Echo Weaver is a time loop metroidbrainia that buzzes with exciting potential

Dayten Rose, 8 October 2025

Waking on what appears to be an abandoned spaceship, a few things quickly become obvious as I boot up the demo for Echo Weaver, an upcoming metroidbrainia from the makers of The Wild at Heart. I notice that the polished movement and platforming set an encouraging pace of progression. Often, metroidvania/brainias leave you feeling weak at the start because they thrive on the slow accrual of power. Echo Weaver is not one of those. It feels great instantly. Also—and I probably should have noticed this first—everything is on fire.

Echo Weaver reveals its core conceit as the flames consume me: I’m stuck in a time loop. Life comes at me fast, and I have precious minutes to figure out where I am and what’s going on. It’ll take a bit of platforming, a bit of combat, and a lot of uncovering the world’s logic.

Before getting into the time loop of it all, it’s worthwhile to talk about the bones of Echo Weaver—the world, the movement, the sense of progression—because if each loop weren’t satisfying, then stringing them together would become a bore as well. It’s daunting to buy in when everything you do will be erased. But the game is committed to carrying forward its momentum run to run, to the extent that I often forgot I was in a loop.

Mysterious, minimal exposition and gorgeous background art sketch the sci-fi setting: an abandoned laboratory in which I’m as likely to find a mecha-cathedral as overgrown flora or a mystical grimoire. Scenes bobble as though they could collapse at any moment. After all, if there’s going to be a plot, it’s got to happen quickly. And Echo Weaver very much respects that you’re on a tight clock.

Early on you meet a helper NPC in the form of a hologram pizza mascot, and they refuse to waste your time. They immediately pass what is, for me, the first test of a good NPC: they want to stop yapping before I do. (It’s worth noting that time stops in dialogue and during flashbacks, so you absolutely can chew the scenery—or disable this in the settings if you really want to lean into RP.) As curious as I am about the broken nature of time, the wandering evil priests, and the research catastrophe that precedes my involvement in the narrative, the game is disciplined with what information it provides, and when.

This extends to the discovery of new movement abilities, which is not freeform. Platforming sections don’t require experimentation; by the time I need a new trick, it’s already been explicitly tutorialized. I’m not entirely sold on this approach, but my issues are mostly philosophical. Like, I discovered the double jump before it was taught to me. Presuming I’d been more dogged in my attempts to discover every ability before it was revealed, would I have progressed too far too early? How badly can I sequence break? The fact remains that I didn’t do those things, and the level design gently led me through the appropriate paces. But a player who picks at loose threads will have a different—though probably still engaging—experience.

Not all progress in Echo Weaver is measured in knowledge. The demo presents one hard upgrade [Editor's note: or is it?] in the form of the glaive, a tool that I want to describe as “obvious” in the sense that its potential is immediate and electric. It’s effectively a boomerang, but that simplicity facilitates a deep knowledge of its uses and how they interact with the evolving world. Further upgrades gave me the sense that the glaive will be a load-bearing tool for the evolution of the game. On the other hand, Echo Weaver’s Flash-like aesthetic modularity makes me hopeful for more transformative options down the line.

Now let’s talk about the time loop. You do have health in Echo Weaver, but it’s a secondary resource to the ever-present clock at the top of the screen. When it inevitably hits zero, you’re booted back to the starting zone without any advantage (that includes the glaive) other than your own knowledge. Most loops will be spent expeditioning, putting feelers out into the world and finding a line. Once the line is set, the challenge is to execute a sequence of puzzle solutions from nothing as quickly as possible. Success takes a speedrunner’s mindset. Case in point, my first time through the demo took 45 minutes—my subsequent playthrough took two.

I was surprised by how little the time loop bore on my decision-making beyond that initial fork between exploration and progression. The game’s world and characters could break themselves into a million pieces with no repercussions. No consequence is too great when it’s all going to be reset anyway. Of all the potential Echo Weaver does capture, this is one place where the demo felt lacking. Only one area I could see (the flaming room at the start) completely transformed as the loop wore on. Most were static. Moreover, I had very little impact on how the loop played out.

I suppose it’s encouraging that the time loop is the least generative part of Echo Weaver. It frames the game, shapes its outer edges, but the gimmick doesn’t define the experience. What actually stands out is harder to summarize: inventive tools, sharp platforming, and a compelling narrative that knows what genre it’s in. And for all that, the time loop still might reach its full potential beyond the demo. Everything else, at least, inspires confidence that this will be a worthy entry in the metroidbrainia canon.