Soar the skies in your decked-out airship, but be mindful of your surroundings - Echoes of Elysium won’t go easy on you. The team at Loric Games believes the survival genre is the perfect jumping-off point to bring Echoes of Elysium to life, but with a twist. Many survival games tend to be grounded, and this was something Co-founders Brian Johnson (CEO) and Ray Soto (Head Producer), along with the team, wanted to change. By bringing the survival game to the skies, the team aims to take everything we know about survival games to unexplored new heights.

In Echoes of Elysium, players are set to explore and survive in a fractured world. That’s the beginning of our journey with the game: explore and survive, every survival game fan’s dream. Exploring new worlds is part of the draw, the hook if you will. During my hands-off preview with Echoes of Elysium, I was shown some fresh and exciting gameplay that fans of the genre will enjoy.

The sky’s the limit with floating islands and customizable airships, where the art director said, “no straight walls” when it came to creating your airship. This presents a much more dynamic and unique feel to the creativity of each airship that joins your fleet.

The game is essentially an open sandbox with bits of lore scattered throughout. Though not narratively focused, the game world is set upon a clockwork set piece with an art direction meant to be timeless. The team plans to feature more story content drops as updates progress throughout the game’s development in Early Access. Having a small team of only 15 people at Loric Games meant that bringing a more gritty and realistic art style wasn’t feasible. Instead, they decided to go with a much more stylized art direction and forgiving timeline, helping the team to be creative and timeless in the art style.

Heading out to gather resources to build your base of operations - your airship - is the hook and desire for the team at Loric Games. That feeling of exploring a new location in search of loot to take back to your airship for your next upgrade, whether it’s a better thruster or armor to fend off enemy airships, should be fun and rewarding. The team wants players to be able to enjoy the game without the stress that survival games are known for. Deciding early on to go with a PvE approach helps solidify that theory. However, PvP will be coming at a later stage of development.

Eventually, players will be able to pick a class when beginning their journey. For now, everyone starts with the Warrior, a strong, tough individual who won’t back down from a fight. The Pilot and Engineer classes are to follow sometime after. With our Warrior in hand, we are free to explore high above among the floating islands, but there’s no point in scavenging alone.

Right now, it’s about joining your friends and exploring the skies. Building your airship with personality that represents you, but also creating a sense of ownership, knowing your ship could go down in the heat of battle. Although there isn’t PvP just yet, there is friendly fire. So be aware when soaring the skies with five of your closest friends, one misfire could be your demise.

Echoes of Elysium was set to launch into Early Access on December 4th, 2025. When listening to the developers talk about the game and its current state for launch, I couldn’t help but feel it was launching too early. Throughout the presentation, I heard a lot about content that is coming post-Early Access launch. Although that is great news, my fear was that there wouldn’t be enough meat on the bone for players to chew on during their stay in Early Access. Loric Games hopes to leave Early Access in one year, possibly longer.

It's great to listen to the community, but if there is no one to listen to, then that could be a problem. This is something Dune Awakening is currently facing. Players who jumped in early have begun to leave, if not left a while ago. The player numbers have dwindled down to a small few, with some servers now being closed.

Those with an eagle eye may have spotted that the game “WAS set to launch into Early Access on December 4th,” which is no longer the case. After receiving feedback from us, along with other media and creators who went hands-on with the game, many of us knew it just wasn’t ready to soar the skies yet. The team heard our feedback and made the decision to delay the Early Access release of Echoes of Elysium to January.

"So after a lot of deliberation and many, many late nights with the team, we've made the call to delay launch to January. This was not an easy decision, but the reality is we still have a few stubborn bugs we need to clean up. We've built something genuinely awesome and unique, and we don't want to spoil that with a couple of stupid crash bugs. We're incredibly proud of what we've created, and even more excited to keep building on it with our community. I want to first thank the entire Loric team for the insanely hard work everyone has put in. I also want to thank our community, creators, press, and testers for all the support so far. It's not just us over here grinding, it's an entire community helping bring this game to life. We have big plans for this game. Please be patient with us as we continue to pour our heart and soul into this world."

Although the game will receive a small delay, I am still concerned that players might be searching empty skies in hopes more content upon release. Time will tell.

Echoes of Elysium shows promise, passion, and the desire to create something unique in a very popular genre. It’s refreshing, but with PvP planned for later, more lore to follow later, character creation coming later, possibly adding pets as companions later, endgame content coming later, you see where I’m going with this, the list goes on and on. The survival genre is for those hungry fans who always need to keep grinding with a purpose and a reward. If Loric Games’ small team of only 15 people can feed this starving group floating high above the skies, then fans are in for a real treat. But if the team can’t keep up with the demand, fans will starve and go find something else to eat.