Echoes of Elysium review: The house has sails, and the roof is suddenly important

The big picture

Owning a home is expensive enough before you ask it to fly. Echoes of Elysium takes the survival-game habit of accumulating furniture, machinery and suspicious quantities of raw material, bolts an airship underneath it, and invites the weather to inspect your work. The result is an appealingly impractical fantasy: a workshop that can chase the horizon, provided you haven't loaded the horizon's entire mineral supply into its cupboards.

Loric Games' survival RPG entered Early Access on January 27, 2026, for Windows PC. That distinction still matters. This is a developing airship-building adventure, with an existing survival loop and subsequent system updates, rather than a finished epic whose every distant island contains another fully furnished chapter. Its strongest idea is already easy to appreciate: the base you keep improving also carries you toward the next reason to improve it.

The forecast says your furniture is overweight

The August 20 Tempest update makes weather more than a decorative complaint. Rain adds weight to wet ship components and stored items, affects travel and crafting, and can stop certain stations working when they become thoroughly soaked. Construction pieces offer different degrees of cover. Suddenly, a roof has a more compelling argument than “it completes the look.”

That's a smart pressure to place on a building game. Attractive shapes and useful shapes don't always agree, and rain gives that disagreement consequences. An exposed workstation may fit your grand vision of an airy industrial veranda. Unfortunately, the atmosphere has also taken an interest in the veranda. Practical shelter becomes part of the design rather than the unglamorous final touch.

Stronger, more variable wind adds another planning demand, while the update's component-weight, fuel and flight-information displays make those demands easier to inspect. The interesting question becomes how much equipment your design can sensibly carry, not simply how much equipment the build menu will tolerate. That distinction gives the ship a personality assembled from your priorities, including the priorities you should probably have reconsidered.

A workshop with an enemy problem

The world supplies mechanical opposition as well as resources. Heron's clockwork forces and airborne enemies give the survival fantasy a sharper edge than leisurely sightseeing. Crafting weapons and tools sits alongside ship construction, so a vessel built around convenience still belongs to a world that has not agreed to respect your working hours.

The appeal is the connection between those systems. Gathering supports better equipment; equipment supports further exploration; further exploration gives the workshop another shopping list. Putting that workshop in the sky makes the familiar loop feel thematically coherent. You're maintaining an expedition, not commuting endlessly between a house and a pile of rocks because somebody forgot one ingredient.

It also establishes the audience fairly clearly. People who enjoy refining a useful machine have a stronger reason to investigate than people primarily seeking an uninterrupted story campaign. The ship itself supplies a continuing project. If adjusting a build sounds like housekeeping rather than play, lifting the housekeeping into the clouds won't magically change your relationship with it.

An airship still under construction

Early Access remains the major qualification. The larger narrative and expanded world are development territory, and a compelling flying base doesn't automatically equal a completed RPG. Expectations should stay anchored to the available survival and construction systems, even if the actual anchor appears to be pointed at empty sky.

Controller users also need to distinguish announcements from finished support. Loric's September 23 announcement offered controller functionality through an experimental beta branch, with multiplayer requiring participants to use the same branch. That's a testing option, not a reason to assume every controller-related rough edge has disappeared. A co-op evening should involve coordinating the expedition, not discovering that half the crew downloaded a different universe.

Echoes of Elysium has a strong identity when it lets practical construction collide with the fantasy of wandering through an airborne world. Its best argument is the airship as a home, tool and ongoing engineering argument. Come for that developing sandbox, with appropriate Early Access patience. And put a roof over the important equipment. Apparently, becoming a sky captain does not exempt anyone from basic property maintenance.