Abyssus is the sort of game you play and, within an hour, go "huh, why aren't there like, a hundred more of these?" Despite a thousand multiplayer first-person shooters and a million more roguelites crowding Steam, stick the two together and you've got a peanut butter and chocolate combo that surprisingly few developers have decided to take advantage of. Abyssus adds a special ingredient of its own to the pairing: sea salt.
The deep sea diver aesthetic of the FPS roguelike has a slight "we have BioShock at home" feel to it for a few minutes, but that dissipates once you're firing a WW1-era repeater or a crackling Tesla gun at towering Aztec-influenced ancient gods who in return assault you with waves and laser beams.
Abyssus is a lithe shooter: you've got a dash and a double-jump right from the start, and enemies like divebombing exploding sharks encourage constant dancing around its battle arenas. Bosses bust out "floor is lava" moves and expanding rings of crackling damage that at times evoke MMO raid bosses or bullet hell patterns. They're overwhelming the first time, but learnable enough that subsequent runs make them familiar puzzles to dance through while focusing on how you'll be dishing out your own damage with an absurd concoction of stacking power-ups.
The shooting's the chocolate, in other words, and it's pretty good all on its own, but the roguelite bits are the peanut butter that put it in binge territory like Gunfire Reborn. Abyssus lets you attach a trio of randomized "blessings" to your gun's primary and secondary fire and your special ability, which defaults to a basic grenade but includes unlockables like a turret and massive melee anchor. The blessings include some obvious ones (fire will set enemies ablaze and deal damage over time, ice will freeze them to take them out of the action) but also some unique powers like Ocean, which summons a legion of magical tentacles to your side.
My first run pairing Ocean with the turret ability gave me that feeling of pulling a fast one on the game's designers that I really love in roguelites. I equipped a charm that gave me a 50% chance not to trigger my ability's cooldown when I played a turret, which meant I could start every battle by throwing down about five of the suckers. Each time a turret fired, it had a chance to summon a watery tentacle from the floor of the arena, which would lob liquid cannonballs at nearby enemies. As I upgraded the tentacles they started being able to throw more and more things: explosives, acid, anchors that stunned whatever they clonked over the head.
Once I took the blessing far enough down the upgrade tree, the tentacles started throwing multiple simultaneously. By the end of the run I could start every fight by summoning an army of turrets and tentacles and then sit back and watch them chew through the baddies.
This was the dash of sea salt that really made me take to Abyssus—while its builds never escalate to the absurd heights of roguelikes like Risk of Rain 2, they're clever enough to make me want to try a new combo the second I finish a run.
As much as my co-op crew aspires to play through the likes of Baldur's Gate 3, it can be awfully hard to keep up the momentum with a months-long commitment. Likewise, I expect many PC Gamers with a regular co-op routine are eager to sink a hundred hours into Borderlands 4 in a couple weeks, but Abyssus is the perfect kind of game to slot in between those sorts of big investments, or for the evenings when one of your crew can't make the playdate.
After about eight hours I'd unlocked all the weapons and most of the upgrades on the tech tree that made subsequent runs easier (with additional healing syringe, upgrade stations added throughout the dungeon, etc.), but feel like I could easily play another dozen hours on harder difficulties. Like Hades, Abyssus offers a healthy list of modifiers to crank up the heat to a boiling point.
Outside how you mix up your powers, Abyssus is a bit light on variety—you'll repeat the same dungeon floors in the same order with the same boss fights every time—which the developers seem intent on changing with future updates. Assuming they can make any given run feel a bit more surprising in the future, I think Abyssus will have staying power as a weeknight co-op go-to. You can find it on Steam.
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