I’m descending into the seemingly abandoned, rusted ruins of an underground base with my crew. It’s safe to say I’m not one of them, and the mood is ominous at best.
Coated in blue-hued darkness, the sounds of our footsteps and the opening of doors that haven’t been used in god knows how long fill the space. It hints at the enormity of this setting, but more foreboding is how much it highlights the silence.
This is End of Abyss, a sci-fi horror metroidvania from Section 9 Interactive, a Swedish team made up of former Tarsier Studios developers. I can feel those tangential links to the Little Nightmares series. These are by no means similar games, but the vibes are very familiar.
I’m controlling a young technician called Cel, who, along with the aforementioned squad of soldiers, has entered this solemn place. Why we are here is something I got to discover as I pieced together its corroded maze.
In a lot of ways, End of Abyss is your standard metroidvania. It’s got plenty of locked doors and unreachable platforms. As its map widens and you discover more, you steadily unfurl the place with shortcuts and new forms of travel. There will be a time or two where you will be banging your head off a wall as you examine its complex maps – if you’re anything like me, at least.
Scale is something Section 9 has done really well here. Across the roughly 13 hours it took me to hit credits, I was struck by this constantly expanding map. Across more than a half dozen areas, locations twist in on themselves across multiple levels. You’ll be studying your expanding schematics like a wannabe architect.
End of Abyss doesn’t hold your hand when you do this either. I was exploring a radiated area called Containment for hours, with the radiation constantly chipping away at my health, before I found a mod that protected me from it. You may have assumed that I found this mod in the radiated area, but no, it was stuffed in an easily missable room in the arse end of a completely different zone.
The game is quite unforgiving in that way. You are constantly faced with locked doors, blocked pathways, and unreachable ladders. When it does give you a waypoint to reach, sometimes it will be on a floor that you don’t have any map for, because you’ve not found the station to download the schematics. Other times you will be cursed with warnings that you need a specific key card that you haven’t found despite your hours of searching.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.pushsquare.com/reviews/ps5/end-of-abyss
