End of Abyss

End of Abyss is a 2026 top-down survival-horror action-adventure developed by Section 9 Interactive and published by Epic Games Publishing, released October 1, 2026 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via the Epic Games Store at $29.99. The debut game from a Swedish studio founded by veterans of the Little Nightmares lineage holds a Metacritic score of 76 on PS5 — 64% positive, zero negative reviews — and an OpenCritic average of 73 (“Fair,” 53% recommend): a genuinely split launch, with PlayStation Universe calling it the “surprise hit of the year” at 9/10 and IGN and GameSpot landing on 6s in the same week.

The split has a shape. Nearly every review praises the same things — the atmosphere, the interconnected facility, the genre blend of Metroidvania map and survival-horror scarcity — and the lower scores all cite the same frictions: backtracking without fast travel, confusing navigation, and launch-window bugs in the map itself. It’s a 13-hour game whose reception depends almost entirely on your tolerance for getting lost.

Technical Specifications

Cel and the Facility

You play Cel, a young combat technician — pointedly not a soldier — sent into a sprawling underground compound to investigate “disturbances of unknown origin,” and descending instead through a broken, derelict world where nothing left is fully human. The facility is the game’s real protagonist: a cold, interconnected industrial labyrinth that Game Informer loved “snooping” through and that nearly every review ranked among the year’s best-designed horror spaces — Section 9’s Little Nightmares DNA translated from side-scrolling dollhouses to an overhead maze. Story is delivered environmentally and sparingly, in the studio’s house style, and lands or doesn’t depending on how much you dig.

The Scanner and the Things That Split

The design thesis survived contact with the finished game: horror built on clarity rather than blind corners. A dual-use scanner reveals the facility’s hidden layers and its inhabitants, and the creature design fights your aim-and-solve instinct — shoot some horrors and they split, multiplying the problem. Twin-stick combat is tactile and deliberately resource-starved; ability gates and a dense, looping map structure make it a true Metroidvania, the reason DualShockers ranked it among the year’s better ones and Push Square called the map “a scintillating brain-teaser.” Difficulty is real — GameSpot’s preview headline called it “fantastic and hard,” and the reviews confirm the second word unreservedly.

Reception: Lost in the Right Place

The 9s (PlayStation Universe, GamingTrend) and 8s (Push Square, Game Informer, Shacknews, DualShockers, Meristation) credit a distilled, confident survival-horror experience; the 6s (IGN: “combat and exploration lose steam quickly”; GameSpot: “long stretches of excitement broken up by regular beats of annoyance”) credit the same atmosphere and lose patience with the structure. The consistent complaint list is specific enough to be actionable: no fast travel, heavy backtracking, navigation that confuses more than it challenges, and a buggy in-game map that several outlets flagged as tainting an otherwise excellent design. Epic’s 4.6/5 user rating suggests buyers are landing closer to the 8s — a $30 price that reviewers across the spread called fair for a 13-hour debut of this ambition.

Where to Play It Today

End of Abyss is on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC exclusively via the Epic Games Store (no Steam release announced, per its Epic Games Publishing deal) at $29.99, with a PS Plus preorder discount now expired. The fair day-three advice: an easy recommendation for Metroidvania players who like their horror slow and spatial, a wait-for-the-map-patch for everyone else — and, for a studio’s first game, a far stronger debut than a 73 suggests. We’ll revisit after the first patch cycle, when the bug complaints either age out or don’t. It lands a week after Silent Hill: Townfall made the same bet on slow horror to a similar split — October 2026 is turning out to be the month the genre argued with itself.