Abyss Odyssey (PC) review "Into the pit"

Very little stands out in Abyss Odyssey, and I never thought I would write such a statement about a game developed by ACE Team. You know, the guys who gave us a first-person beat 'em up set in a surreal world full of anthropomorphic animals, featuring an ambiguously gendered bird person as its main antagonist. Yet, here it is: a 2D action-adventure piece with a procedurally generated realm for you to traverse that's more or less ordinary.

But hey, I'll give this game a few positive points. For one thing, its visual style borrows wonderfully from the Art Nouveau movement, especially providing character portraits accentuated by such qualities. Also, its cast and bestiary come from Chilean mythology. Understand that when I say little stands out here, I don't meant the experience is uninspired. It's very much inspired, and a lot of hard work obviously went into its planning and programming.

Here's the thing, though: I don't think I can tell you one factor that strikes me as a major conversation piece. Yeah, the art style is cool and all, and its presentation are fine, but nothing really wowed me. You don't catch any jaw-dropping images or see anything that strikes you as mind-blowing or awesome. Instead, everything just comes across as rote. You advance through its campaign and see a lot of the same stuff you would in almost any other title: an icy area, a fiery realm, a jungle (somehow underground), and long stretches of basic cave-like real estate. You battle a few intriguing beasts, including apparitions that look like walking human nervous systems, but you also take on your share of foes you can neatly file under overarching categories like “nymph” or “zombie” or “weird bird monster, because ACE Team.”

Hell, even the premise doesn't offer much to discuss. A warlock slumbers deep within the Earth, inadvertently bringing creatures to flesh with his dreams. Those critters burrow up to the surface and start massacring people, and only a mysterious woman armed with a sword can stop them. She does so by plunging straight into the massive hole in the ground and advancing through a random death maze.



Here's where Abyss could've pulled things together. Procedurally generated games benefit by offering as many surprise as possible, deviating from predictable design and expectations in an effort to spice things up. Rogue Legacy stands as one of the gold stamps of this concept, thrusting you into a wild assortment of rooms that challenge, excite, and reward. This title, however, throws very few screwballs your way. At best, you might stumble upon a store or a cursed artifact that gives you a boon in exchange for a bane, or you could end up fighting a boss that only sometimes appears. Sadly, even these guys come across as naught but standard fare: a run-of-the-mill golem and a massive, muscular old man that I've affectionately nicknamed Studly Grandpa.

As for the rest of the adventure, it's all pretty straight forward. You enter the pit and advance one chamber at a time, heading downward. Each exit offers a map for you to check to see how close you are to the warlock and what other types of rooms lie in the future. To get to the exit, you simply walk along a linear course, occasionally descending from one corridor to another. As you progress, you dodge average traps and hazards such as lava, thorns, or flying fish that freeze you.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned Chilean monsters bound out of the shadows to give you a thrashing, and you fight back in clunky fashion. The game's combat has been likened to Super Smash Bros., though a vastly toned down. No, you don't smash your enemies so far upward that they fly off in the background and scream before winking out of existence. You can, however, toss them into the air and juggle them, or put up a shield in a similar way to Nintendo's party brawler. The thing is getting the game's combat down proves tricky at first because the protagonist stops moving any time she attacks. This appropriately prevents you from mowing down the opposition, but it also leads to choppy battle and less than fluid movement.

On the upside, you don't always benefit by button mashing. Rather, you must pay attention to your targets and react to their behaviors. For instance, if your opponent leans on the block ability too long, they're easy pray for a throwing move. If they come running at you, a solid slide-kick might trip them up. If one drops down on top of you, hit it with an upward swipe or a tornado spin.



Of course, you get other factors that give you an edge in conflict, including RPG-style level building, exchangeable weapons, and shops that sell you new trinkets and equipment. Oh, I can hear some of your grumbling that you won't be able to keep any of it because procedurally generated titles tend to set your levels back to one and delete your inventory when you die, and you're mostly correct. Here, your levels remain permanently. For instance, if you die at level ten, you respawn at level ten. Also, you get to unlock new characters and divergent starting points that lead you down shorter, albeit harder, pathways to the warlock. Think of them as difficulty settings...

Oh, and death automatically turns control over to a human soldier who can revive you by locating an altar. So you effectively have to die twice consecutively before needing to restarting your quest.

Like I said before, Abyss is obviously inspired, but it doesn't do anything exceptional with its inspiration. The chasm randomizes every time you enter it, but you end up playing through a lot of the same nonsense with few deviations. You drop in, head to the left, beat up some foes, drop further down, head to the right, then to the left, then to the right, and make your way to the next chamber. Now and then you might find a treasure chest containing money or a weapon you can't equip because it's exclusive to one of the other player characters, but that's it. You don't get any surprise content that spices up a run, and it leaves the engagement feeling repetitive.



Its RPG elements come across as tacked on because you only become so much more powerful with each level. Sure, you get some skill points, but you only receive a few techniques, and they can only be leveled up once in three different categories. Its party brawler mechanics also don't really belong here. The game's atmosphere isn't cartoony in the least, and the physics are so toned down that there's almost no point in including the ability to practically dribble your enemies. As a result, you feel like you're playing numerous unexciting Smash Bros. matches back to back.

Look, Abyss Odyssey isn't a terrible title by any means. It's just forgettable. It had so many different things going on and no great emphasis on one core concept to keep the experience afloat. It is not varied enough to make its randomization shine, not deep enough for its RPG aspects to turn heads, and not smooth enough for it to play like anything other than a stiff brawler that sometimes looks like Smash Bros. when you squint. It's just painfully average on nearly every front, which is the last thing I expect from a dev that brought us such wonderfully peculiar material in the past.

Staff review by Joseph Shaffer (September 21, 2024) Rumor has it that Joe is not actually a man, but a machine that likes video games, horror movies, and long walks on the beach. His/Its first contribution to HonestGamers was a review of Breath of Fire III.