station, you will be walking everywhere. The other thing that can happen is that when you reload a checkpoint, it doesn’t take into account how many assets there were when it was created. Sometimes it would overload enemies, so instead of having just two patrolling guards, there were sixteen, or the opposite would happen, where a key item, like a gun or a key, wouldn’t load, halting all progress.

Visually, Sofie: The Echoes is stunning with its realistic cutscenes and gameplay sets, but this can be let down by the animations appearing out of sync, making it janky and off-putting. The animations are particularly bad when either you or an enemy die; the ragdoll will flip out and rocket away in a random direction, almost as if the gravity had been turned off, and it was ridiculous when put against realistic sets.

Though bad physics does not ruin a game, per se, what does ruin it is visual items getting stuck on the screen. I had one game-breaking visual when the unlocking minigame activated. Each failed attempt would reload the minigame, but rather than a fresh attempt, it loaded on the same screen causing multiple lockpicks to appear. After blindly completing the minigame, the lockpicks disappeared, but the screen remained blurry, leaving me unable to see anything other than shapes.

Music in Sofie: The Echoes is emotionally tuned in such a way it elevates the experience of turmoil, perfectly fitting the story, but unfortunately, the voice acting comes out hollow, as if read by an AI or robot. That’s not to say that the dialogue in itself is bad. If anything, the writing is good, but the delivery certainly needs some work. Sound effects are serviceable at best, which isn’t normally a bad thing, but when nestled next to the emotion-heavy soundtrack, it leaves them feeling as just as flat as the dialogue.

Sofie: The Echoes needed more development time before being released. Having to reboot the game several times to clear bugs, restart a run due to being stuck in unwinnable situations, suffering multiple crashes to the desktop, and having to reinstall the game to force assets to appear as intended does not make for an enjoyable experience. Something is very wrong. Maybe after some major patching, Sofie: The Echoes will be an average game, but in its current state for review, this one is best left to fade into the distance like an echo.

Written by: Ashley Barnett-Cosgrove