Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers for the base game of Chained Echoes.
Chained Echoes felt like a game creator Matthias Linda needed to make. Without a doubt, Linda knows and loves the classics, but Chained Echoes’ cohesion and vision make it stand out from the “retro-inspired” pack. It juggles tons of systems to create a fresh, tight, near-perfectly calibrated gameplay experience that rewards exploration and experimentation all the way to the end of the game. It has a story that, while sometimes clumsy, has something big, important, and personal to say. Chained Echoes feels urgent, feels whole, and it’s special.
Ashes of Elrant, Chained Echoes’ new DLC, doesn’t grab me by the throat and shake me like the base game. To be clear, much of what I love about Chained Echoes is still here—it’s still a lot of fun—but the gameplay adjustments make the systems fit together a little more awkwardly, and the story lacks the philosophical and emotional weight of the base game.
This isn’t to say that Linda doesn’t dip into some big ideas narratively, but since Ashes of Elrant takes place right before the final dungeon with the same party, there are only so many places the story can go. A group of scientists approachs the Crimson Wings to help clear out the remnants of Fredrick’s loyalists in a small town. The party soon learns this is a trap and is sucked into another space and time. Lenne quickly realizes that this is Elrant, an ancient city that began the fight against the Harbinger and where she began her journey many lifetimes ago. The party tries to find and discuss the situation with the mysterious leader of Elrant, the “White Wolf,” and discovers not all is as it seems along the way.
It’s hard to say anything beyond that without spoilers, but as you can tell, the story has potential. Elrant is ripe for exploring Linda’s philosophy. But like much of Ashes of Elrant, the narrative feels like a collection of good but half-baked ideas. The villains could be interesting, but all we get is evil cackling. The people of Elrant struggle, with good reason, but outside of a single solid side quest, they’re mostly treated like an odd collection of gags.
Linda wants to focus more on the characters and humor this time around, but the stilted writing (Chained Echoes‘ key weakness) becomes even more of a sore spot. Interestingly, the “White Wolf” is easily the best character Linda has written, and the NPCs around Elrant are often quite amusing, but it’s not enough. Ultimately, none of this would bother me much if it were a quick three-to-four hour side quest, but it takes twice that long, even if you’re beelining Ashes of Elrant, and it falls a little flat.
Of course, I didn’t storm through Ashes of Elrant; only a monster could do that. While I am a big fan of Chained Echoes‘ story, what I truly loved was filling out that sweet, sweet Reward Board by poking around every corner and tinkering with my combat builds. Luckily, you get a brand new Reward Board with multiple full areas to explore. And these new zones are interconnected in clever ways and absurdly packed with secrets, puzzles, and superbosses. You can even find new “Power Pools” to increase your stats, sort of like Scadutree Fragments in Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree. Honestly, exploration is one way Ashes of Elrant is even better than the base game, and the satisfaction of finding that last item to fill out that spot on my reward board is unlikely to be matched in 2025.
Even with the Reward Board, some cracks start to show. You still get rewards, but they’re not nearly as useful as in the base game—you can purchase almost any crafting material in a shop long before you unlock it on the board. The other currency you get from each unlock is “PP,” which is a new party-wide currency that lets you power up the party by unlocking fishing, increasing a party member’s stats, or even widening the green section of the Overdrive bar in combat. I ended up with more than twice as many points as I needed to unlock every skill, but some of the “rewards” took some strategy out of the game. Starting out a fight in Overdrive makes the bar far less interesting to manage, and other rewards make Sky Armor combat a total joke, even against superbosses. The adjustments are fine on paper, but Linda needed to overhaul some of his systems to compensate for less friction in combat, and he doesn’t, so it’s not as tight or satisfying.
Other changes in Ashes of Elrant range from the inoffensive to the maddening. As an avowed hater of all things angling in video games, the new fishing minigame is fine. The crystal system is significantly simplified from the base game. Now, you only get one power level, removing some of the grind for materials, which is nice, but there’s a little less build variety.
The absolute worst adjustment, though, is to Class Emblems. I always looked forward to the challenging minibosses and the absolutely rocking track that accompanied those fights. This time? You have to do a terrible timed digging minigame that involves sonar (I think? It never worked for me) or, if you’re like me, digging randomly around in a circle. Depending on the RNG, it can take almost 20 minutes to find that Emblem. The fact that they’re much more powerful than any base game Emblems means you need to put on your excavation hat, tedium be damned.
It all adds up to an odd, slightly askew collection of gameplay systems. Consequently, it feels like Linda didn’t know exactly how to make some things work, how to recapture that beautiful sense of progression that was so carefully calibrated in the base game. Instead, we get a collection of disparate solutions to problems that cropped up during development that ultimately seem a bit haphazard.
Chained Echoes felt like an obsession, a product of many, many years of careful labor and planning. Ashes of Elrant feels like a set of solutions to problems. It comes across as something Linda wanted to make, but didn’t have to make. After spending 18 hours uncovering every little secret and poking around in every corner, some of the sloppiness wore on me.
Don’t get me wrong: there’s still more than enough of the base game’s DNA here to have a great time. Exploration is still a blast, it still looks good, and it sounds incredible, accompanied by some beautiful new tracks from composer Eddie Marianukroh that fit right into the already stellar OST. But, like the new Reward Board, Chained Echoes: Ashes of Elrant looks the same and often feels the same, but the payoff just isn’t as strong.
