End of Abyss Out October 1: Scan the Walls, Shoot the Creatures, Watch Them Split

When the distress signal comes in, Cel doesn’t know what she’s walking into. That’s the premise of End of Abyss, the debut title from Section 9 Interactive and Epic Games Publishing, landing on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on October 1, 2026. Six weeks from now, players find out what “unknown origin” actually looks like.

The premise is familiar enough: an underground compound, a mission to investigate, something has gone terribly wrong. But End of Abyss earns the right to tell that story with how it tells it. Cel is a combat technician — not a supersoldier, not a chosen one, but a professional sent to do a specific job. The facility she descends into is described as broken and abandoned, and the emphasis on that word carries through every design decision shown so far.

Section 9’s most distinctive choice is the camera. End of Abyss is a top-down action game, and the studio uses that framing not as a limitation but as a tool. Horror in games usually works through the unknown that fills a first-person hallway. From above, you see more — the wider corridors, the dark corners, the room you just came from. That knowledge becomes its own kind of dread, because Section 9’s creature design gives you plenty to register before the encounter.

The creatures in End of Abyss don’t behave predictably. Cel carries a scanner — a piece of diagnostic equipment repurposed as a survival tool — and it reads the environment in two ways. Pointed at a wall, it identifies weaknesses, reveals hollow spaces, marks passages that will only make sense later. Pointed at an enemy, it surfaces behavioral patterns and tactical data. Some of these creatures split when damaged, fragmenting into multiple threats. The scanner warns you which ones do that. Whether you read the warning in time is a separate question.

The combat system layers pistols, shotguns, and melee tools against enemies that demand varied approaches. Health management runs through injections rather than dropped pickups, keeping the tension of resource allocation tied to the protagonist’s own body rather than the environment’s generosity. There are save stations throughout the facility, and the game preserves progress through them — the respawn loop is built for iteration rather than punishment, encouraging players to re-engage encounters with the tactical intelligence they’ve accumulated.

The underlying structure resembles a contained metroidvania. Branching pathways lead to areas that can’t be entered yet, and returning to them with new tools is part of the intended loop. The scanner catalogs locked routes automatically — sealed passages appear differently from merely dangerous ones — which means exploration has a map-logic to it even when the setting is actively hostile. Previously inaccessible areas open as Cel’s equipment upgrades, rewarding players who remember what they couldn’t reach.

Section 9 Interactive is a small studio whose founding team draws on experience from the Little Nightmares franchise and LittleBigPlanet PS Vita. Both projects required solving a core problem: creating unease in environments where the player is unusually aware of scale. End of Abyss applies that instinct differently. The compound dwarfs the protagonist, the creatures are proportionally massive in the top-down frame, and the sense of being small in a large, broken system is built into the geometric logic of the camera rather than the art direction alone.

Epic Games Publishing has positioned the title as a significant release for the fall lineup, with pre-orders open across all digital storefronts. PlayStation Plus members receive a 10% discount through launch on October 1. PC availability will be through the Epic Games Store.

End of Abyss was officially revealed at Summer Game Fest 2026, where preview coverage noted the coherence between its systems: the creature-splitting mechanic, the dual-use scanner, the top-down horror framing all point toward the same design intention. Section 9 wants you to know what’s there, and still not feel prepared for it.

Tags: gaming, PlayStation 5, action-adventure, End of Abyss, Epic Games Publishing, Section 9 Interactive