I spent a few days playing Section 9 Interactive’s creepy metroidvania and writing my End of Abyss review, and ultimately concluded it was a fun but inconsistent experience hindered by a few particular issues. Now, just a day after it launched on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via the Epic Games Store, the studio has already cleared up most of those issues with a newly released patch.
If you missed the review, my main concern was how the in-game map would sometimes share incorrect information, like telling me a door was locked when I had unlocked it, or failing to signify when I’d found the key to a particular door. In a metroidvania, this means a whole lot. End of Abyss is a game about exploration, including lots of backtracking via roundabout paths, so when I’d plan long treks across the world based on a faulty map, it was really frustrating to find out too late that I’d essentially been lied to.
But a patch has fixed that, among other problems, and it presents an uncommon issue for me. My review only went out two days ago. The game only launched yesterday. Now much of my review is already outdated. In this era of live-service games and post-launch updates, it’s common for games to change shape over time, but for End of Abyss’s patch to fix many of its lesser parts essentially right after the deadline isn’t normally how it goes.
Usually big, important changes happen in one of two ways:
In one common scenario, a game that critics are playing for review may be patched during that pre-release review period. It’s often the case that critics are made aware of bugs we might see, and we’re usually told when they’ve been patched out, or that those fixes are in the “day one” patch that comes with the game’s public launch, leaving us to confirm as much once the patch drops.
This even applies to End of Abyss. I bumped into a few bugs during my time with the game, and the very worst of them–in which a boss failed to drop a quest item–was patched just a few hours before I had to write my review, allowing me to beat the game on time. This made the issue irrelevant to my review, and thus I didn’t even specifically call it out.
If the public wasn’t going to experience it, then I take it as my job to basically erase it from my memory of the experience–or at least, if I do mention it, I should explain how it’s no longer a concern for players jumping in at launch.
In another common scenario, a game changes shape much later in its lifespan, and probably over the course of several updates. Games like Sea of Thieves, Overwatch, and Fallout 76 are great examples. These kinds of games often become the subject of re-reviews years later. But it’s not just multiplayer games that do this. Games such as Starfield, Mass Effect 3, and Cyberpunk 2077 have been affected by such major changes that they merited follow-ups, too.
But End of Abyss is a much rarer case. The game just came out. My review could only speak to my experience, and so it does, but I’d planned to revisit it once my biggest problems with it were addressed and write something like what I’ve written here–something that says, “Hey, it’s better now!” when I could recommend it with more confidence. I just didn’t expect that would be a mere 48 hours after I published my thoughts on the game.
Section 9’s debut landed in a weird gray area, where some important fixes came neither early enough for my review to consider them, nor late enough for my review to feel like it accurately reflected the experience of playing the game for a reasonable period of time. As it stands, only the players who jumped in yesterday–likely a relative few compared to the many more who will play the game over the next several years–bumped into the map issue I had during my time with it. No one else will ever have to deal with it.
That’s good for players, and good for the studio, even if it leaves reviews like mine feeling more swiftly outdated than anything I can remember writing.