ABYSS OF THE SACRIFICE Reviews

spend a decent amount of money and time and don't like it at all. the ui sucks, and hints are not quite helpful. way to many mysteries embedded along the story and it was easy for me to get tired of staying curious. with the troublesome UI and frustrating (sometimes unreasonable) puzzles, I simply had no empathy with any of the main character nor with the story. NOT RECOMMEND

I strongly recommend this VN! Pleasing art, engaging story, immersive music, and multiple character routes. This VN has it all. If you're looking for a post-apocalyptic survival with tense atmosphere, psychological horror elements, and puzzle solving (or anything that has the name "Zero Escape"), you'll enjoy what this VN has to offer. Talking about the music in particular, I got vibes from both Corpse Party and I Walk Among Zombies. It could just be a coincidence, but I wouldn't be surprised if one (or multiple) of the music directors involved in this game also worked for either of those two games.

The plot seems interesting enough, but the puzzles themselves are legitimately breaking me. The developers would've fit right in with 80s era Sierra adventure games like King's Quest just in terms of how utterly moon brained some of the solutions are. Doesn't help that all the text you see in the puzzles or illustrations is in Cyrillic either. I'm going to power through it as a point of pride, but I honestly wish I had never started in the first place.

You should totally play this game if you are fan of Zero Escape series, maybe buy it for full price even. Still, you should not await for "hidden cult classic" stuff here, it's more of nice try to employ unique concept, but game fails a lot. Bad stuff: - Plot is given via fragments, making it harder to follow and somewhat feeling random (characters were busy with one stuff, now they busy with other stuff, one girl died, nobody really cares in next fragment). - Puzzles are following quite a strange logic sometimes and there will be few places you will need to pixelhunt or bruteforce stuff if you don't want to seek walkthrough in steam workshop or elsewhere. - Things are becoming esoteric towards the end with some stuff inserted for sake of player's confusion or excitement, but some of these plot lines are cut or lead to nowhere. - To get all endings/achievements you really need to look at guide and/or abuse save system a lot. Per person: - Characters. You can see five girls with few more characters appearing in flashbacks. All of them are very different with their own way of thinking and you will totally hate at least one or two of them for acting weird. Still, I personally felt like half of characters were written with "hated by fans" thing in head, and I was really surprised game treated them as, you know, characters. There are some fanservice shots in first half especially, but it never feels like devs treat these young girls like some ecchi objects, but only as archetypes, avatars of ideals and concepts which are fighting each other in silent battle of wits and hidden emotions. Even few scenes of "naked skin" are actually used for driving plot further. - Artstyle. Girls really look "very anime", but if you are into mystery stuff you shouldn't really be bothered by it. Positive (IMHO): - Soundtrack. Maybe it's because they are annoying, maybe it's because I had to play and replay puzzles for some time, but tracks felt very atmospheric and logical to current situation, they are appearing in my head sometimes, so I put few tracks, like OP one or stressful ones into my "best VN OST" playlist. - In continuation of above, at most scenes you WILL feel yourself lonely and stressed as girls do. - Instead of direct choices, you are just choosing from fragments you don't have any idea about. First, it's mostly linear path with all girls in check, but once you reach specific point action starts and choosing wrong (or right) fragment will lead one of girls to death or story-changing injury. I know few VNs with fragment system before Abyss and few released after it, but it's only project I know in which ORDER matters. It also shows how un-friendly concept could be to player without some QoL features, but I won't really complain, devs were quite original with this concept, basically pioneering it for sake of others. - Few puzzles are really cool and even if being not-very-logical, you cannot to not agree how diverse devs were with quest segments. Now you are escaping from danger using random items around you, now you are doing housework in flashback, then you are entering cyberspace for abstract puzzle, and then you are traversing maze-like puzzle thing. Scenario writer and game designer are bending stuff at their will more creatively than many other mystery VN teams. - Finally, for a little change, game takes place somewhere in Europe apparantely, judging by cyrillic, West and East slavic names, some other hints. If you are knowing russian, you will be rewarded with few moments of bilingual bonus. As a whole, game is bad mystery story, still unique and interesting in concept and implementation. If you are tired from stories which turn up to be pretty simple and love-filled ones from start to end, this game could be for you. Despite contents of true ending, middle and endgame with all other endings would take you into informational sea of madness and paranoia, which totally obscures any allusions on "power of friendship" and show some justified brutality.

