Image: Midnight Kids & Akupara Games

In your average Metroid-y exploration platformer, your way forward is barred by keys. Sure, it might look like a new type of gun, a grappling hook, or a bomb upgrade, but it's really a key. In Echo Weaver–released yesterday–there's a very good chance that you already have the power to solve your problems. It's just that you don't know it yet. Knowledge that can often only be gained through hurling yourself to your doom in a crumbling alien research colony stuck in a deadly time-loop. Just try not to think too hard about the vast pile of corpses that look just like you.

Echo Weaver is the latest game from Moonlight Kids, who gave us the excellent (and gorgeously illustrated) Pikmin-inspired The Wild at Heart back in 2021. This time, it feels like they've been most inspired by hit time-looping puzzler Outer Wilds, although this is far from a direct clone, merely playing with some of the same concepts.

For starters, this is a proper side-scrolling platformer with combat and plenty of movement tech to master. But the inspiration is clear once you see the game's growing list of hints, details, and connected problems as you explore, searching for that Eureka moment that'll let you chain those ideas together and delve deeper.

The real fun comes from the Glaive, a biomechanical throwing blade still finding work decades after Krull. While usable as a weapon, it's your main means of interacting with stuff at a distance, can be hurled to embed itself in walls, and, in the right circumstances, can be teleported to. Better yet, it can have its starting location changed outside of the loop, meaning you can perform temporal shenanigans that would be otherwise impossible.

From the couple of hours I've had a chance to play so far (and I really do want to sink more time into this one), this one's just excellent all round. The platforming feels good, the graphics are up to the studio's very standards, and the tone of the writing is playful without being overbearing, despite the grim sci-fi setting, the hallways patrolled by mutations, animated corpses (some of them your own), and worse.

Echo Weaver is out now for £16/$20, with a 10% launch discount, and extra savings if you own one of MANY other Metroid-inspired games. There's also a fairly lengthy demo if you want to have a try before you buy. And for those wondering, the game is somewhat more chill and restrained than the trailer below suggests.