Look, I wanted to like End of Abyss; and I did! Sometimes. When everything’s going smoothly, it’s an atmospheric and excellently-paced survival horror that’s harsh but fair. The problem is that when everything isn’t going smoothly – which is more often than should be the case, especially in the latter half of the game – it’s a pretty good example of what not to do in the genre.

The distant camera and smoky darkness may well put you in mind of Little Nightmares (studio Section 9 is made up of former Tarsier devs), but a better comparison would be classic Resident Evil. Partly this is down to the (great) monster design – many of End of Abyss’ creepy horrors wouldn’t be out of place for Leon Kennedy and friends to face, with dashes of the sort of abominations that haunt The Last of Us and indeed Little NIghtmares. But, End of Abyss feels built in the Resident Evil mold right down to the gameplay.

Abyss of a problem

Though you can sprint, avoiding the lumbering pace of old-school Resident Evil (the controls are, thankfully, significantly tighter too), one survival horror element End of Abyss channels excellently is teaching you to be wary of, and respect, uncharted territory. There could be an enemy just off screen at any time, and you don’t want to run in for a hug. Especially not when most of the beasties can delete a huge dollop of your health with one hit.

Your scanner also serves to reward more careful exploration, but with mixed results. Although it can provide useful info, such as what notes say or which keycard is required for which door, it’s nothing that a simple button tap wouldn’t achieve faster with equal efficiency. The only unique use it really has is for a bit of classic ‘follow power lines through the walls’ in order to find door-opening nodes to shoot.

The Resident Evil comparison comes in not just through keycard use, but intentionally imperfect combat against resilient enemies. There are also safe rooms, though saving works differently to the Capcom classics. When you die, you retain any items you picked up, and any opened doors or extended bridges stay as you left them. However, all enemies – apart from bosses and ambush setpieces – respawn. Any expended ammo, however, does not.

Combat while exploring is usually tough, just the right level of awkward, and manageable (make sure you upgrade your weapons, though). Unfortunately, End of Abyss has a nasty habit of cheaply synthesizing challenge by forcing you into a tiny arena. This is especially true of the boss fights, most of which are awful. When facing multiple enemies, this results in silly situations where you’re leading monstrosities in circles like a Benny Hill chase, occasionally stopping to take potshots at them until it’s over.

Bugs aside – I have a few instances of enemies hitting me through walls, an elevator that doesn’t load properly, and a soft lock that loses me progress in the final area – my journey to the end of End of Abyss is frequently marred by small but cumulatively annoying gripes, a different kind of horror to where the game shines. Gloomy environs, for example, contribute to the great atmosphere, but it does mean that levers and other objects can sometimes be hard to see. At one point, I completely miss a progress-crucial destructible section of floor because the subtle pale coloring melts out of view.

My greatest nemesis is a radiated area where, without the correct (and missable) suit mod, you take minor but constant damage while exploring. Once I eventually get hold of the mod, I find that it requires four energy points to activate… and my suit only has three! Cue hours of aimless wandering until I finally stumble across what I need – wait for it – deep into the area I need it for. Doubtless I missed at least one of these energy pickups somewhere earlier, but it shouldn’t have been possible for me to find myself in that situation. While there’s a touch of Metroidvania – I regularly encounter doors and devices before I’m able to make use of them – the fact that there’s only one piece of traversal gear to find (a grappling hook) brings me back to Resident Evil as a reference point.

A combination of darkened corners and missable items means that I spend a lot of hours wandering around in this way, and I often yearn for fast travel between safe rooms. It doesn’t help that information from the scanner isn’t very useful for many doors, cheerily informing me that they’re locked without any indication of how I might remedy the situation.

That said, End of Abyss does hold some juicy rewards for those willing (or, in my case, forced) to stray off the main path. Not only crafting materials and snippets of lore, but meaty weapons and entire boss fights that you can otherwise roll credits without seeing. There’s even a way (it seems) to soften the difficulty of the final boss by finding certain items scattered across the game, but by then I’ve had more than enough of running around overfamiliar areas to even consider the idea.

I spend way, way longer than I’d like doing laps of the shuttle system trying to find something to help me progress, and I’m not a huge fan of the fact that, if you run out of crafting materials for ammo by repeatedly failing a boss fight, the only way to get more is to revisit areas you’ve already rinsed to kill enemies you’ve already killed. It was bad back when Bloodborne did it, and it hasn’t suddenly become good now.

However, there are enough sprints of enjoyment between the swamps of frustration to just about hold End of Abyss together. There’s lots to enjoy if you live for immersing yourself in a complex environment to explore backwards and forwards with little consideration of plot; but if you’re after something where you can follow the story path with relative ease, expect to make plentiful use of guides.

End of Abyss was reviewed on PS5, with a code provided by the publisher.

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