Echoes of Mora launches September 21 on Steam as two apps, one VR and one flatscreen

Echoes of Mora launches on Steam on September 21, and the Berlin studio Selkies Interactive is selling it as two separate products rather than one. Echoes of Mora is the flatscreen game, and Echoes of Mora VR is the headset version, which the studio says also contains a full non-VR mode you can switch into without restarting.

In the VR version you swim with your own arms through motion tracking, with joystick locomotion as an option. Image: Selkies Interactive

Both store pages list September 21 as the release date, and Steam’s countdown on the two pages pointed to an unlock at around midday UTC. Neither page carried a price before launch. The flatscreen demo has been free on Steam since August 20, 2025.

The premise is a small one. Mora’s brother vanishes near a violet lake, her village drowns days later, and you swim through the flooded streets hunting for hidden objects and for “Traces”, lost memories that play back moments from before the flood. Sealed portals called Echoes then drop you into the village as it was, where Mora is the only person who can see you.

Only the VR version carries both modes

The VR store page says the game supports all PC-based VR headsets, and its system requirements name SteamVR and Meta Quest Link with Quest 2 and Quest 3. Swimming is done with your arms through motion tracking, with joystick locomotion offered as an option.

The switch is the studio’s own selling point for that build. Selkies Interactive says you can move between VR and PC mode “within the same play session”, and the store page describes doing it from the in-game menu with no restart. The flatscreen app carries no VR support flag at all and is played with mouse and keyboard or a controller.

They are two separate Steam listings, each with its own screenshots, system requirements and reviews, which is the reason the studio gives for splitting them. “A single page would mean every screenshot, every system requirement, and every review would be half about an experience you’re not looking for,” it wrote on Steam on August 17.

Steam has grown more relaxed about what a VR listing can be. Valve now sells VR games that will not run on a PC at all, so a developer shipping the same story twice, once flat and once in a headset, is a small thing by comparison.

Unlocking an Echo puts you in the village as it was before the flood, with its people rendered as figures of light. Image: Selkies Interactive

A publisher deal fell through in the summer

The studio posted on Steam on April 28 that it was moving the release to Q3 2026 because it was in talks with a publisher, and reported on August 17 that the deal had collapsed.

“Sadly, and quite unexpectedly, the publisher deal fell through in the end,” the studio wrote, saying the extra months went into building and polishing the village instead, and that what ships in September is far more than it would have shipped in April. The same post puts the team at “just three people, all writing our master’s thesis right now”.

That post is signed by Meike Strippel, Daria Pankau and Namin Hansen, the studio’s three co-founders. Its team page lists six people in all, including an intern, so the three are the ones carrying the release rather than the whole studio. Selkies Interactive was founded in Berlin in 2023, describes itself on its site as an all-female team, and had Echoes of Mora, its debut title, in the Official Selection of the London Games Festival 2026.

The demo has been out for more than a year

The flatscreen demo arrived on August 20, 2025 and stood at 93% positive from 32 user reviews on September 21. That is a rating for the demo rather than for the finished game, and 32 reviews is a very small sample.

It covers about a third of the map, including the forest, the lake area and Mora’s house, and the first five of the 20 Echoes in the full version. The VR demo moved to its own Steam page on August 17, so headset owners who kept the old one installed are on the flatscreen build.

Echoes of Mora is one of several smaller VR releases arriving before the end of the month, alongside the 10 games and updates due on Quest and Steam before October. Both versions list 11 supported languages, and both demos are free.