Release Date: 15/06/2014
Played On: Win
Available On: PS3 / PS4 / Win / XB360
Time Played: 16h 35m
Progress: Unlocked almost every character / all mains over level 40
Developer: ACE Team
Publisher: Atlus
Having a large backlog of games to get through means that every now and then you come across something that you wish you'd found much earlier. It's the whole reason I'm determined to play every game I have access to, because there's no telling how many gems are hidden away in the pile.
The down side is that a lot of the games we forget to play aren't anything to write home about, which is probably why we never played them in the first place. For me, there are hundreds of games that I've picked up in cheap bundles over the years, that I have little interest in trying out right away. Most of the time there might be one game in a bundle that I’m already interested in, so the rest get ignored for a long time.
Thankfully there are titles like Abyss Odyssey hanging around in the pile of neglected games that give me reason to wade through the crap. If one in every ten games can be as good as this one, it will be worth the wasted time in the other nine. Hopefully this will end up being true, as I'd like to stay motivated throughout the exploration of my expanding game library.
I didn't know it at the time, but it came as no surprise to learn that Abyss Odyssey comes from the same folk behind Rock of Ages, Deadly Tower of Monsters, and Zenoclash. All of these games are striking in their aesthetic style, and each maintain a unique element in their gameplay that draws you in and makes life interesting.
Abyss Odyssey is a rogue-lite platformer, but it's also a bit of a fighting game. There's running and jumping, but what really ties the whole thing together is the combat, which sits somewhere above typical platforming combat, and a deep fighting game system of combos and special moves. It's not as complex as a dedicated fighter, but there's enough meat in the combat to elevate it beyond your typical run and jump on things type platformer.
The story goes that there's a powerful Warlock who for some reason is sleeping, but his nightmares are manifesting themselves in the world. As a powerful hero, it's up to you to dive into the Warlock's world and fight demons and creatures that threaten the innocent folk living on the surface. There are mythical creatures, demonic distortions, trickster nymphs, and a vast gallery of interesting beings that all want to kill you.
It's a rogue-lite in the way that you are tasked with taking on a series of areas that contain enemies to fight, and potential upgrades for your character. Each run goes from the top of the world where soldiers are holding back the nightmares, to the Warlock's chamber where he slumbers. By defeating his demonic visage, you can wake him from his sleep and return the world to normal, but he'll soon sleep again and the whole process starts over.
With each run taking about an hour on average (for me anyway), there's a lot to do and explore, but you quickly get into the rhythm of the rogue-lite repetition. The area layout changes each time you embark on your quest, but you have a small amount of choice over which path to take. Each area is either easy, medium, or hard in difficulty, which challenges and rewards you accordingly.
Upon death, a soldier is summoned to pick up your belongings and continue the fight. If you're able to make your way to an altar (which spawns in random locations) you can resurrect your hero and get back on track. This system in particular is one of my favourites in the game, as you are genuinely challenged to fight for your life. The soldiers are capable in combat, but pale significantly when compared to the heroes. It takes some dogged determination and skill to take your weak soldier through a few difficult areas before finding an altar, so when you do the payoff is immensely satisfying.
Speaking of heroes, there are three main characters that you can play as in Abyss Odyssey, although two need to be unlocked. Katrien is your default fighter and excels at quick movement and sword skills. By beating the Warlock you unlock The Monk; who moves more slowly, but hits harder with a broadsword.
Every now and then you will find a gold room on the map, and by donating coins to the fountain found within, you can unlock the final hero: The Pincoya. She is a mythical goddess with a lot of sweeping attacks that cover a lot of ground and hit multiple enemies. However, she sits somewhere between Katrien and The Monk when it comes to survivability.
Each of these three characters get levelled up through experience earned with each run. It's nice that they each have their own experience pool that isn't tied to the other characters, so you can find yourself facing a real challenge when you unlock a new character. There's something frightening about going from a level forty Katrien with buffed special moves, to a level one Monk who can only swing a sword.
Levelling each hero will increase their health pool and how hard they hit enemies, but collecting skill points along the way will increase the abilities they have to draw on. Characters have three slots available for special abilities, which are tied to attack patterns. There are more abilities than slots available, so it's possible to get into some light character customisation here, as many of the available choices will change the way you play with that character. Additionally, each available skill can be buffed for damage, defense, or mana, which changes how they can be used effectively.
I stuck to buffing damage on most of my skills, as I just wanted to kill difficult enemies quicker, but adding in some defense worked in my favour here and there as it gave me i-frames in tight spots. This is how it ends up feeling like a fighting game when you're tackling a pack of enemies, or even locked in the midst of a one-on-one battle. Utilising dashes, height, cancels, parries, jump-ins, and a bunch of other techniques becomes essential if you want to wipe the floor with every demon you face.
One of the coolest systems in Abyss Odyssey, is one that it took me a little while to understand and appreciate. You have to remember that I played this game a while after it was released, so I wasn't up on the hype and had to learn everything from scratch. As I fought my way through a couple of runs, I kept noticing that I was filling a mana bar as I killed enemies and picked up little blue orbs. The red orbs I picked up gave me health, but the blue mana orbs didn't seem to do a whole lot at first. Most attacks and skills are tied to a stamina bar that works just as you'd expect, but nothing really did much to the mana I was collecting.
