End Of Abyss review – a creepy dollhouse take on Resident Evil and The Thing

End Of Abyss review – a creepy dollhouse take on Resident Evil and The Thing

PlayStation 5 (version played), Xbox, PC; Epic Games Publishing
This fetchingly presented horror game brings style and scares, but overextends itself with repetition

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 is a survival-horror game in the mould of PS1-era Resident Evil, which took a similarly zoomed-out approach, using fixed, CCTV-reminiscent camera angles. It’s a great way of controlling each scene’s composition for maximum aesthetic value – and, of course, to set up scares.

End of Abyss delights in lovingly decorated dioramas, with bodies and viscera laid out just so, illuminated by the flickering light of a CRT screen and some orange-glowing item (a valuable key or weapon upgrade) dangling just out of reach. As you’re studying these details, trying to figure out how you might reach that desirable object, at the edge of your vision a monster will peel itself from the darkness and attack before you can consciously register its presence.

What follows is a dance of backpedalling and firing your pistol, praying that it’s loaded with enough ammo to finish off the advancing assailant before it can catch up to you. Or, worse, your retreat carries you into another nest of monsters. These are foundational thrills of the genre, and End of Abyss keeps them intact as it shrinks them down to dollhouse size. They might be scarier still, in fact, because manually aiming a gun from a top-down perspective can be fiddly, and End of Abyss’s control scheme is so confounding (who puts reload on the right thumbstick?) that you’re fighting muscle memory as much as the monsters.

On top of this survival-horror foundation, though, End of Abyss layers elements of Dark Souls, Metroid and Hollow Knight – and here it overextends. This facility is big and complex enough for you to get lost in, filled with doors that only open from the other side and seemingly separate zones that join up in unexpected ways. These can be some of video games’ finest pleasures, when done right, but they make for an uncomfortable fit in a game that relies on a character so slow-moving that they can be threatened by a shambling zombie.

That striking gloomy style, meanwhile, is something of an achilles heel when you’re trying to tell one room from another. It’s not helped by a pause-screen map that struggles to convey the interlocking territory, and, at the time of playing, is prone to getting confused over questions as fundamental as which doors are locked.

This leads to a lot of unnecessary backtracking and, with every repeat visit, those carefully staged scenes lose some of their sheen. A composition that had you gawping the first time can’t hope to maintain that effect on the dozenth visit, while the shadow-peeling scares turn out to run on the clockwork logic of a fairground ghost train. Reaching the final boss after 12 hours, with much of the map still greyed out and other stretches tromped over endlessly, I’m left feeling exhausted, with little inclination to explore the other half of the game that (according to the completion percentage) remains unseen. Contrary to its fetchingly diminutive presentation, End of Abyss might be just too big for its own good.

• End of Abyss is out now; £22.69

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