[PC] Stirring Abyss

[Isgrimnur]

Lovecraftian underwater turn-based combat





Demo available

[Lordnine]

I have finally got around to playing this one and have been having a good time with it. I am about 6 missions in and just had my first boss fight, which is not something I expected to see in an X-Com style game. I’ve pumped all the water out of my flooded sub, which serves as your base, but I am a long way away from repairing all the rooms. Resources are scarce and getting enough scrap metal just to give your team basic weapons is hard. For the most part, I’ve been making most of my team fight hand to hand with Cthulhian abominations because I can’t afford better equipment.

Mechanically, it very much feels like a slightly pared down version of the Firaxis X-Com games. You start with a limited squad of divers that are broken into three classes, Officer, Scientist and Brawler. As the game goes on you can pick up additional divers in random side missions. As far as I can tell your diver skills for each class are random and are not guaranteed to get the same upgrades. This feels a little odd but does allow for some fun combinations on your crewmates if the skills line up correctly. In additional to class skills, you also quickly unlock the mutation upgrade option. These are a lot of fun and allow you to further specialize your squaddies. My favorites so far are the giant crab claw one of my brawlers grew and my science officer has gills which allows her a passive chance to generate oxygen each round.

The game is not all good. The fixed camera angle with hand drawn art style means that, at times, objects and enemies can be hidden behind your characters and make it difficult to see and target. Also, while it is appropriate to the setting that character movement is slow and plodding, it can be tedious at times when your whole team must walk VERY SLOWLY across a large map that you have mostly cleared.

Still, if you can look past those small inconveniences, this seems like a very solid little X-Com-lite style game with good atmosphere, an interesting setting and wonderful sound design.

[Lordnine]

And finished after about 13 hours. Not great but solid all around. The biggest issue is that game has a difficulty curve problem. The player starts out severely underpowered but by the last couple missions my crewmates were pretty much unkillable unless I did something stupid. I would also have liked some sort of reward/punish for the choice to accept mutations or not. As far as I could tell there are only two potential endings, and they are both decided in the last mission.

Worth a look for sure but maybe wait for a sale.