Eventually, the bar filled up and it prompted me to push a button combination, which unleashed a bright blue orb. I figured this was just a super magic attack, so continued to save it for special occasions through the next few runs, but whenever I hit anything with it, the spell didn't seem to do a whole lot of anything.
It played on my mind for a while (like a lot of the more hidden systems in the game), but eventually I learned that if I fired the bright blue ball at an enemy, it would let me capture their soul once they were defeated. This changed the game entirely for me, and once again launched Abyss Odyssey to another echelon of complexity that kept me coming back for more.
The thing with capturing souls is that you are able to capture the soul of any enemy in the game, so long as you are a higher level than they are. Some of the harder enemies have pretty high levels, but they too can be captured if you persist long enough. So why bother capturing souls at all?
The first reason is that when you capture a soul during a run, you are then free to switch to that character at will. This means that you essentially become one of the creatures you were fighting and adopt all their move sets and skills. With each enemy having a full range of normal and special moves, capturing their soul becomes a great way to learn about the enemies and discover their strengths and weaknesses. It then becomes easier to fight them as you learn an intimate appreciation for what they're bringing to the fight.
Additionally, having a soul up your sleeve is like having a bonus health bar that will get you further in the game. I soon stopped switching between my hero and whatever soul I'd captured, and instead stuck to the soul creature until it died. This way I was able to progress as far as I could on a health bar that had nothing to do with my main characters health at all. Once the soul is dead, it's lost, but you're then free to carry on with a full health hero who still has a soldier ready to jump in and find an altar if everything goes south.
However, the second reason to collect souls, is to unlock them for play in the practice and versus modes of the game.
When you're not fighting your way through demons and creatures dreamed up by the Warlock in his world, you can fight up to three other PC or player characters in the versus mode. The levels are limited, but they do the job and everyone entering the match gets to pick a primary character and a secondary soul to bring along. Then it's straight up fighting in what feels like a tag-team tournament as you attempt to defeat your opponent's combinations.
So if you want to play with some of the higher level characters and enemies (because they have the more interesting move sets), then you need to defeat them in single player to unlock their soul. You can also unlock characters through playing the versus mode, but it's not as much fun and not nearly as challenging, so I'm going to pretend that you can only do it through single player runs.
All of that and I haven't even made it to the best part of Abyss Odyssey, which is the stunning artistic presentation and design. The game looks a hundred times better in motion than any of my screenshots can convey, but it should be pretty clear how beautiful this game is to look at.
The entire aesthetic is tied together with a painterly art nouveau theme that influences everything from the characters' costumes, to the borders around dialogue and portraits. Even the enemies in the game fit with this theme, as their design remains linked directly with early twentieth century influences.
Of note are recurring special characters such as The Jackal who strums his blues guitar while offering words of wisdom for a price. However, the coolest character you'll meet along the way is Paganini; a devilish character who shows up at random altars playing the violin. Speak with him and he will offer you a deal, which will provide you with a valuable benefit, but he'll hunt you down later in the game. Sure enough, he will find you eventually and engage you in a tough fight, all the while playing his violin and prancing around you with devilish cheek.
There are also a few mini-bosses that show up once or twice each run. Again they fit the theme, but I haven't learned enough about them to understand what their deal is. However, the entire game feels drenched in natural beauty and style, which is an incredible accomplishment for the creators. There's nothing that doesn't fit in with the overall themes, and the key points are conveyed effortlessly and without smacking you over the head with pointless dialogue or exposition.
Abyss Odyssey is truly one of the most beautiful games I've ever played. So much so, that if I'd played it in the year of its release, it would have certainly been one of my picks for game of the year. Even now, I'll put it up there as one of the best looking games of all time. The depth to which the art nouveau theme and style is taken, really elevates it to another level of artistic accomplishment. I can't express just how much I am in love with how this game presents itself.
It's a shame that I didn't look at this game earlier, but maybe I wouldn't have enjoyed it quite so much if there was an active community driving hype online. One of the big features of Abyss Odyssey was one that actually put me off in the first instance. The world of the game would be affected by how players performed overall in the game. As more and more players defeated the Warlock, or were defeated by him, the monsters and the world of the game would increase or decrease in difficulty. At the time, I wasn't all that keen to be faced with a potentially harder version of the game that prevented me from getting into it, but I also didn't want to breeze through the challenges because other people were better than me. Despite being a core system to the game, I'm kind of glad that I played through the game after any of that was relevant.
As it stands, I found progression in Abyss Odyssey to hit my sweet spot perfectly, as it was challenging enough that I failed on a lot of runs, but I always managed to improve. I lost loads of runs, but managed to succeed on enough to make progression possible. I never felt like the game was out of my grasp, which is often something I feel when I'm playing challenging rogue-lites. It's a nice change to play a repetitive game that manages to click, just right.
I could go on and on about Abyss Odyssey, as it's been the coolest surprise I've had all year from a game that I initially overlooked and only picked up so I could say that I'd given it a go. As it happens, this is exactly why I force myself to give every game a go, because there are gems like this out there and finding them is a joy.
I can only hope that there will be more incredible experiences like this hiding away in my backlog, but for now I'm pretty pleased I found Abyss Odyssey. I'm also a little sad, as I'm also ready to move on and continue exploring, so will leave this one behind. Although, I can see myself firing it up in future every now and then, just to bathe my eyes in the beauty of its art.
It's so damn pretty.