Abyss: The Wraiths of Eden

This is another Artifex Mundi title and the last one I am likely to play for a while. At the time of completion there were no more games available on the marketplace and this one felt a bit stale after the time invested in the rest of the titles.

Abyss follows the story of a girl who goes deep sea diving looking for her lover Robert after he goes missing. She stumbles across Eden, an underwater city, similar to Rapture from Bioshock except instead of Big Daddys there are these Wraith things that suck the life out of you. They are apparently trying to resurrect some kind of ‘evil one’ and Robert is the vessel and you need to save him. The storyline is tried and tested and is only really there to give you a reason to go from one puzzle to the next.

The puzzles and hidden picture scenes are essentially the same as before but Abyss does require you to go back and forth a lot and some of the hidden picture scenes reopen despite you thinking you were done with the area some time ago. It’s very similar to the first Enigmatis in this regard.

Instead of doing the hidden picture scenes, you can play a game of dominos which has been in previous games so I’m guessing there won’t be a lot of variety going forward if they are repeating themselves here. Personally, I don’t see why they need to have these additional things and I would rather they just did away with them.

There is also a bonus episode which acts as a prequel to the main games which provides a little more story and some more hidden scenes. Other than this it doesn’t pull any extra punches.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 20 Achievements

This is average sized haul for an Artifex Mundi game now and eight of them are related to various parts of the story. There are another eight achievements related to doing all the puzzles and hidden picture scenes without skipping or hints as well as finding three items in three seconds, not making many mistakes and completing both a puzzle and hidden picture scene in less than a minute. Standard Artifex Mundi fare.

Where I struggled was the expert playthrough as it required a lot of faffing around and searching and it could have brought my playtime down dramatically if I had just played on normal first but there you go.

I also struggled to get the motivation up to complete a second playthrough and nab the three achievements related to playing all the dominos games. This sums up how much the game felt like a slog.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Abyss: The Wraiths of Eden is another solid game from Artifex Mundi that offers the same thing as before. As I said though I’ve had my fill of these games so this review probably comes across as negative. It’s still a good addition to the collection and offers new scenery as a lot of the others are turning in to series’.