To intentionally misquote Friedrich Nietzsche: “If you gaze for long into Abyssus, then Abyssus gazes also into you.” My subject today is Abyssus, developed by DoubleMoose Games and published by The Arcade Crew. Abyssus presents itself as “a fast-paced 1-to-4 player FPS and roguelite brinepunk adventure” in which you’ll have to “choose your loadout, blast through the corrupted denizens of a sunken civilization, and wield godly powers.” In Abyssus, you and your co-op partners are a crew of heavily armed divers aboard a submarine. You submerged your craft somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean after you detected “a faint signal” from that point.

When you arrived at the source of that signal, “a sudden surge of energy from far beneath the sea wreaked havoc on your submarine’s instruments.” That destroyed most of your submarine’s functions, but left just enough of the craft functional as to allow you and your co-op buddies to use the submarine as a home base. From there, you’ll embark upon expeditions into the sea in an effort to find out just what the heck is going on here. The term “roguelite” in the description of Abyssus probably tells most of our readership exactly what we’re dealing with here.

That is, you’re intended to fail frequently early on as you spend resources you gather during each run to unlock permanent upgrades. In turn, said permanent upgrades progressively strengthen you so that you fail less and less often in future runs. The first point Abyssus scored in my favor is that, at least on my setup, its loading screens take hardly any time at all. That helps to minimize mandatory downtime between runs and allows me to quickly get back to the action. On a related note, Abyssus looks great and runs really well from a technical standpoint, even on my PC’s aging hardware.

The atmosphere of Abyssus really helps to set its tone. You really feel like you’re a shipwrecked sailor stuck beneath the sea, whose only hope is to explore and see what you can discover. It didn’t take long at all for me to feel “immersed” in the world of Abyssus, if you’ll pardon the pun. The core gameplay loop within Abyssus is largely intuitive, and anything that isn’t is instead explained quite well. Combat is really enjoyable, and every gun I’ve tried out feels really satisfying to use. The fact that weapons have primary and secondary firing modes intended for different situations is useful.

At the end of each run, you’re presented with a highly detailed report of your stats, regardless of whether you succeeded or failed the run. Abyssus will tell you things like how much damage you did with your weapon’s different firing modes, which godly aspect you favored, and how much their related power-ups helped you, and how many enemies you killed. Abyssus describes its gameplay as “fast-paced.” That’s definitely accurate, which is exactly what brings me to the biggest downside of Abyssus as of the time of writing: There’s no way to play offline with bots.

That means you’re totally alone if you don’t have at least one co-op partner with you. If you play alone, as I did, you’re in for a challenge that’s likely to be untenable unless you’re a seasoned veteran of games like this. Sure, you can easily join a server and play alongside other random players, but the absence of bots in offline play alienates players (such as myself) who would prefer to keep to themselves. Abyssus reportedly features crossplay between its PC and console versions, though I didn’t get the chance to test that out before I had to complete this article.

Even with crossplay, Abyssus is really brought down by the fact that its lack of bots serves to heap a potentially unmanageable level of challenge onto anyone who can’t bring in any friends and doesn’t want to take a gamble on playing alongside randos. That, combined with the $25 base price, really limits my ability to recommend Abyssus. If none of that presents a downside for you, however, I think you’re likely to really enjoy Abyssus if you like games such as Deep Rock Galactic and Left 4 Dead with a healthy amount of roguelite elements added into the mix.

A PC review copy of Abyssus was provided by The Arcade Crew for this review.

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Abyssus

$24.99

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• Really well-optimized from a technical standpoint.
• The atmosphere really helps to set the tone of the story.
• Core gameplay feels smooth, intuitive, and satisfying.

Cons

• Total lack of AI partners when playing offline.
• Core gameplay can easily become too challenging without at least one co-op partner.