I’m descending into the seemingly abandoned, rusted ruins of an underground base with my crew. It’s safe to say I’m not one of them, and the mood is ominous at best.

Coated in blue-hued darkness, the sounds of our footsteps and the opening of doors that haven’t been used in god knows how long fill the space. It hints at the enormity of this setting, but more foreboding is how much it highlights the silence.

This is End of Abyss, a sci-fi horror metroidvania from Section 9 Interactive, a Swedish team made up of former Tarsier Studios developers. I can feel those tangential links to the Little Nightmares series. These are by no means similar games, but the vibes are very familiar.

I’m controlling a young technician called Cel, who, along with the aforementioned squad of soldiers, has entered this solemn place. Why we are here is something I got to discover as I pieced together its corroded maze.

In a lot of ways, End of Abyss is your standard metroidvania. It’s got plenty of locked doors and unreachable platforms. As its map widens and you discover more, you steadily unfurl the place with shortcuts and new forms of travel. There will be a time or two where you will be banging your head off a wall as you examine its complex maps – if you’re anything like me, at least.

Scale is something Section 9 has done really well here. Across the roughly 13 hours it took me to hit credits, I was struck by this constantly expanding map. Across more than a half dozen areas, locations twist in on themselves across multiple levels. You’ll be studying your expanding schematics like a wannabe architect.

End of Abyss doesn’t hold your hand when you do this either. I was exploring a radiated area called Containment for hours, with the radiation constantly chipping away at my health, before I found a mod that protected me from it. You may have assumed that I found this mod in the radiated area, but no, it was stuffed in an easily missable room in the arse end of a completely different zone.

The game is quite unforgiving in that way. You are constantly faced with locked doors, blocked pathways, and unreachable ladders. When it does give you a waypoint to reach, sometimes it will be on a floor that you don’t have any map for, because you’ve not found the station to download the schematics. Other times you will be cursed with warnings that you need a specific key card that you haven’t found despite your hours of searching.

As you explore, you’ll have to manually scan doorways and interactable objects to mark them on your map. This is especially important as you’ll regularly come across stuff you’ll not be able to touch till you find some new gadgets later in the game.

My main issue with this, however, is that if you mark a locked door, that door would remain as a locked icon on your map even after you swung it open. It meant I had more than a few occasions, as I started to get a little confused about where to go, that I would travel to check on a locked door on the map, only to find I’d unlocked it hours before.

I suppose it’s all part of the charm of the genre, especially backtracking. For every moment where I wanted to pack it in for the night, there were two moments where it all slotted into place. Finding that way through, or discovering the key, almost felt like when you uncover a new area in Elden Ring. Zones can double in size with the opening of the door, and it was an alluring sense of discovery.

Speckled across these dusty hallways, however, are mutated monstrosities. A mysterious infection has torn its way through whoever once occupied this cursed place. Bodies are sealed to the ground with fungal growths, and some who stand spout tentacles or wide, sweeping necks.

End of Abyss is a twin-stick shooter, which makes its combat encounters rather intense. It’s easy to miss your shots, and enemies will quickly swarm you. With the help of a dodge and a myriad of gadgets, like a grenade or attention-drawing flares, combat remains tactical the whole way through the game.

Across its zones, I fought giant wasp-like creatures, spiders that burrow themselves into corpses before reanimating them, and scuttling hand-like spiders that quickly approach. Each enemy type feels like it has its own way to deal with them, which is something I didn’t really appreciate until the last variant of the game is revealed, and they are kind of the same but have more health.

How powerful your character gets to deal with such threats is really down to you, and how much you’re willing to scour every corner of its setting. I found most of the weapons in the game with ease, but I know at least one alluded me. Similarly, rare materials are needed to upgrade your weapons, add extra health packs or give your suit more power to equip more mods.

Mods are only found in Vaults, and to unlock a vault you must receive a key from a boss. Not all of these bosses are mandatory, and the vaults are pretty difficult to find. All of this is to say that End of Abyss isn’t throwing upgrades and level-ups at you with abundance. You need to track these things down by combing your way through its every hallway.

That grind means that each upgrade feels so valuable. I was by no means overpowered come the end – I was still getting my ass handed to me from time to time – but it made enough of a difference that I might as well have done a jump and a skip with elation every time I found some rare resource.

That certainly wouldn’t have fit with the world, however, because End of Abyss is moody. The blue tint to darkness gives it a distinct foggy look, and I love how the game constantly played with perspective and light. Sometimes it’s strictly top-down, sometimes it’s more of a sidescroller, and often, it would go somewhere in between.

It gave each room, hallway, or entire area its own visual style. I certainly had the motivation to explore considering what I was finding, but it helped that those areas also looked incredibly cinematic – especially when a torch was involved. The whole place has this fantastic eeriness to it that lightly reminded me of sci-fi classics like Sunshine and Event Horizon.

I played across both the base PS5 and PS5 Pro, and interestingly, there are no performance options in the game. Regardless, both ran flawlessly at 60 frames per second, at least to the naked eye, and they look gorgeously dark. I have to shout out the haptics too, which are pretty decent.

However, my time with End of Abyss was somewhat marred by a few too many bugs. I’m usually fairly forgiving of bugs, especially in a prerelease build. End of Abyss, however, was speckled with audio issues, pathways blocked by invisible barriers, and I even got stuck in the environment after beating a boss, then had to back out of the game and beat the boss again.

What’s worse is that most of these issues are fairly inoffensive. However, they stacked upon themselves a little too much for me to ignore in this review. Hopefully, they are sorted in a day-one patch.