End of Abyss pulls from a lot of inspirations. It has the same texture to its creepy world as Little Nightmares, which makes sense, given the team at Section 9 Interactive includes some former creators of that series. It borrows a bit from soulslikes, with its towering bosses who pack a mean punch if you don't time your dodge-roll well. Its fixed camera angles are reminiscent of Resident Evil, especially when you can hear something monstrous in a room before you can see it.
First and foremost, it's a third-person metroidvania in which you shoot monsters, solve environmental puzzles, and regularly unlock upgrades that enhance exploration. Some of its best parts are staples of the genre, but due to a few flaws, including one that broke my trust, and some poor blending of these influences, it winds up being an inconsistent patchwork instead of an inspired amalgamation.
In this 12- to 15-hour sci-fi horror story, you play Cel, a voiceless technician sent to investigate a facility that has gone dark for reasons unknown. Elsewhere in the third-person adventure, other characters try to help solve the mystery, each decked out in hazmat-like coveralls, as you reveal the massive facility floor by floor, section by section. You'll routinely unlock new items meant to send you backtracking to solve puzzles, uncover secrets, and ultimately beat the game. Of course, End of Abyss didn't invent this formula, but it uses it well, consistently giving me strong incentives to retrace my steps as I'd recall old routes I couldn't take until milestone moments in the story.
This tried-and-true mode of exploration is my favorite part of the game. It was a tantalizing prospect to fight through a tough area with the game's twin-stick shooting mechanics and survival-horror-like limited resources to uncover things like explosive charges that can destroy some weak walls and floors, or a grappling hook that can pull down previously inaccessible ladders, revealing huge new avenues to explore, including many optional areas. Most upgrades are only found in optional areas, so I always made the time to seek them out as I tried to stay ahead of the many punishing enemies shambling around most corridors.
Physically, the explorable space is well-designed, often leaving me to chart much of the facility myself, with some valuable maps hidden off the main path that regularly rewarded my efforts with a full view of a given area. However, End of Abyss betrays its genre and the player alike with one particular area lacking in polish: those all-important maps sometimes lie to you. Due to an apparent bug, sometimes a door you've opened will still register as locked on the map, or a door for which you have the key won't remind you of that with the map icon the game uses to say, "Come back! You can open this one now."
These are visual bugs only. I could still open a door if I had the right key, even if the map didn't tell me I could, and some doors locked on the map were wide open when I got there. But it meant having to juggle two versions of the game's many intricate areas in my head at once: the world according to the map, and the world according to reality.
It made my favorite part of End of Abyss more frustrating than it needed to be, with more than a few instances of this issue cropping up before I hit the credits. A patch for the game went out just before I faced the final boss, which scrubbed out some other issues I faced to the point that they're not even relevant to this review anymore, but the map problem remains for now.
As much as I loved exploring every inch of the world, finding hidden bosses and precious resources alike, these sometimes faulty maps are a cardinal sin for a metroidvania, a genre that relies on these in-game signals for players to immerse themselves in their labyrinthine worlds. Once I realized I couldn't always trust the map, navigating became more stressful than some of the boss battles.
Though the map misled me at times, at least the world is gorgeous. End of Abyss's underground facility comes to life thanks to its awesome atmosphere and art direction. The midnight-blue color palette gives every inch of the space an eerie, unsettling feeling. Cel can often hardly see more than a few feet in front of her, and it's not long before she, and you as the player, will come to realize how unfortunate that can be. I love when a sci-fi story can still feel like a haunted house, and though End of Abyss' many kinds of enemies are usually closer to mutated zombies than ghosts, it's all enveloped in an air of disconcerting stillness that I adore.
When in combat, from a certain range, Cel's shots are mostly spot-on thanks to a soft auto-lock that assists you. Get too far away from an enemy, though, and targeting becomes more dependent on your manual aim, giving fights that classic horror thrill of missing shots you really needed to land. It's good tension, even if it can feel like some under-the-hood randomness is deciding your shots in a way I suspect may frustrate others.
There's no shortage of body horror in this game, which pulls from sci-fi classics like Alien, Event Horizon, and The Thing in different ways. Most enemies, with their noodly organic masses spilling out of their heads, behave like mindless drones, running or stumbling toward you, then clawing at you, latching onto your face, or stinging you, so it quickly becomes tense trying to keep a safe distance from the enemies without losing the aim assist that dispatches them more efficiently.
Early on, every encounter felt like a tense fight for my life. My gun was underpowered and enemies were numerous and quick to close the gap between us, while the cramped quarters and fixed camera angles added purposeful friction. At times, I grew frustrated because of the game's soulslike inspirations. Some of that comes down to taste. I don't enjoy or, usually even play soulslikes because I don't have the interest in getting beaten by a single boss for long stretches of time, and a few times early on, that was my experience with End of Abyss.
But around the halfway point, everything began to click. My guns were more plentiful and powerful, having unlocked a shotgun, rifle, and flamethrower--though none of them really compared favorably to my fully upgraded pistol with infinite ammo. I got much better at timing my dodges, and after a few early bosses gave me fits, I beat several later ones in one or two tries each.
That's partly due to the game's satisfying power climb that ramps up the deeper you get into the story, though it's also true that most bosses don't offer much diversity when it comes to challenge. Most of them want to simply clobber you up close or from range, heaving a fleshy appendage at you with just a half-second's notice per attempt. Though each boss has its own look and a few have some unique gameplay wrinkles, several others hardly feel different from one another. Once you learn to take advantage of the dodge-roll's invincibility frames, you'll be just fine.
I went into End of Abyss expecting a tough horror game based on my previous hands-on sessions with the game, and though it is often difficult and the world is definitely horrific, I also came away feeling like the soulslike elements clash poorly with a horror game. The first time I'd enter a room and get swarmed by a specific onslaught of enemies, it was scary. But when I'd get to a restoration pod--a save point and stand-in for Dark Souls' bonfires--enemies would reset. That meant retreading my steps through areas, which, while exciting for their newly opened avenues and hidden upgrades, lost their scare factor when I encountered the same enemies doing the same things as before. There are only so many times the monster can jump out of the proverbial closet before someone sleeps through it unphased, you know?
As a result, I stopped seeing End of Abyss as a true survival-horror experience and started seeing it more as a darker, creepier Metroid. I like that conceptually, too, though if that's what it wants to be, a more reliable map system is crucial. Getting lost because of faulty in-game hints happened too often for a game so reliant on exploration as its key ingredient. This problem may be fixed by the time you get to it, so you might have a better time than I did.
There are only so many times the monster can jump out of the proverbial closet before someone sleeps through it unphased, you know?
Ultimately, my 13 hours with End of Abyss were inconsistent, with long stretches of excitement broken up by regular beats of annoyance. When I was rolling right along, finding major and minor upgrades, unlocking crucial shortcuts, and taking on hordes of enemies in nail-biting combat, I really loved it. But too often, the map misled me, some encounters lost their luster through repetition, and some early difficulty spikes left me flustered.
In one sense, the way End of Abyss pulls from so many different inspirations lends it much of its appeal. It's the rare sort of game where you could round up super-fans of Dark Souls, Resident Evil, and Metroid, and each of them might come away with something different they enjoyed. But even if a patch fixes my big issue with the map's reliability, it's this same blend of influences that hampers some parts, none more than the repetitive soulslike encounters that reduce its horror elements to mere aesthetics.
0 commentaires:
Enregistrer un commentaire