Earth Atlantis Abyss makes light the price of every answer in its drowned-world roguelike

The ocean in Earth Atlantis was never a backdrop so much as a verdict. Pixel Perfex’s shooter imagined a planet swallowed almost whole by the sea, where machines had adapted into marine predators and a lone submarine hunted them through the wreckage, all drawn in a scratchy, sketchbook style that recalled old sea charts crowded with monsters. Earth Atlantis Abyss returns to that drowned world and asks a different question of it: not how far you can travel across it, but how deep you are willing to go.

The answer is built into the structure. Developed by Pixel Perfex with Eccentrix Studios and published by Rising Tide Publishing, Abyss is a shoot ’em up roguelike split into seven layers of descent, each darker than the last. The idea that organises everything is light. The sub’s spotlight is how you read what is coming, and the game treats it as a resource to be rationed, so every step downward trades a little more visibility, and a little more safety, for answers.

The submarine spotlight cuts through darkness beside sunken temple ruins in Earth Atlantis Abyss — Image: Pixel Perfex / Eccentrix Studios / Rising Tide Publishing

Those answers are personal. You play Pypher, a seventeen-year-old captain who takes her grandfather’s old submarine down to the spot where he vanished three years earlier. Hero, rebel, traitor: everyone above the surface tells a different version of him, and the story comes up one layer at a time as you dive. It is a small, familial engine for a genre that usually runs on high scores.

Each layer closes with a boss, eight in all, fought in the bullet-hell register the series is known for. Between those fights the game turns into something quieter and more cerebral: a packing puzzle. Weapons, engines, drones and hull modules arrive in different shapes, and all of them must fit onto one small grid inside the ship. Matching parts merge to level up; two different weapons can be fused into a hybrid using a Dwarf Star torn from a defeated boss. Heat and power need watching too, or the guns jam mid-fight. The promise is that no two runs build the same ship.

The grid-based ship-building screen with weapons, engines and drone modules in Earth Atlantis Abyss — Image: Pixel Perfex / Eccentrix Studios / Rising Tide Publishing

It is a pairing of two temperaments. Pixel Perfex, an independent studio in Bangkok, brings the franchise and its atmosphere, now rendered in detailed pixel art rather than the original’s sketched line. Eccentrix Studios, a newer team with three original projects in development, brings the build systems. In the announcement, Justin Paulsen, founder of Rising Tide Publishing, frames the game as exactly that collaboration, praising mechanics he calls “intense, claustrophobic, and deep” and admitting that his playtests keep turning into “another run for the fun of it.”

Co-op is part of the design, both local shared-screen and online. Earth Atlantis Abyss is coming to PC via Steam, with launch planned for the first quarter of 2027.

For a series that began as a hunt across a flooded map, the turn inward suits it. The monsters are still down there. What Abyss adds is the dark between them, and the question of how much light a granddaughter is willing to spend on the truth.

Tags: roguelike games, Earth Atlantis, Earth Atlantis Abyss, Eccentrix Studios, Pixel Perfex, Rising Tide Publishing