Echoes Of Mora
Selkies Interactive
To my knowledge, swimming through a sunken village has never been a
thing in games. Until now. In Echoes of Mora that is exactly what you
do, uncovering memories and making inroads into the events of the past
in the possible hope of resolving the future.
It’s a gentle, even peaceful experience, with no timers or dangers
waiting around the next corner. As the Gameboomer's announcement said,
it’s just a quiet world full of secret places, lost belongings and
stories waiting to be found.
Indeed, it is as much an interactive narrative as it is a game,
accentuated by the easy nature of the puzzling. Which isn’t a criticism,
just an observation.
Set in an Italian village, the story is centred on two siblings, Mora
and Dario. Legend has it that the local lake is cursed, that the Drowned
One wanders it shores, and that anyone who falls in will not resurface.
In response to a dare, Mora goes looking for the Drowned One’s locket,
the result of which is that Dario falls into the lake and disappears.
The broader narrative, and insights into the various relationships in
the village is told primarily through flashbacks generated by activating
portals and engaging with certain items. The portals are the Echoes,
memories if you will, and standalone items are Traces. The latter play
out just by clicking on the item; the former require the portal to be
activated. This involves finding the item or items indicated above the
portal, and putting them in place. Once done, you can swim through the
portal and activate a cutscene from the past.
You will also encounter the Entity, a swirl of luminescence that isn’t
on your side. It adds to the mystery of the lake.
Effectively you move from portal to portal, following the clues given in
the flashbacks and by following the school of fish you can summon. What
you need to activate the portal will be close at hand, and items you can
interact with will be highlighted. An easy puzzle or two won’t hold you
up for too long.
There are occasions in which you can talk to Mora in the past, and your
answers to various questions seem to determine the order in which the
events unfold. They don’t though seem to affect the end, which comes
down to one straightforward choice. Unfortunately, given the way the
save system works (it exclusively saves on exit and to a single save
point), I had to watch the other ending on YouTube unless I wanted to
play the game again.
The game uses both the keyboard and mouse and while using the inventory
is a little fussy, it's a small thing. I found though that I tended to
ignore it altogether, holding each inventory item in my hand until it
was used and then getting the next one. The proximity of items to where
they are needed facilitated that approach (the endgame might be a
sequence where you differ), and swimming one handed works perfectly
fine.
It plays in the first person, and the view of your forearms as you swim
adds a little something. There is spoken word, as well as a soundtrack
and ambient sound, and a watery, colourful vista. Movement is completely
free, and you can swim fast or just languidly float about.
There is a twist or two and the narrative gets a little weird, but
cursed lakes tend to do that. How you ultimately feel about the game
might be a result of that aspect. While the game isn’t my usual cup of
tea, the three hours I spent with these echoes were a comfortable
experience.
I played on:
OS: Windows 11, 64 Bit
Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz
RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB
Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB
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October 2026
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