[h1]What is this game?[/h1] This game is a sequence of escape rooms packed into a visual novel with branching paths. The visual novel aspect is decent and unravelling the backstory of the foundation is engaging enough. As a puzzle game, the main problem this game suffers from is the wildly varying quality of the puzzle rooms. There are a lot of escape rooms in the game - around 40. All of them are byte-sized problems you can solve in half an hour or so - and some of them are truly great. There are puzzles in this game that will make you feel clever when solving them. That's what I wanted in an escape room game. And this game frequently delivers. [h1]What are the problems with this game?[/h1] But also, some of the puzzles are... hair-wrenchingly terrible. Some rooms are pixel hunts, where you have to click on the exact right pixel to find a secret area that has no business existing. Some rooms are beyond lunatic in logic. I'll spoil one minor puzzle in a late game area as an example: You're in a basement concrete corridor dungeon, the only way forward is a keypad-locked door with 4 digits. The only clues are an upside-down K, and a Q, both written separately in blood on a wall nearby. If you now immediately thought the keycode to progress is 3112, you're way more clever than I am. If you like me goes "wft?" now, then you now know how this game is at its worst. The logic behind this puzzle is apparently based on playing cards, where the king(K) for some card counting systems has the value 13, and the queen(Q) has the value 12. And since the K is upside down you flip its number around giving you 31-12? Sure. Whatever. This is a terrible puzzle, there was nothing at all to suggest you should even think about playing cards and that flipping logic is wobbly at best. And while I have to again re-iterate that there are some really great puzzles to find, bad ones like these do appear. Thankfully there is a hint system when you're stuck. Unfortunately, it is entirely useless. Half the time it only gives you hints for problems you have already solved. The other half of the time, the hints are absolutely obvious nonsense, like "this sequence of symbols is a code". Yeah, I did figure that out. What I wanted to know how to turn them into a 3 digit number thank you very much, either give me a hint or the actual solution already because I am clearly stuck! When you do get stuck, your only real option is to either find a youtube playthrough of the relevant chapter (which at best only gives you the answer - unsatisfactory really) - or - find the japanese wiki which gives the hints you want, but only if you know japanese. Google translate still has a very long way to go. Speaking of translations... while the story segments are well translated and clearly proof-read to make sense, the smaller text, like hints, item descriptions and similar are sometimes not so well quality assured. At several times I found myself thinking "this surely has to be a translation error". For example, there was a really cool VR minigame fairly early on that only made sense when I found what each piece in that game did through trial and error. The translations explaining what the pieces did just didn't add up to what was happening! [h1]But is it fun?[/h1] YES! Despite all those issues above, I will recommend this game as a puzzle game. As already mentioned the good puzzles were really good. There is also a lot of variety in puzzle types, and I must admit I had a hard time shutting the game down after bedtime as a result. "Just one more room". I don't really want to spoil the story, so I shall not talk about it. I do not think the story or characters in this game are as engaging as the truly excellent zero escape series. But the story is not bad. There are multiple branching paths, and the five heroines of the game can frequently end up dead if you picked a wrong storyline. Sometimes playing rooms in a different order gives different story outcomes. Sometimes you need to see some bad ends to find a good end. It's a pretty good hunt for a perfect ending overall. I enjoyed that aspect of this game. [h1]Why you should play Zero Escape instead[/h1] As far as I can tell, this game is a port of a vita game from 2010. You can kinda tell that it's an older game lacking some of the more modern design of a branching path visual novel. I would murder for a decent branching storyline tree as seen in Zero Escape 3 where you can jump between checkpoints. This game does have something like that, and it allows you to go back to an older point. But there is no moving forward again. There is a skip-forward feature in the VN dialogue, and you can entirely skip puzzle rooms you have already solved - but - I think I still spent around 4 hours just spooling through story I had already seen (even if there were minor changes now and then). Some of the latter chapters I must have played 10 times just to try out different room orders. That's not great game design. Had this game been made today, the game designers would just not have done it that way. Zero escape raised the bar. Its' just the better game. [h1]Do I recommend Abyss?[/h1] Yes. But... take it for what it is. This game is primarily for those of us who desperately want more gameplay like Zero Escape, and is willing to cope with a few bits of puzzle logic nonsense to satisfy that itch while we wait for ZE4. I think the game is a bit overpriced given its flaws when you look at it with modern glasses - but - I still had a blast. So that's a thumbs up from me. You can find the translated japanese wiki here, and you will need it. Good luck! https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https://w.atwiki.jp/wikisacrifice/pages/29.html

This is a puzzle escape game where you have to investigate your surroundings. So far so good will update later. Midpoint update I like the how characters draw you into the mysterious story. The art does justice to the girls. The hint system works well but one or two of the puzzles are very hard to decipher. Update I have played the final chapter. It was well worth playing. I liked the ending.

