by October has been a pretty spectacular month for videogame bangers. It started with the likes of Ace Combat 8, Star Wars: Galactic Racer, Silver Pines, and my personal GOTY, Gears of War: E-Day launching within the space of nine days. And that’s before we get to Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen, Castlevania: Belmont's Curse, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. You get the idea.
It's certainly a great time to be a gamer. The biggest problem is finding enough hours in the day to actually sit down and play everything. Lord help us when GTA 6 drops and we’re all reduced to malnourished husks.
With so many big releases fighting for our attention, I want to spotlight an early October release that I think may have fallen under your radar.
I'm talking about a little indie game called End of Abyss. It's the debut game from Swedish developer Section 9 Interactive, a small team of former Tarsier Studio devs, and I'm enamoured with this creepy adventure. It launched on October 1st to a 73 Metacritic rating, which is pretty good, although most of the headlines that day went to Gears of War: E-Day and Ace Combat 8, both of which scored 88.
End of Abyss is a fantastic, if somewhat flawed, spooky twin-stick metroidvania with some of the best world building and unsettling vibes I’ve experienced this year. So, I want to share what I love about it and, hopefully, get more of you to give it a go.
I Swear I've Had This Nightmare Before
I'm a sucker for games with killer vibes, little characters, and mushed together with horrid stuff lurking around every corner. Think Playdead or Tarsier Studios. So, imagine my excitement when I heard that a team lead by former Tarsier Studios devs, Gustaf Heinerwall, Marcus Ottvall, and Mattias Ottvall were whipping up an atmospheric metroidvania set in a dark and spooky world. Oh, and best of all, it featured an awesome little blue-helmeted gal named Cel. Sucker checklist complete.
Heinerwall and the Ottvalls worked on the Little Nightmares series back in the day, and now they've set up their own studio, Section 9 Interactive. You can feel their talented fingerprints all over End of Abyss. If you're as much of a fan of the Little Nightmares series as I am, you're going to love this game’s aesthetic. I'm glad End of Abyss looks quite similar to their previous work at Tarsier Studios, but I'm also happy that it plays totally different. It's still scary, but this time, I can fight back.
End of Abyss tells an unsettling story in which Cel and her crew must investigate an underground compound that’s gone offline. It's an uncanny and depressing story told with hardly any dialogue, allowing its tense action and genuinely great horror moments to carry the game forward. I'm a big fan of this unspoken narrative. Sure, there are a few mumbled voice lines and plenty of documents to pick up, but the silence lets your imagination run wild as you picture all the horrid stuff that happened before Cel arrived at the abandoned facility.
Clever, Creepy, And Claustrophobic
The underground facility has to be one of my favourite locations in gaming this year. I'm a big fan of how dark End of Abyss is, with corridors drenched in shadows that guide you through its various locations. You’ll wade through waist-high currents in the water treatment facility, set fire to failed experiments in ominous testing labs, swat bloodthirsty ticks in bug-infested pipes, and fend off hordes of infected workers in their living quarters. For such a claustrophobic facility, there’s a surprising amount of variety.
I particularly enjoyed how the level design feels like one great big puzzle. The world is filled with locked doors, key cards, flooded rooms, and other obstacles blocking your path. Uncovering the right items to gain access to the next area is a moreish endeavour. Once you figure out what you need to do, the game enters this sort of flow state where it all just clicks together.
End of Abyss reminds me of Resident Evil 2 in a lot of ways, particularly how it encourages you to investigate rooms for key cards and what-not to unlock the path forward. You’ll spend quite a lot of time exploring rooms, and can even download map schematics to help guide you along. It's not everyone's cuppa, but by the end of the game, it's likely you won't need to check your map at all. The facility becomes that familiar.
It's Scary And Gross...I Love It
I like to think I’m pretty hard to spook. Over the years, I've learned what goes into a successful scare, and so I'm not quite as easy to catch off guard. To be honest, it kinda sucks because I love horror.
So, when a game comes along and it's capable of dishing a decent scare, I'm grateful for the experience. End of Abyss is one of those games. It's best played at night, with the curtains drawn, the lights off, your headphones on, and your face inches from the screen.
I credit the game's ability to make me jump to its atmosphere. The creepy environments, the tension, and the horrid monsters all work together to keep you on edge.
