The something-punk genres are easy reference material to reach for when cooking up a new game and setting, but you know what they’re missing? An abundance of salt. Abyssus is here to change all that, eschewing the random cogs, goggles and oily machinery of steampunk, and the dystopian body mods and neon of cyberpunk in favour of corrosively salty water and lashings of cosmic horror.
Abyssus has you diving into a first-person shooter roguelike, stepping into the deep-sea diving suit of a brinehunter before descending into the depths to follow The Signal. The story doesn’t really matter here, though you’ll inevitably be drawn to the mildly amusing notes and messages left behind.
Playable in up to four-player co-op, I immediately grabbed a few fellows to play alongside me, thinking that the more of us, the merrier it would be to descend into the murky depths. And that’s true, with the obligatory harmonised song that you can all engage in – now a standard feature of any watery multiplayer game – the strange dancing, and the tussle with the red-eyed automaton enemies that assault you as you venture through the depths of the first region.
With just two of us, the first few runs were a real trial to make progress, butting up multiple times on the way to and then at the first region boss. There was a nice twist here, in finding a boss that really leans in on MMORPG ideas, with hefty area-of-effect attacks, invulnerability phases, and area-blocking hazards. It’s honestly quite overwhelming at times.
Adding a third compatriot, and with the smattering of metagame upgrades applied, we were able to persist and overcome, venturing into the second jungle-like region to battle lizard peoples, and promptly succumbing as the difficulty ramped up. Thankfully, we made it far enough to unlock a few new weapons and abilities – having turrets instead of grenades as an ability was an instant bonus that was so impactful to our steady damage output, we nicknamed them Terry.
With this challenge, I approached playing solo with a sense of trepidation, so you can imagine my surprise when Abyssus was suddenly just…. easy. The number of enemies presented in an area dropped, the number of bullets they take to overcome plummeted, and where even the first few areas of a new run would require a bit of effort in co-op, here I was just breezing through with barely a scratch. I made it just as far on my own as I had with my trio on the first effort, without feeling anywhere near as pressured until the final moments.
Part of this will, of course, be down to powering up in the metagame, spending what I’d earn from each run to grow the options available on successive attempts. These range from having an additional ability charge, to opening up new altars and upgrade stations sprinkled through each region, and simple percentage boosts for damage output. Healing stations are a great help to give you more health stims and aid deeper runs.
On each attempt, you’ll find a selection of different elemental blessings that can be applied to your primary fire, secondary fire and ability. Ice will freeze, fire will burn, lightning will arc between enemies, but there’s also tentacles that can spawn to chuck rocks, shadows that will debuff affected enemies, and vengeful spirits that will build up and then just unleash themselves at enemies. There’s some great combos here that encourage you to coordinate with buddies, or even just shift between fire modes – and again, having Terrys that will steadily ping enemies with shadow damage is just a huge help.
The main problem with Abyssus – outside of the steep co-op difficulty – is that the actual structure of the game is uninspiring. There’s a bunch of hand-crafted arenas for each environment and they’re combined in different ways, but they quickly become overly familiar, and the notes you discover between combat rooms are unchanging, so the world isn’t significantly expanded through lore. The challenges you get to try and spice up the action are also quite basic – destroy a few extra objectives in a room, try to avoid taking damage for a given depth level (which is brutal in co-op), stand on and charge up some floor plates (which is very punishing given that this is a movement-based shooter).
The structure and gradual expansion of both overarching and moment-to-moment possibilities through Abyssus is just a bit too safe, too linear when compared to the best roguelite shooters out there, like a Returnal or Risk of Rain 2. Hopefully this will grow over time, with DoubleMoose Games confirming that post-launch content updates will be free with more weapons, modes, mods and more.