I bought this because I loved the Nonary games (999, Virtue's Last Reward and Zero Time Dilemma) and the Danganronpa trilogy, and was looking for something similar - a crazy and violent anime visual novel interrupted by puzzle / escape room like sequences. This game indeed does scratch that itch, and I really don't consider it to be bad at all.... But Steam only allows for a thumbs up or down, and my thumb goes down because it's just nowhere near as good as the aforementioned games are and I couldn't help but be disappointed. Disappointed by the story (which is not terrible, it's just okay - 4 out of 10 in my book) and especially by the puzzles. A couple of the puzzles are well designed and really enjoyable too solve, but many are tedious (you know these kind of puzzles where you've figured out the solution conceptually, but need forever to figure out how exactly the game expects you to put this solution into practice? You'll find plenty of those in here...). A handful of puzzles are also illogical and make almost no sense to me, even after looking up the solution, and worse: two puzzles are solvable but *outrageously* difficult and thus just feel completely out of place - they are in a completely different league than all other puzzles in the game and will take forever to solve for the average casual gamer (and looking up solutions online isn't easy, this game isn't very popular apparently, and I could only find a walkthrough in chinese that's not easy too understand in the google-translated English version, and Videos on YT). If you are in a similar spot as I was and have played through all other games in this niche (i.e. Anime Visual Novel with Puzzle sequences) and this game is on sale, I'd recommend it, but there are certainly far better games in this category out there...

Abyss of the Sacrifice is a visual novel with playable adventure game "escape room" segments. There are no choices in the VN or adventure segments, so you get different endings by playing various chapters in different orders (characters will make decisions based on what they know from previous chapters for example). This is an interesting idea but it does make the game feel kind of fragmented and weird, as most chapters are their own separate vignettes with a self-contained story arc, so it's kind of like "the girls are looking for food" and then you click the next one and "the girls are trying to turn the power on". Also character deaths aren't as devastating as they could be because due to the fragmented set-up they're not usually mentioned much if they're not present until the endings. The art and music are both fine, basic but they do the job. The text is in an awful font that is very hard to read, and for some reason there isn't an indication of who is speaking (or even if they are saying the lines aloud) aside from the voice acting so if you are hard of hearing you may be SOL with this one. Gameplay in the adventure segments is, frankly, bad. Some of the puzzles are fun but a lot of them are very obscure, and sometimes the hints are just like "good luck, lol" so you're stuck looking at a Japanese wiki with google translate trying to get through them. Inventory management is terrible with way too much clicking (to use an item you click the button that opens the item wheel, click on the item, then click "use", then click on whatever you wanted to use it on) and you can only combine items in the order that the game has decided is allowed, so "bottle+kettle" works but "kettle+bottle" won't. This means that nearly every puzzle segment brings the plot to a screeching halt while you plod slowly around trying to solve complex math puzzles (or pick up the flashlight by sticking some duct tape to a stick, which is a real puzzle). Speaking of the plot, it is a bit of a mess. It starts out interesting and I liked parts of it, but it goes off on some weird tangents (the like 3 minutes that [spoiler]xenomorphs[/spoiler] are present despite not being mentioned on any other occasion, a section about a virus that just sort of peters out) and the sci-fi nonsense comes at you hard and fast after a certain point. It seemed like whatever sci-fi concept was a convenient explanation for what was going on would just be introduced for that part and then dropped. If it's on sale and you really like escape games maybe, but I couldn't recommend it at full price.

When playing this game, my opinions were all over the place. First, all of the characters are easily hateable. That's not to say they don't have good points, but it's hard to say I really liked any of them. In some ways that's part of the story. And as for the story, most aspects of what's going on makes absolutely zero sense, which threw me off for large portions of the game. However by the end of the game, most of those loopholes were closed, which made that confusion bearable. The exception would be the puzzles themselves; in a game like zero escape, the puzzles were explained in the context of the world and thus made sense, but here there is no reason for any puzzle to be a puzzle in the first place or to be set up the way that it is. Furthermore, the difficulty ranged from stupid easy to impossible without a walkthrough. Look, I have a PhD in physics, I can understand complicated maths and quantum mechanics, but even with walkthrough answers I STILL have no idea how to solve some of these - they're way too abstract and esoteric. The story itself is quite mysterious and interesting, and as I was playing the true route I was leaning towards giving this game a thumbs up because I enjoyed the story despite my earlier complaints. But then it ended suddenly and abruptly in an unsatisfactory way, so I decided on thumbs down. Sorry, this game came close to a like, but I couldn't recommend this to someone, the faults are too frustrating.

If you enjoy plot based (NOT romance based) VNs and adventure games whose puzzles can get to ridiculous levels of difficulty and "logic", then yes, this was a fun game. Honestly, anyone sane playing this is doing it while staring at a translated walkthrough, and I have intense pity for the people who had to play the original Japanese version and try to figure all this out in the first place. Each character has her own problems and her own arc, and they don't really bond as a team or share their information with each other until the very end, so don't go in hoping for a lot of cute hand-holding moments or found-family feels. On the other hand, if girls rescuing each other from imminent doom (and sometimes failing to do so, and sometimes turning on each other) is your jam, there's definitely that.