Approachable Underwater Puzzler With An Emotional Heart

Echoes of Mora sees you solve a mythical missing persons case in this dreamy aquatic puzzler.

One thing you should know about me is that I love being in water. Pools, oceans, lakes, rivers – you name it, I’m a fan. So when the opportunity to swim in VR through Selkies Interactive’s upcoming narrative puzzler arrived, I jumped at the chance. Echoes of Mora centers around an imaginative young girl called Mora whose brother has fallen into a cursed lake, never to emerge again.

Acting as an ethereal voyeur to this mystery, you’re tasked with exploring underwater dioramas and reliving the events surrounding the accident, helping save Mora’s brother. At Gamescom 2025, I spent thirty minutes testing my stride across this dreamy underwater setting, solving approachable head scratchers while searching for emotive narrative clues. 

Before jumping into the missing persons case, though, Echoes of Mora teaches you how to swim – a process that isn’t far removed from reality. Emulating the multidirectional nature of movement in water, your traversal isn’t restricted to forward and backward motion, and you can wade up and down, too. The direction of your stride dictates where you’ll eventually float. From a practical perspective, this means holding the triggers on each controller, which shifts my hands into a semi-cupped position, and pulling down in a breaststroke-like motion.

Swimming in VR does feel slightly odd at first, requiring some practice during the demo to start moving in the right direction without looking like a floundering fish. Thankfully, it’s not just aqua aerobics, and you can also utilize the controller grips when close to a rock face to grab and pull yourself around the space with more precision. It’s worth noting that while it’s not available in this demo, Selkies Interactive plans to add a system so you can transition between your PC and VR saves ad hoc. So, if your arms start to tire, you won’t need to stop playing for the day and can switch over with your save data intact.

Echoes of Mora’s primary gameplay centers around collecting glowing purple orbs called Fragments and placing them into portal-like Echoes. Offering a glimpse of the past once a Fragment is deposited, the Echo turns gold and opens up, allowing you to step into Mora’s memories to relive key moments. While the demo keeps the lore relatively light, these contextual windows do well to introduce and humanize characters, like her missing brother Dario, whose ambition to leave this strange town put him at odds with the locals.

The demo featured five Fragments to seek out, with some hidden in boxes and others locked behind puzzle-shaped blocks. Due to the open-world nature of the game, Echoes of Mora has its own take on ‘yellow paint’ in the form of shimmering fish that glide past and in the direction of your next Fragment.

Still, finding the hidden Fragments is simple enough thanks to Echoes of Mora’s highlighting system, which coats interactable objects in a neon purple glow. Unfortunately, this simplicity also extends to the puzzles, which aren’t quite as challenging as I would hope. For example, to unlock one of the trapped Fragments, I have to recreate a marble bust by sorting through individual parts and assembling them from a limited number of options. 

Elsewhere, I need to search a small house to find letter blocks to spell out Mora’s name. The approachability doesn’t take away from the sense of achievement, especially as the reward of precious lore adds to the process. However, those looking for a testing, enigma-filled VR experience such as The Last Clockwinder might not be satisfied here.

Echoes of Mora is coming soon, though you can play the demo now on Steam. While it’s by no means a seamless swimming simulator, its compelling narrative beats and dreamy world design provide more than enough intrigue to earn it a place on my wishlist nonetheless.