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[00:00] While we play them, this is my home.

[00:30] creepy, cool, sci-fi horror game, which I know we've seen a lot of, but there's something that's happening at End of Abyss, aesthetically, that's a little bit grimmer. It's gray, it's more blue, it's more cold, and it's also kind of silent. So as a twin-stick shooter, it's overhead,

[00:48] but it still shows a world in a really cool way. And I also found that the framing works really well for survival horror. Similar to how like survival horrors back in the day had fixed camera angles, there was a sense of dread there because you couldn't always see what was around the corner.

[01:04] You might be able to hear it instead. And in End of Abyss, by moving the camera in this way, it actually instilled a lot of fear because you might hear something in the distance. And when you get around the corner into another room, that's when you realize something is there.

[01:17] What is there Well they basically like this fungus creature mutated zombie things which you know we seen before The thing that makes like good survival horrors today is like that feeling of like not always being able to aim down the sights like the the the the sort of erratic movements of creatures that every single bullet you miss feels awful and end

[01:37] of abyss twists this a little bit the stick shooting is really specific you have to be like dead on still in order to hit these things but the one interesting element is there's no stamina

[01:50] so you can dodge like souls like kind of rolls and dodges out of the place you can sprint but that's not always going to get you out of the bind because your main gun is a pulse rifle and while you don't need ammunition for it it recharges so there's this constant in a way it kind of acts

[02:05] like a weird stamina bar because you can fire off but the more you fire off the less chances the more time it has to take for you to get ammunition back so there's a really interesting dance between like my brain was like trying to conserve ammo but i also didn't have to reload

[02:20] but these things were coming in on me. I had to dodge. I had to sprint around them. And it still conveyed that same sort of tension that you get from a Resident Evil, from an Alan Wake 2 or something of that nature where you don't feel like you're in complete,

[02:33] total, snip-snappy control of things. There's a constant pressure on you. There are guns with ammunition. The only other gun I got to use was a shotgun. Once you have limited ammo for it, it's very slow. Like every shot you want to make count.

[02:47] But there's another interesting element to combat as well. flares The game is dark like visually dark but you can use flares to then like distract these zombie dudes away from you in which you can unload on them or just run right by them But a major element of this and this is where the Metroid Prime stuff comes in is that you can scan things

[03:03] You can scan the environment, you can scan documents, you can scan doors, you can scan the monsters themselves because there's a large variety of them. I saw about three to four variations of creatures. They're all freaking terrifying, including a boss that was like a giant centipede that was hard as bleep it.

[03:21] And that isn't the only Metroid thing about it. It is in this design like a Metroidvania. You know the drill. You get to a door. You may not have the ability to unlock it yet. You might have to get something somewhere else to be able to then get a power and unlock it later in that way.

[03:34] This is also tried and true in the survival horror genre. The door is locked on the other side. like any good survival horror there are safe rooms in which you save and also repair your suit there's a workbench to improve your stuff um but the kind of souls-like element of it is when you

[03:49] die you keep the progress of what you found your documents ammunition unlocked doors but every time you die enemies do respawn where they are so that kind of creates this an additional tension of like

[04:02] Yes, at the loss of dying, you now have to just go through it again and fight these dudes all over. And this game is hard. I would say I did pretty damn good. I was able to mess up most things.

[04:14] I a pro I know what I doing in the survival horror world I take my time I backtrack But yeah no there definitely like there like this terrifying like thing there like one mutated dude whose like entire body face is like kind of like a giant hand it leaped at me in a way that reminded me of like when you first encounter

[04:30] something that doesn't look all that bad and like a dark souls and then all of a sudden it unleashes attack you're like i have no idea how to deal with this so there is a sort of trial and death to some of the combat as well uh so it is by no means easy i didn't really get much of the story

[04:46] in the time I played, but on a mechanical gameplay, moment-to-moment thing, it felt confident. It felt like something refreshing, even though it's using a series of genres,

[04:58] a bunch of genres that we've seen iterated on and implemented over and over and over again, especially recently, it feels like. But it shot up to being something I was extremely excited to check out. Yes, I'm survival horror nuts, so it's in my blood and it's my responsibility

[05:11] to play all those things. But this did feel like it was at least attempting the toy with certain mechanics, like the pulse rifle, the lack of ammunition, the ability to dodge, the way the souls sort of like respawn works. There are things working there that I haven't quite seen done in this setting

[05:25] with these mechanics, with this attitude and confidence. So End of Abyss is game. This guy's looking forward to this year. For all the other End of Abyss and Summer Game Fest jazz, you can stay here at GameSpot with me, Kurt and Davina, and others.

[05:45] against Joe.