ENG: Yet another entry for the Unity Arthouse. Straight to the point, 0_AbyssalSomewhere, beyond the poetic language that the messages on the screen try to convey, has nothing. Another game victim to the modern good design that is all about comfort and atmosphere. Just another Gris. Navigating its world is not terrifying nor confusing, nor does it generate fear, it doesn't even evoke any feeling other than boredom result of going through the only possible path during the scarce 30 minutes the game lasts. And walking past the main path is only a waste of time.

If at least the world (what little there is) was captivating, but no. Cheap symbolism with nothing to say. "Uhm... I wonder what that statue shaped like a person in fetal position is supposed to mean?". Style over substance, only worse, because depression is nothing more than a serviceable aesthetic to accompany the pseudo-reflexive intentions of the next linear indie game with allegedly evocative environments. And even if its environments communicated something more intelligent and profound, inhabiting the world is still dull. Mechanically, it does not convey any of the emotions the aesthetics pretend to convey. That is the real problem with the extreme and comfortable linearity of this type of games, playing them is often unevocative.

ESP: Otro juego más para la Unity Arthouse. Al punto, 0_AbyssalSomewhere, más allá del lenguaje poético que los mensajes en pantalla parecen intentar transmitir, no tiene nada. Poco menos que otro juego víctima del buen diseño moderno que consiste en comodidad y ambientación. Vamos, otro Gris. Navegar su mundo no es aterrador ni confuso, ni genera inquietud, por no hacer, ni si quiera provoca ningún sentimiento aparte del aburrimiento generado por seguir el único camino posible durante los escasos 30 minutos que dura el juego. Y si decides desviarte por poco que sea del camino principal, tan solo pierdes el tiempo.

Si por lo menos su mundo (el poco que hay) fuese atrapante o algo, pero no. Simbolismos de baratija sin nada que contar. "Umm... me pregunto que significará aquella estatua con forma de persona en posición fetal?". Estilo sobre sustancia, solo que peor, porque aquí la depresión no es más que una estética resultona para acompañar las intenciones pseudo-reflexivas del enésimo indie lineal con entornos presuntamente evocadores. Y si aún así, si sus entornos comunicasen algo más inteligente, habitar el mundo sigue siendo aburrido. No transmite ninguna sensación a nivel jugable de las que se pretende transmitir a nivel estético, ese es el auténtico problema de la linealidad tan extrema y comodona de este tipo de juegos, que jugarlos nunca dice nada.

In Alfie Bown's excellent The PlayStation Dreamworld (2017) the author considers whether a videogame can truly be unheimlich. On one hand there is something unsettling about the malfunctioning technology of yesteryear. But then on the other, Bown notes, we have a way of smoothing over the gnarled edges of the past by designating things 'retro'. Maybe we can see this with the trend toward a self-consciously broken 'retro' style in videogames. For something to be unheimlich it has to reveal something about ourselves — perhaps if we call these things uncanny it's because they reveal hauntology's undesirable proximity to cheap nostalgia. 0_abyssalSomewhere doesn't have any answers, but it benefits by making a dual address to both the style and materiality of the past. What I mean is it pairs the ghostly trace with corroded industrial debris because in practical terms the two are the same thing. It comes from a future where we are dead but our technologies have survived, or, rather, have been programmed to await a human 'input' that will never arrive.

O abismo é caquético. Refletimos essa caracterísca no design e vamos sentir a ferrugem e o concreto até o final, quando nos libertamos (pelo menos um pouco).
Mesmo nos colocando em um mundo ferrugento, esse jogo consegue, em suas limitações, nos conduzir a uma aventura densa e etérica.
Sua narrativa obtusa é amarrada por uma direção concreta que torna a expériencia palatável e, portanto, memorável. Algo que Dark souls 1 faz muito bem, consigo ver feito aqui também com maestria.
Esse jogo se conhece muito bem em suas restrições e termina em uma catarse surpreendentemente livre.

How many empty shells of level stone melded with cast iron slabs were left somewhere, unused and completely purposeless, purposely ignored and forgotten.
Concrete giants who fell to their weak knees, whose chests caved in, while gasping in the dusty air for too long after decades of screaming the soul out of their body to no-one but the echo.
Whose shadows cast for none except on our undeserved, vehement insistence of something we dare to call human compassion.
The years of effort wasted, wastful destruction of nature for wasteful construction and unused potential housing, just to at best languish as an investment for some, only in stats and numbers thinking, asshole. Whose figure in the puddle next to the structures reflects back just as obsidian as the water it is made of, if you could even still call it that.

Idk, the story is pretty vauge and open to interpretation and that is how my Marxist ass chooses to interpretate its themes.
If I am trying to reduce the experience I would call 0_abyssalSomewhere an opressively ambient, fromsoft inspired, experimental art game.
Your minimal, mechanical toolkit consists of a single slash attack that will find it's use and the player some interaction inside the atmospheric third person walks, all topped off by intriguing visual experimentation and occasional inner monologue via text on the screen.
A few times the camera will switch to a fixed perspective, which I thought was neat. I genuinely loved my under an hour short time of staring into this abyss.

Play this game if you like the sinister vibes in fromsoft games without the punishing trademark soulslike experience, experimental art or just to broaden your horizon and join the waiting seats for the sequel.

quiet... and LOUD. the silence of the dark glides like oil between small islands of thrumming sound and jagged stabs of screaming steel. echoes of dark souls, shadow tower (abyss), BLAME! (& other nihei), eraserhead, shinya tsukamoto, killer7, silent hill, ico, angel's egg... prometheus? post-industrial, rusted out and haunted, this 'somewhere' could be anywhere, endless. headphones recommended — do brace yourself, though. very much looking forward to tower of no one.

