End of Abyss

More about End of Abyss

End of Abyss comes from Section 9 Interactive, a Swedish studio founded by developers who previously worked on Little Nightmares and Little Nightmares 2. Epic Games Publishing published the game, and it launched on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on October 1, 2026. The PC version is exclusive to the Epic Games Store; there is no Steam release. The game casts you as Cel, a young combat technician sent to investigate strange disturbances inside a derelict underground facility. What begins as a routine inspection quickly turns into a descent through a ruined, abandoned complex, one where broken machinery and worse things wait in the dark. The story leans on atmosphere and mystery rather than exposition dumps, letting the state of the facility itself tell most of the story. Mechanically, End of Abyss is a top-down, twin-stick shooter built around Metroidvania structure. Cel starts out badly outmatched by the creatures roaming the facility, so survival means paying close attention to positioning and ammo rather than charging in. Upgrading gear, better weapons, more health, new scanner functions, is what gradually turns impossible fights into manageable ones, and that power curve is the main thing driving progress rather than a traditional experience-and-level system. The Metroidvania backbone shows up in how the facility itself is laid out. Corridors that are sealed off early on, because Cel lacks the tool or the firepower to get past them, reopen once new equipment is found elsewhere. A scanner is central to this: it is used to spot hidden routes, secrets, and points of interest that are not visible just by walking past them, and it becomes more capable as Cel acquires new upgrades. That loop, hit a wall, explore elsewhere, come back stronger, is the game's main structural hook, and it is handled through backtracking across a single connected map rather than separate levels. Visually and tonally, End of Abyss sits closer to survival-horror than to a straightforward action shooter. The facility is designed to feel abandoned and wrong, and the twin-stick combat is deliberately tense rather than power-fantasy: expect to feel outgunned for a good portion of the early game. That tension is also where the Little Nightmares pedigree shows through most clearly, even though the top-down camera and twin-stick shooting are a significant departure from that series' side-scrolling platforming. The game was first revealed in mid-2025 and got a firm October 1, 2026 release date about a year later. Early hands-on previews based on short sessions at a summer games showcase in 2026 described it as a sci-fi take on survival-horror pacing, consistent with the atmosphere the final game leans on. As a smaller-scale release, End of Abyss does not try to compete on scope with major open-world titles. Its pitch is tighter: one setting, one character, and a single facility whose geography keeps rewarding players who come back to it with better tools. For anyone who liked how the Little Nightmares games built dread out of environment and silence, End of Abyss translates a version of that sensibility into a different genre, the twin-stick Metroidvania shooter, where backtracking and gradual empowerment carry most of the weight instead of a fixed narrative path.