Deliciously cruel (★★★★★)
It’s been a while since I played this, but I wanted to write about a game I really, really liked. I’m writing this from memory, so some stuff might be wrong. Anyway, here goes.
This game is deliciously cruel.
Made in Abyss is a survival sim/JRPG where enemies respawn all over the place, it has ridiculous equipment durability and you can easily screw up your current run by running out of equipment. And you know what, I don’t care, I even like it!
I respect a game that gives you enough rope to hang yourself with. In this case, it’s literally untrue, because you have to bring your own rope and running out of it is one of the mistakes you can make. (Oh boy, let’s see how many times I can use the word literally in this review in its proper, well, literal meaning!)
Survival sims tend to be extremely light on the actual survival and extremely heavy on the crafting. Tons of survival sims tend to be both too mundane and too far-fatched, i.e. you always start smashing a rock against a tree to get wood, but you somehow end up crafting an assault rifle. Oftentimes, you have no real goal, no real sense of where you fit in the larger world. You do you, I guess? Look, I get it, it’s one of the appeals of the genre. Made in Abyss, however, has incredible worldbuilding, a tone, a sense of place, which gives the game an enormous amount of structure.
You are part of a society literally living on the brink of the void. The titular Abyss is a mix between the Stalker exclusion zone, deep sea diving and tomb raiding. Who you are is a random orphan that has to earn its keep by bringing back loot from down there while not getting eaten by monsters or falling to death. Your know what, Oliver Twist had it pretty good in my mind. He didn’t get more gruel, but at least they didn’t send him to fight against flesh eating squirrels. So what you are is a spelunker, what you do is hunt relics and what you craft is rope, cook food etc. You craft the essentials, not a fricking nuclear reactor.
The visuals are childish: stocky characters with round faces and bright colors, in a simplistic anime style. The subject matter, however, is very grim. The disconnect is intentional. Something about the world you live in is deeply wrong. It’s like those “gotcha” horror games that start with a cute setting, except here Made in Abyss never takes off the mask.
For example, a few kids are introduced at the beginning. One of them disappears without a trace suddenly. You’d think, “Oh he’s going to show up safe and sound later”. But nope he really is dead. Gone. And furthermore, it’s not some great tragic event. His death isn’t even important. Life is cheap in this world, especially young life.
Everyone is your world is obsessed about whistle colors, which are basically each person’s position in the pecking order of this spelunking society. They function somewhere between a karate belt and a scout badge. Pretty much all everyone talks about is moving up the ranks, with white whistles being top dogs. Everyone wants a white whistle, despite countless people dying trying to get one. To top it off, everybody seems gleefully oblivious to the fact that all the actual white whistles have gone certifiably insane, each in their own way.
The game even makes you care about the stupid whistle colors because the gameplay consequences are enormous. The skill tree is tied to your whistle color, as is fast travel. And believe me, fast travel is a big deal. But it isn’t given to you, it is earned. Fast travel is literally a badge of merit. You’ll get your fast travel once you’ve shown your mastery of an area, here called a “layer”. Each layer is worse than the previous one. What you travel through is the usual locales, (cave, forest, etc.) but getting anywhere is a grueling journey. My God, here a cliff is a fricking cliff.
Going down the layers is one thing, but coming back up to town is even worse. That’s where the Curse comes in, which is the game’s own version of the bends when diving underwater. In practice, it’s merely annoying, all you need to do is take little breaks every few steps or get hit with a debuff. But it is a massive part of the game’s theme. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. The game makes it easy to go down, but hard to come back up, lulling you into a false sense of security. Hubris. The game is giving you the rope to hang yourself with (figuratively this time). The coming back is an enormously important part of exploring the unknown. Is it time to go back? Am I going too far? Made in Abyss “gets” this part of a survival sim. Many people have seen the summit of Mount Everest, but have died on the way back. They ran out of strength.
The game is relentless. Weapons break constantly. Combat is awful. To be fair, enemies don’t give XP. Selling artifacts or completing quests does, which is a brilliant idea. Combat isn’t the point. Still, creatures don’t seem to know about this because they spawn constantly. The game doesn’t even have the decency to spawn enemies where you aren’t looking, it just plops flesh-eating squirrels right in your field of vision, endlessly. Butterflies keep showing up when you’re climbing, making you waste precious stamina and potentially making you fall off. They’re literally nagging you to death. (I hear the spawning was toned down in a patch, oh well.) The player deaths are all pretty gruesome too. Hat tip to the bird that mimics the sounds of the people it kills (i.e., you) to lure more prey to it.
To be fair, the game is much more lenient than people make it out to be. The game autosaves when you enter a new “room”. You can also save manually when the sky isn’t blocked by sending up a mail balloon to town (a clever idea). There’s even an emergency save that brings you back to the last time you were in town. It might mean hours of lost progress, but at least you can’t “break” your save file.
Inventory management is a big part of the game. It’s managing weight, being prepared for anything, while streamlining your kit enough to maximize your looting. This is to me, the best kind of min-maxing. It’s the quintessential travel question: How much should I pack in my suitcase and how much room should I leave for souvenirs? How much rope is enough? Spare weapons? How about food? Do I really need that curling iron?
I’ll leave you with my favorite part of the game: the Orb Piercer. When the game tells you this creature is deadly, you must absolutely believe it. It will fuck you up. In a split second. The Orb Piercer is something like a poisonous porcupine polar bear with psychic powers. You can kill one, but you must absolutely be ready for it. It’s not even a unique monster or anything; it’s just a species of animal that happens to be impossibly dangerous. In a nice touch, the lore even states that the animal is a herbivore, so it’s not trying to eat you, it’s just sick of little adventurer assholes like you showing up on its turf. You know how the hippopotamus looks like a big dumb fat herbivore, but is actually much more dangerous than a lion? Same thing. Hippopotamuses are just violent jerks. A lesser universe would have given this job to some big magical creature with teeth, something stupid like a dragon. In Made in Abyss, however, the mundane is more than enough to kill you.
Idle Thoughts 