Every once in a while, I come into a game where I expect one thing based on trailers and find it’s something completely different when I get my hands on it. End of Abyss, the debut game from Section 9, was made by a team that featured some developers behind the Little Nightmares franchise, which gave me a specific set of expectations.
I assumed the game would involve some light puzzle solving as I moved between set pieces with horrific creatures in a strange but beautiful world. What I got instead was a challenging cross between Dead Space, Super Metroid, and Resident Evil, with a unique vibe that immediately set it apart. While there are many stylistic choices that resemble Tarsier Studio’s work on Little Nightmares, this was its own beast, and all the better for it.
End of Abyss casts you as Cel, a technician who is part of a team exploring a strange underground compound in the aftermath of an unspecified incident. You’re escorted in by a team of soldiers, but after a brief introduction, you’re largely tasked with exploring the facility on your own, fending off the warped creatures that roam its halls. For most of the game, there isn’t much more to the premise than that.
There may be things you glean from the environments or notes around the level, but the few cutscenes in the game never really fully explain what’s going on. The setup feels like just enough to send you on your journey through this harsh and compelling world, though I was hoping for a little more narrative punch to pay off all the intrigue.
An Oppressive Sci-Fi World Built on Atmosphere
What it lacks in narrative, it makes up for in pure vibes, which is something that often works best for games of this type. From the first screen, the washed out blue color palette immediately sets a bleak and eerie tone, matched by the minimal but atmospheric soundtrack that accompanies the action. The preset camera angle captures things from an isometric perspective that shifts in and out when needed, giving the devs another tool in their toolbox for setting mood. Each room feels like a little diorama, showing off a decaying and broken down facility with weird biomass growing on the walls like something out of Annihilation.
It’s clear that it takes inspiration from retrofuturistic settings like Alien, but there’s enough to the design of the technology that makes it feel like its own thing. I particularly loved the suits that the soldiers wear as they tower over Cel with weirdly geometric helmets that hide their humanity.
The strong mood is key to making the environment enticing, which is important for a game so based on exploration. The first areas feel compact and dense, tightly designed with shortcuts like Resident Evil’s Spencer Mansion, but after the second boss the game opens up dramatically, revealing a more open and sprawling game than I anticipated. Like a Metroid game, you’ll gain access to tools or abilities that will allow you to open up previously unavailable areas, building a great network of paths to cross the facility’s various sectors. After a more linear beginning, I was really surprised at how little the game held your hand, asking you to truly explore the area to find the way to your goal.
Exploration Rewards Curiosity—and Patience
For the most part, it’s incredibly successful. Save points, which bring you back to full health and restore your healing items, are scattered around at just the right distance from each other, making it feel like a well-earned relief when you stumble upon one for the first time. Each sector has a map terminal hidden within, and finding that always feels like a huge victory. Opening up your in-game map and trying to see which areas you haven’t checked out yet, then puzzling out your route to get there is one of my all-time favorite things to do in a video game, and End of Abyss captured this feeling perfectly.
To make it feel even more active, you have a scanner tool that can be used to analyze objects in the environment. This will often be the best way to figure out what’s blocking you from getting through a door, whether it’s a specific key or it’s locked from the other side. Information about doors isn’t added to your map until you do the scan, making it part of the satisfying core loop of completing your map of the world. While some people may want a smoother experience that automates this process, the friction of having to do it myself was what made it more captivating, making me feel like I’m exploring and charting this world on my own.
As with many games of this type, this open structure can lead to frustration. There were points later in the game where I swore I had explored every single option on the map, but still had areas that remained inaccessible to me. It was a laborious process to retrace all my steps, room by room, trying to figure out what I had missed. In this specific instance, I had simply not noticed a switch to extend a bridge in an area that I had passed through many times. Due to the lighting and perspective, it was hard for me to see, only spotting it when I was randomly swinging around the scanner to look for something hidden.
You’re definitely intended to feel some friction as you’re exploring, as getting lost definitely feels like the experience the developers intended, but it’s a tricky tightrope to walk to make sure that’s balanced. It feels so rewarding when you take another look at the map and realize that you finally have the right item for an area, though frustration can definitely start to build if you’re not able to spot it. I definitely have more patience for this type of game, as exploration is one of the most rewarding parts of gaming to me, but if that’s something that can grind your enjoyment to a halt, go in knowing that End of Abyss may frustrate you in certain areas. It’s challenging to explore, but that challenge comes with satisfaction when you finally find your way.
