End of Abyss Review: The Little Nightmares Veterans Grow Up and Grab a Shotgun

Every autumn a mid-sized horror game slips out in the shadow of the big releases and gets forgotten by Christmas. End of Abyss is this year's candidate, and I would hate for that to happen, because for 29.99 EUR it does several things better than games costing twice as much. It also does one thing badly enough that I nearly quit at hour nine. Both halves matter.

What it is

End of Abyss launched on 1 October 2026 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC - on PC it is an Epic Games Store exclusive, so Steam-only players are out of luck for now. It costs 29.99 EUR, carries a PEGI 16, and comes from Section 9 Interactive, a small Malmö studio founded by veterans of Tarsier, the people behind Little Nightmares. You play Cel, a young combat technician sent with a team to check out disturbances in an underground facility. The team does not last. The facility's former staff have turned into something that is no longer staff, and the game is your 13-hour descent through it.

How it plays

This is a third-person action game with full 360-degree aiming, structured like a metroidvania. Your pistol has infinite ammo and is deliberately weak; the shotgun-style blaster, grenades and C4 are scarce, and every charged shot is a gamble because you are standing still while something closes in. There is a dodge roll, a grapple hook for traversal, flares to light up rooms that very much want to stay dark, and a scanner that reads the environment for clues and hidden paths. Safe rooms save your progress, heal you, and let you upgrade gear and craft weapons - and every time you rest, the enemies come back. Dark Souls rules, horror pacing.

The high: the place

The facility is the star. Section 9 understands scale the way Tarsier did: tiny Cel against vast, rusting machinery, flooded halls, corridors where your flare reveals exactly enough to make you want to leave. The sound design is restrained and nasty. Creature design has that Little Nightmares quality of being wrong in a way you cannot immediately name. The map genuinely keeps expanding past the point where you think you have seen the layout, and the moment a grapple upgrade reopens an early area from a new angle is proper metroidvania joy.

The low: the map

And then the map screen. Navigation here is honestly bad - the map is cluttered, vertical layers blur together, and objective markers tell you where without telling you how. I lost well over an hour across the campaign simply walking the wrong way through respawned enemies with no healing items left. In a game this tense, that wears you down the wrong way. Healing scarcity is a design choice I respect; getting lost is not. There are also no real difficulty options, which will shut some people out.

Who it is for

If you liked Returnal's shooting, Little Nightmares' art direction and Metroid's structure and wondered what their offspring looks like, this is it. If you want hand-holding or a relaxing spooky season game, skip it. For the price, patient players get one of the most atmospheric horror worlds of the year.

Verdict

A studio with a clear voice and a cheap ticket. Fix the map and this is an easy recommendation; as it is, it is a flawed gem I am still glad I played.

Score: 7/10

Image: saskialisette / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flooded_interior_of_abandoned_factory.jpg