ECHOES OF ELYSIUM

In this survival game, I faced an enemy worth punching trees over

- Lincoln Carpenter

Sometime in the first or second century AD, the ancient Greek mathematician Heron of Alexandria invented the world's first steam engine. In Echoes of Elysium, an upcoming survival game from Loric Games, Heron didn't stop there: he punched a hole into Elysium, the mythic paradise of Greco-Roman mythology, where he's harvesting the souls of heroes to power a legion of automatons.

During a hands-on preview demo at this year's GDC, Loric Games told me that, by reclaiming Elysium from Heron's mechanical hordes, I would be battling "the hubris of man". And as we all know, the best weapon against mankind's hubris is a sick airship. Echoes of Elysium is the latest in a line of recent survival games trading the genre tradition of tree-punching and stationary base-building for mobile base construction. Instead of building forts and cabins, up to six players can piece together flying Greco-Roman triremes with cannons and jet thrusters powered by the condensed energies of the afterlife. In my demo,