Strong Creature Design, Uneven Enemy Balance
While exploring the many sectors of the game, you’ll be fighting the mutated creatures that roam the facility. Combat takes the form of twin stick shooting, with the right stick used to aim your various weapons. The starter pistol has unlimited ammo and will be your primary weapon throughout the game, but you’ll pick up other firearms that pack a bit more of a punch. The alternate weapons have a much more limited ammo supply, so choosing when to use your precious shotgun shells is key to survival. You’ll also find other items that either have exploration utility, like flares or placed explosives, or combat uses, like grenades. A well-timed grenade definitely turned the tide of battle a few times, which meant I was sure to keep myself well stocked.
Defeating enemies will yield a currency called Fragments, which can be used in save rooms to either craft ammo and consumables or upgrade your weapons. Grenades and ammo won’t be frequently found while exploring, so crafting them is the only way you can keep yourself armed for more dangerous encounters. Weapon upgrades, which require more limited resources in addition to Fragments, help your guns pack more punch, sometimes adding new fire modes or modifications in addition to a general stat bump. Most of my upgrade materials went into my pistol, since it was the most used gun by far, which often made me less likely to try to find use cases for other weapons, but they still made their way into my rotation when things got hairy.
Enemy design is strong throughout, if a little derivative. Most of them fall into the category of shambling humanoid, often given body horror flair by The Thing or Resident Evil-style mutations. While they might not be the most unique designs, they are well-rendered in the game’s gorgeous art style, brought to life by expressive animations that make them feel strange, inhuman, and dangerous.
Boss Battles Shine Despite an Inconsistent Difficulty Curve
I appreciate the way they break up exploration, but the fact that they respawn any time you stop and save can slowly turn them from menacing to tedious over the course of the game. By the tenth time you’re crossing the same area, they no longer feel like a threat, just something you need to navigate around. This is compounded by the fact that they are a bit more tanky than they should be, meaning you sometimes have to put a couple full clips of your pistol into a standard monster to take them down.
Robotic enemies in particular were guilty of this, which was exacerbated by the fact that they were the most common enemy in many of the game’s locked room encounters that required you to kill waves of enemies to progress. The tanky enemies do make the weapon upgrades feel more meaningful, but I feel like I would have enjoyed combat more if they had fewer hit points and more variety in attack behaviors.
Boss encounters featured not only the most grotesque creature designs but also the most interesting mechanically, but the difficulty curve of them didn’t feel quite right. The second boss of the game, a massive centipede made of bodies, ended up being the most challenging to me, taking way more tries than even the game’s final boss. There were late game bosses that I was beating in one try that felt way easier than the first few, so it feels like there could have been another pass done at slowly ramping up the boss difficulty in a smoother manner.
A Rewarding Horror Adventure for Players Who Love Exploration
Another big surprise with the game was the large amount of optional content. There is a weapon you get late in the game that allows you to progress into new areas you couldn’t, and exploring these areas will lead to collectibles that will get you the game’s alternate ending. I was a little disappointed with the vagueness of the standard narrative conclusion, so having both more sectors and narrative to explore after finishing is an enticing prospect, even if I didn’t have time to get to it in the review period.
For all the praise I’ve had for the general structure and gameplay, almost every aspect was, at one point or another, marred by technical issues. I had several instances where the map wasn’t updating properly, causing me to backtrack to areas that were marked as locked but I had already opened. One room I entered was completely black and did not properly show the room until I blindly walked into the exact right spot. I got soft locked when locked doors wouldn’t open after defeating the waves of enemies, and I had several hard crashes.
When trying to beat the final boss, it would occasionally not spawn after the intro cutscene, forcing me to turn the game off and on before it would load properly. One of the most frustrating bugs involved a fan that was supposed to be blocking me from climbing a ladder, but the fan wasn’t animating, so I was just hitting an invisible wall with no indication of what was stopping me. There were multiple patches during the review period, so hopefully things will be ironed out soon after release, but technical issues definitely got in the way of my enjoyment of the game several times throughout the 12 hours I spent with it.
End of Abyss is an uncompromised take on the Metroidvania genre that will probably frustrate many players, but if you get joy out of slowly filling out a map and puzzling out your next place to explore, you’ll feel right at home in its bleak and eerie world. While the combat could use a bit of a balance pass, both in its boss progression and enemy health, Section 9 clearly achieved what they were setting out to do.
The mood created through traversing its derelict world helped make up for the lack of concrete narrative, telling its tale through immaculately eerie vibes and atmosphere. My hope is that the bugs that hampered much of my playtime will get ironed out in the near future, because End of Abyss’ brand of demanding exploration was incredibly rewarding.
Review code provided by publisher. End of Abyss will launch October 1 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and PC via the Epic Games Store.