This game is the black hole in your mind that forms after a decade or so of woe, woeful existence where you feel every atom exist at the same time.

To play this drunk and tired at 2 in the morning with dealing with a little abyss of my own was not such a bad idea, never probably never finding out what the harpoon does sadly, spend around 30 minutes just going around the desert trying to see if there was some secret or ending to it.

Just the most impeccable atmosphere, it swallows you in and doesn't let go until you exit the game. I honestly believe there is beauty to something so hazy and dark, deranged brutalist arquitecture and a main character that looks like your first attempt at making a knight with play-doh, absolutely love it.

Final boss could do with not pushing you away every 2 seconds, really dragged out a scene that's otherwise great like the rest of the experience.

what an indescribably evocative little thing, just a swirl of emotions and spectacle. how the hell do you cram so much enchanting imagery into less than an hour? how the hell do you capture the feeling of finding comfort in the dark and dingy, the experience of just letting a place swallow you alive? how the hell do you so effortlessly recreate deafening silence? curled up under a dirty table in the middle of a squall. how magnificent, a game wholly dedicated to letting you rub the dirt on the floor between your fingers

0_abyssalSomewhere is interesting because it has such a unique and imposing sensory dedication. It's a piece of architecture in the same way as a Fumito Ueda game mixed directly with an abstract KittyHorrorShow piece, and it's hard to pin down exactly what it's doing with that atmosphere but damn if it isn't effective.
The game starts you off in a space that feels like a mix between the interiors of Haibane Renmei and Rain World's imposing walls, and presents you with a soundscape of unnerving echoes and an almost calming dampness, before adding on top the screeching of rusty metal and souls being rent out of existence by a piercing blade.
It feels, in an eerie way, like what I felt experiencing Twilight Princess' castle sewers for the first time. It tastes, in an eerie way, like electricity. It constructs, in an eerie way, a mix between concrete and something more spiritual, jarring you with familiar shapes and textures before placing figures of light and sound into the setting.

Don't look up anything, just play the game – you can beat it in less than an hour and it's free.

0_abyssalSomewhere draws inspiration from familiar design. It was impossible not to think of Dark Souls when my character descended into an inky black abyss; it was impossible not to think of Silent Hill while I moved through the rusty, grimy, concrete catacombs; it was impossible not to think of Resident Evil when the camera angle fixed itself behind my character, a cold, impersonal position above me.

It's a harrowing experience. Ambient hums and distant machinery kept me on edge throughout. The bit-crushed explosion as I plummeted hundreds of feet into a dead city submerged in darkness arrested me. The wind is remarkably unnatural – obviously recorded, compressed – although as I'm wearing headphones, paradoxically, it sounds like I'm actually there.

An electric pylon juts from the center of a billowing dune. I look away and it's gone.

A uniquely grim, breathtaking sensory experience.

I do not know how to talk about 0_abyssalSomewhere.

I mean, in a way I do, but not in a manner it would do it total justice. It's incredibly obtuse, it doesn't make any part of it be clear, it's terrifying and tense despite death being non-existent. And yet, I loved it.

I don't usually remember my dreams very well, but when I do, they tend to be nightmares. Nightmares of me being lost in abandoned places, surrounded by cement walls, oppressive and claustrophobic, and the beings I encounter are hostile, human in form, but lacking something crucial, and that makes them terrifying. In that sense, it's uncanny how much this game replicates and evokes those exact feelings, playing this made me feel incredibly uncomfortable, but now it's stuck on my head.

I know that this review may be biased, but even excluding my own personal dumb experiences with dreams, those sounds coming for the abyss of stone and rusty copper and the cryptic and ethereal monsters made of light and night amounted to something I've never seen in another game.

I believe that its admittedly clunky controls (especially in the ''combat'', despite being so little of it) and its overly cryptic nature do stop it from achieving absolute greatness, but it's still nothing short of incredible. It's a half-hour experience that evokes feelings that other works would wish to.

I cannot wait for what's next in Tower of No One man, for the first time ever I WANT to be creeped out... oh god I'm gonna end up playing Silent Hill won't I?

Este juego no perdona, no porque posea dificultad, para nada, no perdona al jugador perdido.
Todo el tiempo me sentí perdido, que había una parte que me faltaba, que algo andaba mal pero no podía clarificar que era. En todo momento estuve muy atento a mis alrededores intentando no pasarme algo por alto, pero nada de eso sirvió.
0_abyssalSomewhere destaca por esta manera tan peculiar que tiene de contar su historia, todo parece fuera de lugar, todo tan tajante y brutalista en su arquitectura, todo de concreto y metal.
Nuestro personaje deambula por un purgatorio eterno, todo esta muerto y solo existen fantasmas de lo que alguna vez fue la vida. Podemos leer algún tipo de narrador que a veces nos explica de a pequeños bocados que esta pasando o donde estamos. Pero eso es todo.
Por momentos recuerda a Silent Hill y por momentos parece un videojuego que encontrarías en la deep web.
Cada uno tendrá su opinión o forma de ver lo que es abyssalSomewhere, pero yo lo veo como una experiencia macabra, una pesadilla profunda, un vistazo al limbo.
Me gusta ver los juegos como experiencias, como frasquitos cerrados donde adentro se encuentra algo que podemos vivir por unas horas, y una vez terminado cerrarlo y ponerlo en algún lugar de nuestra mente. Pero este frasco no lo pude cerrar.