Whispering Abyss Review – Sometimes the Abyss Whispers Back

Whispering Abyss by Precipice Games

Whispering Abyss is a horror-themed, twin-stick Rogue-lite. As plucky protagonist Grace, you’ll explore a procedurally generated dungeon, blast hordes of monsters with a revolver in each hand, and collect magical objects and bits of lore along the way.

Swarms of Monsters, Swarms of Bugs

I’m just going to come out and say it: the sheer amount of bugs makes Whispering Abyss an unpleasant experience.

From common but typical bugs like getting knocked and trapped behind walls and unlock triggers failing to kick in after killing all enemies in a room to quality-of-life issues like not being able to skip introductory scenes or tutorial prompts that pop up every single time you open the game, there’s a lot happening in Whispering Abyss that discouraged me from wanting to play it.

Game World a la Mode

The shame about that is that there are multiple janky things happening, and aside from the game-ruining bugs, a lot of it is really entertaining!

Take the monsters, for example. There are some characters straight out of Lovecraft, like the mi-go (or fungus from Yuggoth) that operates the elevator that takes you deeper into the dungeon, but enemies range from typical horror game monsters like disembodied eyes to such incongruities as giant, fast-moving bulls.

Then there’s the setting of the game: it’s apparently the real town of Duluth, MN, but it looks like a typical JRPG fantasy village, complete with little wooden lakefront house, while Grace herself is an anime steampunk heroine.

Lessons Learned

Whispering Abyss is a total jumble of themes, styles, and imagery, and I love that about it. It’s also got some solid if not particularly innovative mechanics; the movement feels good, the revolvers sound better. The art is stylish if a bit…extra…and even the collectible diary entries are well-written enough to be compelling (previous adventurers seem as confused by the presence of underground dungeon cattle as I was).

It’s apparently a student game – the publisher is listed as Poughkeepsie, NY’s Marist College – and while I can’t quite recommend people purchase Whispering Abyss in its current state, I can most definitely recommend that the developer keeps at it. That seems to be the case, judging by several developer responses on the game’s Steam page. That’s a good thing because there are a bunch of ideas rubbing up against each other here, and most of them are actually pretty great.

Whispering Abyss is available via Steam.

Watch the trailer for Whispering Abyss below:

Related