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We speak to the CEO and writer behind one of 2025’s most promising AA titles about developing and marketing its game as a small team, and the road to reinventing it. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for video games to find room to breathe these days. Regardless of scale, subject matter, or art style, the release calendar is always so stacked with both AAA and more indie-orientated titles, gabbing the attention of your intended audience is often an insurmountable mountain to climb – and that’s after a studio is done, you know, actually making it. You only need look at Echoes of the End for evidence of this. A third-person action-adventure set in a world of Icelandic fantasy, it’s an undeniably beautiful and highly ambitious title the folks at Myrkur Games poured their heart and souls into for the better part of eight years. On its initial release date of August 12, 2025, however, Echoes of the End struggled to gain a foothold in an already crowded month that also included heavyweights such as Mafia: The Old Country , Gears of War : Reloaded, and Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater. A linear, story-driven actioner made in the style of 2018's God of War would have popped off just a few years ago, and yet the Myrkur Games team was forced to go back to the drawing board after technical issues buried most of the good word of mouth. There was a good game buried in Echoes of the End, but it didn’t make the best first impression. The solution the studio came up with was Echoes of the End: Enhanced Edition. A total revamp of the original game that features a speedier tutorial level, all-new collectibles and outfits for heroine Ryn to find, and a more refined combat system. It’s a rare chance for one of 2025’s most overlooked AA titles to enjoy a second wind, made possible by a small team of 40 people who want to give their debut game the best chance possible at succeeding at an undeniably challenging period for games. To learn more about what changes Enhanced Edition brings about to Echoes of the End today, what returning players should expect, and how the Myrkur Games team turned it around in just eight weeks, I recently sat down with studio Halldór Snær Kristjánsson and Senior Writer Magnús Guðrúnarson. Halldór Snær Kristjánsson: I think before launch for any game is a very chaotic process. We wanted to do a game like this with a small team because we're also fans of these games, obviously, and I think that there's an opportunity to make them. Games are always evolving all the way up until launch and you're constantly testing the players and constantly getting feedback that tells you what to do. So, for us, we were anxious, but we were also hopeful. We had a positive response to the game prior to launch. The problem is that we're a small team, ultimately, and with that there’s also smaller resources to do everything. The pool of players we had before launch to test things, test our theories, test our designs, and validate things is more limited and we've also been looking at the game for eight years. You do get blinded after a while and so you're trying to balance out what's the feedback versus what's the vision. I think that’s how the team was feeling before launch. Halldór: You have to align a lot of things for a game to ship. It’s very hard to make turns. Not that we were wishing for extra weeks at the time of launch, but there's always a ticking clock. We had been testing in our limited capacity internally, and we had false positives on some of those things prior to launch. For example, the infamous Unreal Engine hitching. We thought we had that down. That's why we were able to fix it so quickly after launch, because we just had a false positive. Things can always be improved performance wise, but we were getting stable 60fps on consoles as far as we could see, and PCs were doing quite well. We felt good about it. But then we came into the hitching and the HDR issues and a couple of smaller ones. It comes down to us being a first-time studio with a very ambitious game. Magnús Guðrúnarson: PCs are also just so different. It's so difficult to cover all the bases there. When we released there was the newest AMD driver, which was causing our game to crash. The older versions did not. Magnús: I genuinely feel like there's two kinds of feedback you can get. There was a great thing a writer told me once, which was ‘the worst feedback you can ever get is one sentence or one page’. The shorter the feedback you're getting, the worse it is because when people like something they are far more put off by its issues. It felt good to get feedback that was saying, ‘what I'm seeing is something that I want to like, but there are issues with it that are preventing me from doing so’. I think that's also the driving force for us in wanting to make this Enhanced Edition. Because all the feedback we were getting, even the worst reviews, were all saying, ‘there is something here. It's just something's bogging it down’. We figured there's something to fix here, so let's fix it. Halldór: It also comes down to us being a tight team. Everybody knows everybody. We're in this because we love it. This is our passion. We deeply care about making a game. This is very personal to all of us, working together for many years and in close relationship with each other and kind of going through the impossible to make such a project happen. So, for us, we really care about that. Once we saw that some things were a bit misaligned in terms of how they could have been done, we felt there was a game here that plenty people love and like, but also that other people are having issues with, and we can see why they're having those issues. Once we understood the feedback from those players, we kind just got right to work. Halldór: Why is it Enhanced Edition? I'm just going to get that out of the way. It's because this is packed. We have been working around the clock. And I think calling it a patch would be wrong because we've changed things in the game that go deep. One of the deepest things is that we are reworking the combat. It's a complete overhaul. I think we've touched every single animation on Ryn. Both in combat and in locomotion. We retimed her animations, we rebalanced her, we changed the key binds, we've tuned everything in the combat, so it just feels snappier. In terms of specifics, for example, we've made vast improvements to the lock-on, we have changed what Rin's progression is in the. We've change so many different things with her that she feels way different to play. Magnús: Her attack combos are preserved a bit longer and it feels very different to be able to attack, be into the third swing, dodge, and keep going versus feeling like every time I dodge, I'm hitting a reset. The flow just feels more dynamic, more natural, more fun, and it's faster. Halldór: In the base game you only have one outfit and that was just due to the scope of the team. But we soon saw that people wanted to be able to customize Ryn. Even though we have quite a deep skill tree in the game, they wanted more control over that, so we made 13 different outfits. Those outfits are tied to what we call relics, which are stat modifiers to abilities or base stats to the main character. So if you're playing a very magic heavy build, for example, you could pick ones that enhance some of your abilities or a flat improvement. Or if you are looking for a defensive style, you can go into that. Magnús: With the equipment system and the relics, we tied those systems into exploration quite a bit, because now you find resources to craft items because there are players that enjoy exploration, but didn't enjoy the fact that the only real reward for exploration was lore and world building stuff. It's just not their thing. As such, we wanted to make sure there was layered incentives to that as well. Halldór: Some of the other things that we're doing as well is that we have reworked the first chapter entirely in the game. The start was a bit slow, and the tutorials could have been done better. We also introduced New Game Plus and a new difficulty setting as well. Halldór: The most honest answer I can give here is that we've had such a singular focus on the Enhanced Edition, because we're only eight weeks from the game releasing and that doesn't sound like a long time for us, we want to see this through. We want to make sure that this version of the is the best version of itself that we can possibly put out and that helps it reach the players who are looking for these types of games. For us that's the number one focus: making sure that this game is fantastic. Beyond that, of course, at some point we'll be spinning off new concepts and new projects and stuff like that. We definitely have ideas. But for right now our focus is not to leave Echoes because we want to make sure that it's fantastic. Echoes of the End: Enhanced Edition is available right now on PS5 , Xbox Series X |S, and PC , free for owners of the original game .
