End Of Abyss review – a creepy dollhouse take on Resident Evil and The Thing
Source: The Guardian ·
PlayStation 5 (version played), Xbox, PC; Epic Games PublishingThis fetchingly presented horror game brings style and scares, but overextends itself with repetitionA small band of soldiers enters an abandoned facility, where puckered flesh sprouts from cold steel. It’s a promising but familiar start to a sci-fi horror story, with heavy overtones of Alien and The Thing. Neither of those, though,…
From the source
A small band of soldiers enters an abandoned facility, where puckered flesh sprouts from cold steel. It’s a promising but familiar start to a sci-fi horror story, with heavy overtones of Alien and The Thing. Neither of those, though, were so … dinky. End of Abyss’s facility is presented as a kind of a model-village recreation of The Thing’s Outpost 31 that you peer into from above. Your little bobble-headed hero takes up a tiny fraction of the screen, with most of the remainder drenched in foggy darkness, or even blanked out entirely. This is a world of Usborne-style cutaways, where anything outside the walls is total blackness. This combination of cute and eerie immediately marks End of Abyss as part of the Scandi-chiaroscuro style pioneered by Limbo and Inside (from Playdead, in Copenhagen) and Little Nightmares (from Malmö-based Tarsier Studios, where the founders of End of Abyss developer Section 9 cut their teeth). Those games, though, were all puzzle-platformers. End of Abyss…