A small band of soldiers enters an abandoned facility where puckered flesh sprouts from cold steel, offering a familiar sci-fi horror premise reminiscent of Alien and The Thing. However, the game presents its setting as a model-village recreation that players peer into from above, with a tiny bobble-headed hero navigating a world mostly shrouded in foggy darkness or total blackness.
This blend of cute and eerie visual design aligns with the Nordic-influenced chiaroscuro style seen in titles like Limbo, Inside, and Little Nightmares. Unlike those puzzle-platformers, End of Abyss functions as a survival-horror game inspired by PlayStation 1-era Resident Evil, utilizing zoomed-out, fixed CCTV-style camera angles to carefully compose scenes and manufacture tension.
The game revels in detailed dioramas featuring bodies and viscera illuminated by flickering CRT screens and glowing items just out of reach. While players study these environments, monsters frequently emerge from the shadows to attack, leading to frantic shootouts where manual top-down aiming and a confounding control scheme, which maps reloading to the right thumbstick, complicate the combat.
Beyond traditional survival-horror mechanics, developer Section 9 layers in structural elements inspired by Dark Souls, Metroid, and Hollow Knight, including sprawling facilities, locked doors, and interconnecting zones. Unfortunately, this proves to be an uncomfortable fit for a game where the main character moves slowly enough to be easily threatened by standard shambling zombies.
This gloomy aesthetic also creates navigation hurdles, making it difficult to distinguish individual rooms, a problem compounded by a pause-screen map that struggles to accurately depict interlocking territory or locked doors. Consequently, players face heavy amounts of backtracking that dull the impact of the carefully staged scenes and predictable jump scares over a roughly 12-hour playthrough, suggesting the ambitious title ultimately becomes too big for its own good.