End of Abyss sends a lone technician into a flooded facility

Section 9 Interactive has put a date on its descent. End of Abyss arrives on Xbox Series X|S on 1 October, casting the player as Cel, a young combat technician working through a flooded research facility that has stopped behaving like a building should.

A small studio with a horror pedigree

The developer is a small team founded by three former Tarsier Studios members, the Swedish studio behind the Little Nightmares games. Writing on Xbox Wire, co-founder Marcus Ottvall frames the project as an atmospheric sci-fi action adventure rather than a straight horror game, built around a world that feels worn down and slightly wrong.

That intent survived a change of direction. Ottvall says the team's early work had action, destruction and a handful of small levels but no clear visual identity. It was only once the studio became interested in something atmospheric and eerie that the references, sketches and prototype creatures started pointing the same way.

Borrowing from the 1980s and 1990s

The look comes from the films, games, comic books and anime the developers grew up with, and specifically from the rough edges of the 1980s and 1990s, when effects were often made by hand. Ottvall describes wanting to carry that weathered quality into the facility to make players uneasy about the space around them, while still keeping the world looking new rather than deliberately retro.

Enemies were designed the other way round from the usual pitch deck. The team began with gameplay behaviour it wanted to try and then looked for a creature that fitted it, which is a sensible way to avoid the familiar problem of a monster that looks superb and plays badly.

What the launch actually gives you

The pitch is tightly scoped: one technician, one facility, one sci-fi action adventure, with the studio leaning on mood and scale rather than a long feature list. Ottvall's post is a developer's account of making the thing, not a specification sheet, and Section 9 is not promising systems it has not shown.

Our opinion

End of Abyss is a debut that has to justify itself on atmosphere alone, because that is all a player can judge before 1 October. The Tarsier lineage is reassuring — that studio understood how much dread comes from framing rather than gore — but three of its alumni is a starting point, not a guarantee, and the flooded-facility setting is a crowded one.

The more interesting detail is the enemy design process. Starting from the behaviour you want and finding the creature that fits it is how you end up with encounters that read clearly on screen, and it is the sort of decision that separates a studio with a design method from one with a mood board. Whether the mood holds up over a full run is the question the launch will answer.