End of Abyss turns a tiny dollhouse into creeping terror

The big scare this Friday is a haunting little package called End of Abyss. The game, created by Section 9, lands in a boxed, dollhouse-like facility that you navigate as a small, scrappy team of soldiers. It feels like a cross between a classic survival-horror replay and a tight, artful puzzle world. It’s out now in the UK for a listed price of £22.69, with the US price not specified in the sources we have, so readers should check stores for local availability.

What makes End of Abyss tick is its atmosphere. The facility you explore is composed of diorama-like rooms drenched in dim light, with a mix of creepy flesh textures and industrial steel. The presentation has a distinctive, almost Usborne-style cutaway look that lends charm to its dread. The sense of scale is deliberately tiny: your character takes up a small portion of the screen, while the world around you is dark and partially unseen. It’s a thoughtful approach that helps the scares land even when you can mostly only peek at what lies just beyond each door.

Gameplay mixes gun-based survival with puzzle and exploration elements drawn from games like Dark Souls, Metroid, and Hollow Knight. You’ll hang on to limited ammo, backpedal from creeping threats, and hunt for keys and upgrades that unlock new routes. The camera angles feel fixed in a way that nods to old-school survival-horror, which can be cinematic but also a little fiddly in practice. The result is a tug-of-war between atmosphere and control, where mood carries you forward even as the controls occasionally fight you back.

As a design choice, the dollhouse conceit works well when the game wants you to study the walls and dioramas for clues. The downside is that the facility’s layout is big enough to cause backtracking, and the way areas connect can feel opaque. The review notes that progress can stall as you tease apart where doors lead and which paths are truly open, especially when the map fails to clearly distinguish explored spaces from new ones. By the time you reach the final boss, the game leaves you with a sense of achievement, but also fatigue from revisiting similar rooms and rematching puzzles you’ve already solved.

All that said, End of Abyss succeeds as a mood piece first and a game second. Its art direction, lighting, and the way it stages scares are standout parts of the package. If you’re after a darker, more thoughtful take on horror in games, and you don’t mind a potentially slow pace, this one is worth trying. Just be prepared for a journey that leans heavily on atmosphere and art direction more than nonstop action.