Cel descends into the facility with a pulse gun with infinite ammo, alongside other weapons like a flamethrower and shotgun to tackle what lies within. Sure enough, wielding these weapons gives you some semblance of power. And power isn't scary, is it? Instead, the developers are clever about when and where they spring their scares.
One encounter that got me good was the first time I ran into a chest hugger. I was wandering through a seemingly empty pipe when it dropped from the ceiling and charged right at me. These horrid, hand-like b*stards evoke the same sense of fear I get whenever I spot an earwig in the house. Yuck.
Before I knew it, the chest hugger had closed the distance and tackled Cel to the ground with its hand-like appendages. An absolutely vile creature. I hated it the moment I saw it, but I was also grateful because it made me cack my pants.
It's An Absolute Blast
For all its oppressive and horrid monsters, End of Abyss doesn’t want you to cower in a corner. It wants you to fight back! Thankfully, the twin-stick shooting and gameplay mechanics are a lot of fun.
Dispatching enemies is simple enough: point your analogue stick in the direction of the enemy and pull the trigger. You can sprint and dive to create some distance, giving you enough space to turn around and rip ‘em a new one. Husks, chest huggers, brutes, spitters, and many other disgusting monsters all present different challenges, keeping the loop from getting stale.
What I like is that the game doesn't try to remove the fear as you become stronger. Instead, it favours a gradual rise to becoming an absolute badass, without removing that feeling of vulnerability.
Weapons can be upgraded, and the variety of guns are pretty good. For the most part, I focused on maxing out my Pulse Gun, as its unlimited ammo is good in a pinch. As the game went on, I grew fond of the shotgun for eviscerating heads at close range and the flamethrower for crowd control and burning enemies to a crisp.
The game doesn't hold back on the action, either. Along the way, you'll enter into lockdown rooms that throw hordes of monsters at you to test your combat skills. These rooms can get the heart pounding and the blood pumping, providing a welcome shift from creepy horror to full-blown action survival.
Boss fights can also be somewhat spectacular. These unique enemies tend to lie in wait at the heart of each of the game's locations. Thankfully, not all are mandatory fights, which is good because at times they can be a bit... too hard.
Addressing The Brood Keeper In The Room
Finally, a quick word on some of the negativity and the quality of life fixes that have made a real difference.
At launch, End of Abyss frustrated several critics and early adopters with a few pretty egregious design choices. Specifically, the economy system, which required players to collect 'fragments' to spend on equipment, ammo, and costly weapon upgrades.
I'll admit, I found the extortionate prices for crafting things like shotgun slugs and grenades incredibly frustrating. It often felt impossible to feasibly upgrade any gun and keep it loaded with the ammo I needed.
End of Abyss is likely to end up in my top five games of the year
To make matters worse, collecting fragments was a laborious task. Breakable crates scattered around the environment were rendered completely pointless because nothing fell out of them. Instead, I was stuck collecting fragments from defeated enemies in a drawn out cycle.
It pissed me off having to grind enemies over and over again just to craft what I deemed essential ammo and equipment. And when I died to a troublesome boss, I’d end up in an even worse position, spawning with no fragments, no ammo, and a severe lack of patience.
Now, I know all of this sounds quite negative, because, well, it is. BUT! Section 9 Interactive has addressed a bunch of these frustrating issues. Items that previously cost 50 fragments now cost 25, crates actually drop a handful of fragments, and drop rates are increased when you’re running low on supplies.
These might sound like small changes, but they’ve completely turned the game around for the better. It’s a much better experience as a result, and I genuinely think End of Abyss is likely to end up in my top five games of the year.
So, there you have it. End of Abyss isn’t perfect, but it’s wonderfully spooky and a great little adventure well worth your time.
If I were to rate it, I'd probably give it an 8/10. It's flawed, inspired, and overall damn good fun. In fact, I loved End of Abyss so much it became my first ever Mythic Achievement since they became a thing. Which, funnily enough, isn't the most fun Mythic out there. But that's another story.
With Halloween just around the corner, I can’t think of a better time to give End of Abyss a go. It's perfect for the spooky season and a surprisingly lengthy game for £22.69 / $29.99 on the Xbox Store.
