In this airship-building survival game, I faced an enemy worth punching trees over: 'The hubris of man'

Sometime in the first or second century AD, the ancient Greek mathematician and engineer 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's 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 violent 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, Echoes of Elysium felt like a middle ground between the expected resource-gathering and Sea of Thieves-style shipboard shenanigans. As I cobbled together a flying ship from bits of flotsam drifting between Elysium's floating islands, I equipped my makeshift vessel with harpoon guns for spearing nearby resources and sawblade launchers for mass-harvesting trees.

Those sawblade launchers, I discovered, are also good for sending your ship into a mad spiral and launching your shipmates into the otherworldly void if you fire a fully-charged shot into your own hull. Heron isn't the only scientific mind in this particular afterlife.

In Echoes of Elysium, a ship's construction affects its handling and speed. Better materials—hardier wood, metal plating—are more durable, but they're heavier and require more propulsion.

As a result, Loric Games says it's seen its playtesters build fleets of purpose-built ships: heavy, slow motherships with storage and crafting stations, more nimble haulers for scooping up and shuttling back resources, and metal-plated battle ships that prioritize propulsion, maneuverability, and—of course—guns.

A neat touch I enjoyed was that all ship wall components are curved. Loric Games says it's partially for aesthetics—no flat walls means ships naturally skew towards the classic trireme profile. But it's also a functional decision: Crafting benches and research stations all nestle against the rounded hull, so the central corridor of the ship remains unobstructed when you're sprinting between turrets and cannons during airship combat against Heron's fleets.

I only got a brief taste of Echo of Elysium's ship-building for myself. Thanks to the time pressures of a GDC expo floor preview, I ended up piloting a hastily-designed vessel shaped more like a barrel than a battle-worthy boat. But Loric Games is releasing a standalone shipbuilder on March 24, so we can all sample the full depth of its airship construction set.

Any ship designs you make in the standalone shipbuilder can be saved as a blueprint that you'll be able to import and build in-game when Echoes of Elysium launches in early access later this year. You can even add your ship blueprints to Heron's forces, if you want to draft up your own enemy armada.

I'm more keen on seeing what my airship looks like when it's actually ship-shaped.

Echoes of Elysium is due for an early access launch later this year.