Early in my hands-on for End Of Abyss, the developer sitting next to me expressed surprise at how readily and consistently I was using the game’s handheld scanner. I myself was surprised – perhaps even appalled – to hear that other journalists had been neglecting it.
End Of Abyss, you see, takes place in an underground plate-metal labyrinth where every corner is a huddle of waiting shadows, every doorway a mystery, and every ventilation fan a web of fungal grot. I hate to cast aspersions on other members of the press, but you would have to be an absolute chowderhead to explore such a warren using your eyes alone. This is a world that feels like it’s holding its breath.
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Whenever I entered a room, I took care to do a full 360-degree sweep, inching forward while running the scanner’s bright blue lines over all the deceptively inert detritus lying under tables or stuffed oh-so-innocently into the background machinery. The scanner didn’t catch every ambush, but every so often I’d have the satisfaction of thinking: I see you there, you wily abomination – I see you pretending to be a stick of furniture, and I am now switching to my shotgun.
End Of Abyss charts familiar themes for a horror game, but it’s rare you play a top-down shooter as foetid and threatening as this. Developers Section 9 are veterans of Little Nightmares studio Tarsier Studios, and you can glean that heritage from the dinky proportions of lead character Cel, whose helmet makes her look like a bobblehead trying to escape a maze of rabid hamsters.
The setup here is that you’re a combat engineer scouring a subterranean edifice for the source of a mysterious signal… and that’s pretty much all the explicit backstory you’re getting. The game uses twin-stick controls, and has you alternating between your regular pistol, which has infinite ammo, and a selection of beefier power weapons with limited capacity, together with support tools such as remote C4, grappling hooks, and grenades. There’s also a knife, for those moments when you simply don’t have time to aim or reload.
All the guns can be upgraded at the crafting stations that are often (always?) found near save points, using scrap recovered from the visible layout and from secret rooms hidden behind fractured walls. See, that’s another reason to keep using your scanner. Honestly, I don’t know what they teach young reporters these days.
The handling is a good balance of skittish and weighty. You’ve got a rolling dodge that’ll tempt you to play fast and loose, tumbling through enemy attacks, but every time you get clobbered you’re knocked on your rump for a second or two, allowing the mob to close in – and now you’re backpedalling into the next room, spraying ammo with scant regard for the game’s ponderous reloading animations. In my demo, I had two health packs, each good for about half a bar. Seemingly, the only way to replenish them is at save stations, which also respawn all the enemies: a touch of Dark Souls in a game that doesn’t aim to be quite that challenging, as Section 9 co-founder Mattias Ottvall explained during the hands-on.
The enemies themselves cover a decent range. At the tolerably awful end you have bulging zombie derivatives – be wary when ‘finishing them off’, as some have a snaky surprise. Certain bloated corpses are nests of teeny, scampering greeblings that are aggravatingly hard to target against textured surfaces.
I was most upset by the bear-sized hand monsters I met while trying to recover something from a buried lab. They don’t seem to have any facehugger functionality, but that’s not much consolation when you’re being squished by one. Fortunately, even the larger threats have a healthy respect for Mrs Shotgun, and are equally susceptible to Mr Pistol once you’ve upgraded the damage a bit.
The problem is generally that the monsters materialise unpredictably. Typically, the first enemy you’ll encounter in a room is just a distraction from the second one flopping out of a vent behind you. Some of the smashable resource crates harbour more of the greeblings – don’t forget about that knife. There are also sewers where you should obviously be wary of V-shaped ripples. And between all these things, there is constant, lowering silence broken only by the whine and click of your scanner. Goodness, what a dreadful place. I can’t get enough of it. The camerawork is quietly accomplished, shifting from lightly angled top-down to more of a vintage survival horror CCTV perspective.
The demo’s only severe letdown was the area boss: a buxom, groaning ball of tentacles with some groundpound attacks and a second phase I didn’t get to complete, because the PRs at Summer Game Fest were hurrying me off to see something else. The boss was an ordeal, certainly, but not very horrifying. In Section 9’s defence, my demo was broadly from the game’s second major area, so perhaps they’re still getting into their stride with the creature designs, but come on – flash a little more of that Tarsier DNA. Where are my janitors with limbs as long as the room I’m hiding in? Where are my shrieking geisha ghosts?
I sense that End Of Abyss’s shooter elements may eventually spoil the mood, if the enemies are too many or too formulaic. What feels like frantic crowd control right now could end up being a grind. Still, this is a promising start, and I’m optimistic that the not-so-little nightmares at Section 9 can bring the beast home. I’ll be keeping my scanner cocked.
