I first played End of Abyss during a Summer Game Fest demo in 2024, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it ever since. The full version is about as good as I hoped, mixing the familiar Metroid formula with a touch of survival horror, making it stand out even among an oversaturated crowd of indies. My game was unfortunately plagued by a few major bugs, but I enjoyed the rest of the experience enough to brush them aside for the most part.
In End of Abyss, you play as a technician who ventures into an abandoned facility alongside soldiers and their captain. The setting is liminal and mysterious – fitting for a survival horror game – where you have to search for old notes and item descriptions if you want narrative context. The atmosphere is cold and lonely, and even your armed companions don’t seem interested in helping you complete your tasks. For a game so light on plot, I found myself instantly sucked into the world-building, cautiously curious about what was around every corner.
It helps that the resort is a joy to explore. End of Abyss takes clear inspiration from the Metroid series and borrows some of its best traits. The map constantly wraps around itself, and you’re just as likely to discover a shortcut to a previous area as you are to find a rare resource. Even among the sea of similar indie games, I was still impressed by End of Abyss’s large-scale design. There’s also a scanner (a la Metroid Prime) that lets you scan enemies and search the environment for ways to progress. I don’t know what the facility is called, and even after the credits I’m not sure what it’s for, but the setting is one of the most memorable highlights of End of Abyss.
Although End of Abyss is structurally similar to Metroid, it is also a twin-stick shooting survival horror game. Your gun has infinite ammo, but you have to craft bullets for the other weapons you find (most of which are optional). Every conflict is tense, making my narrow victories satisfying, and the game has just enough enemy variety to keep things interesting, including zombies, bugs, and robots. Different enemy types also have their own weaknesses, which is why we encourage you to use your entire arsenal of weapons.
The bosses, on the other hand, weren’t always as fun to meet. These difficult encounters are well balanced from a combat standpoint, but repeated attempts quickly deplete your precious ammo and grenades. On several occasions I had to search for bullets and bombs before returning. The alternative is to rely on your starting gun, but most health bars are so large that it’s too tedious to rely on the gun alone. This became less of an issue in the late game, when I had more weapons and therefore more ammo types in stock.
Finally, there is the elephant in the room; my time with End of Abyss was filled with bugs. I got stuck in walls, encountered invisible walls, and even fell out of bounds at one point. The map would also have issues, marking unlocked doors as locked or omitting certain landmarks, making backtracking confusing. And perhaps most frustrating of all, some doors failed to prompt me to press the “Open” button, leaving me unable to enter until I exited and reloaded. The bright side is that you save frequently to heal, so resets don’t erase much progress. End of Abyss has also already received several patches during my time playing, and some issues have been fixed, but it still affected my experience.
Despite the issues, I loved poking around End of Abyss’s cold, industrial corridors, and the bugs surprisingly didn’t affect my overall opinion. I’ve been looking forward to End of Abyss for a while and I’m glad it lived up to those expectations.
Gn tech
