End of Abyss Review
End of Abyss is a bleak, beautiful world worth falling into, bugs and all.
End of Abyss is the debut title from Section 9, and you only need to glance at a single screenshot to guess where some of its developers came from. Yep, that's right: some of the lead developers behind the first two Little Nightmares games are part of this team, and it shows in every dark corner of this world. But if you're expecting something similar in terms of gameplay, you'd be mistaken. End of Abyss is a full-fledged Metroidvania with a couple of twists, and those twists are both what make it special and where most of its problems come from.
The first twist is the camera. Instead of the usual side-on perspective, End of Abyss uses a third-person, semi top-down view. My first impression when I saw it was that it could be interesting and different, and honestly, it works incredibly well. It fits the genre perfectly. After a few hours I simply forgot I was playing a "different" Metroidvania at all. The map works just like any other in the genre, you're just seeing it from above like you would in pretty much any other game. Breakable walls, hidden floors, locked paths you'll come back to later, it's all here and it all translates naturally to this perspective.
The map itself deserves a lot of credit. It leans much more on verticality than most Metroidvanias, with areas stacked across multiple floors, and while it isn't huge, it feels bigger than it actually is. That's especially true on your first blind playthrough, which will have you wandering a fairly confusing layout until you finally stumble onto the path or key item you were looking for. The game doesn't hold your hand here at all, and if luck isn't on your side, you'll be running around for quite a while. If you know exactly where to go, the game can be finished in under three hours, but that's not really a fair measure in this genre. Realistically, a first playthrough without a guide will land anywhere between 5 and 10 hours. The good news is that this is a genuinely interesting world to get lost in.
And that world is where End of Abyss truly shines. The environments, the atmosphere, the dark and bleak tone, it's all clearly coming from people who know exactly how to make a place feel unsettling. The map is packed with secrets, and there are corners that are creepy in the best possible way. This team are experts at this, and it's the reason the game hooked me from day one.
The second twist is the one you'll notice far more, and it's one I don't hate, but it definitely has its flaws. End of Abyss is a shooter at its core, and it plays a lot like the classic Resident Evil games, where you point your aim in a direction with the analog stick and fire. This is going to come down to personal preference, but it does make combat noticeably simpler than most Metroidvanias. You start with a pistol that has infinite ammo and a knife for close combat, which comes in handy against the annoying bug enemies that latch onto you. On top of that, there are optional weapons, six in total, but these don't have infinite ammo. You also can't find ammo lying around the world. The only way to get more is to spend currency crafting it at safe rooms.
The problem is that most of these weapons simply weren't worth it. Close to the start, just before the first boss, you'll find a shotgun. I tried it for about five seconds and swapped straight back to the pistol. Not only does it come with just five shells, but the damage felt lacking, and the same goes for most of the other weapons, with the possible exception of one found in a very late optional area. The pistol, meanwhile, gets pretty decent as you upgrade it, and those upgrades use the same currency you'd spend crafting ammo for everything else. Between the limited ammo, the underwhelming damage, and the shared currency, I ended up finishing the game four times using only the pistol.
To be fair, both of these issues can be fixed later on. Once you start upgrading the other weapons, they do begin to pack a punch. As for ammo, End of Abyss has a really interesting collectible in its long list of collectibles: hidden codes scattered around the world that can only be seen with your scanner. In the final area, you can pick up an optional key item that lets you activate these codes as cheats, and one of them gives you infinite ammo for all weapons. The funny thing is that even with infinite ammo, the weapons didn't feel overpowered, again apart from maybe that last optional one. It made me think about how much more I would have used them throughout the game if it had been like this from the start, or if resting at a safe room simply refilled a set amount of ammo instead of costing currency.
Grenades and a few other interesting tools also have to be crafted with currency, and there's an extra sting here. If you die after using any of those bullets or grenades, you're sent back to the safe room with nothing returned. More than once I burned through consumables only to die and lose them without having made much progress at all.
Getting back to the combat itself, the dodge is excellent. It gives you more than enough distance and invincibility frames to handle what the game throws at you. And overall, End of Abyss isn't especially hard compared to a lot of other Metroidvanias. There's no difficulty selector, but it feels balanced enough. A lot of that comes down to the gunplay. It's far more boots on the ground than most of the genre, which usually has you dashing and flying through the air mid-fight. This game doesn't even have a jump, so the enemies and encounters have clearly been toned down to match. Most enemies can simply be kited around while you shoot them. The game does try to counter this by placing groups of enemies in smallish rooms, and in true Metroidvania fashion, some bosses come with a swarm of mobs alongside them. Even so, it never gets truly difficult.
Which brings me to the bosses, and they're without a doubt the weakest part of the game. There are only a handful of story bosses plus a few optional ones, and thanks to the nature of the gunplay, every single one of them was forgettable. Each has three or four attacks that you can avoid by rolling and keeping your distance while firing back. On top of that, the designs are pretty meh, which is surprising given how strong the rest of the art direction is.
By now it might sound like I don't like this game, and that's absolutely not the case. End of Abyss has actually become one of my favorite Metroidvanias in a strange love-hate kind of way. I love the environments, I love the vibes, I love this camera angle in the genre, and I even think the gunplay is a solid base. It can definitely be improved, but I would love to see where it goes from here.
Then there are the bugs. And I mean both kinds. Oh boy, the bugs. To be clear, I played before the day one patch, and I'm sure a lot of this will be addressed. But during my time with the game I ran into doors that wouldn't open, lifts that didn't reset, falling through the floor out of bounds, crashes, the map not filling in, and two hard-locked playthroughs that I had to restart because a quest refused to progress. It had it all. And since I'm writing this just one day before release, I have my doubts that everything can be fixed in such a short time.
Even so, I've sunk around 50 hours into End of Abyss, finished it four times, and I'm still going for the 100%, if that's even possible in its current state. I'm going to keep playing it. If it had more interesting bosses and fewer bugs, a lot fewer, then on the strength of its atmosphere alone this could be one of my all-time favorite Metroidvanias.
If you love the creepy, oppressive world-building of Little Nightmares and you're into Metroidvanias, End of Abyss is 100% worth checking out. Just don't go in expecting the flashy combat the genre is usually known for, and maybe expect a few bugs at launch until they get around to fixing them.
