this game really surprised me. i went into it with low expectations thinking it would be a janky mess but it ended up being my favourite game of the year.
you quickly get sucked into it. planning a dive is one of the most addicting factors, figuring out what to bring, what to drop when you're at weight limit and if it'll impact your ability to make it back to the top fills each dive with tension. every dive was a challenge, and even if it would take hours at a time time, i immediately wanted to go back down the abyss after it was done. the feeling of a successful dive is unparalleled.
the music really stands out and is extremely immersive. the compendium is great as well. i think my only gripe with the game is the side missions which can be a bit tedious if you choose to do some of the latter ones, but if you're already at that point you know how to make your way around the abyss and can pretty easily finish them off with some time and dedication.

Realmente quise que este juego me gustara, porque soy una fanática de Made in Abyss y especialmente del mundo del manga. El juego empieza con un horrible tutorial de unas cuantas horas que te obliga más o menos a jugar la mitad de la primera temporada del anime, y después de eso te deja jugar la campaña original, que es básicamente el auténtico contenido del juego. La idea es tremenda porque tanto el mundo de Made in Abyss como el gremio de exploradores son ideas geniales para un RPG, y además se nota que cierta parte del equipo le ha puesto muchas ganas al desarrollo del juego. El abismo es precioso, los sistemas de mejoras e inventario funcionan bien, si investigas a los animales con el catalejo los añades a un bestiario genial, los personajes originales no son molestos y el juego tiene el mismo tono oscuro del manga cuando hace falta. Pero aquí acaba todo lo bueno; en pos de la fidelidad al manga se añade la maldición del abismo, pero es increíblemente abusiva, hay veces que tardas horas en regresar a Orth porque tienes que ir a paso de tortuga, hay zonas donde puedes obtener la maldición por saltar o por caminar por una zona con ligeros baches. Además el sistema de hambre es exagerado, te obliga a llevar 99 de sal todo el rato porque se utiliza para todas las comidas y te obliga también a enfrentarte a enemigos con un respawn infinito para que quizá te den comida. Las armas se rompen una barbaridad, y hay zonas en las que sencillamente no puedes encontrar los materiales para hacerte más armas, o quizá no encuentras Rhombus para hacer cuerdas, o quizá tienes que dejar tesoros para llevar cosas en la mochila que se llena con literalmente nada. El juego está diseñado como el culo, da lugar a softlocks a patadas, se progresa lentísimo e incluso siendo tan previsora de llevar 10 putos machetes encima me he visto obligada a perder horas de progreso porque te obligan a bajar a cierto sitio y luego a subir, completamente escasa de materiales. No sé hasta dónde llega este juego, yo llegué a ver a Ozen y ya estoy hasta la polla. Necesita ser rehecho a un nivel tan fuerte que espero que lo arreglen todo en otro juego.

Why do people keep giving their anime licenses to Spike Chunsoft? Seriously, look at their past history. It's all shovelware so they can get money for when their visual novels that aren't named Danganronpa when they eventually undersell.

The graphics looks very underwhelming for an anime about the explorations and wonders/horrors of the unknown, the great mechanics of the abyss curse, which mind you made people vomit their guts out the moment they ascended one step is completely countered by waiting for the purple effects to disappear off your screen.

Reg and Riko never shut the fuck up, they repeat the same 3 sentences every 5 seconds, you can't run for longer than 2 seconds without running out of stamina and freezing in place, the vertical challenges from the game are completely avoidable for reasons mentioned previously, the "story mode" involves only a glorified tutorial that leaves you up to half the first season, and while I do appreciate that there's an original story to create your own OC that goes further up to where the third movie left off, anime games where you relive the same story of the show but with a silent character has gotten boring and overdone since Xenoverse 2.

Just read the manga, or dont. With the way these chapters take half a year to be released the author will probably be arrested for the Terabytes of CP he has on his hard drive before the story is finished

Took me 65 hours to beat.

I think it was overall really cool to get to explore and move around the Abyss and interact with the characters. The atmosphere in the areas is very nice accompanied with a great soundtrack that truly captures the feel of the abyss.

Gameplay-wise few of the areas are quite tedious and are extremely difficult to get through. Not to mention that you have to go through them multiple times.

The spawn rates of the enemies won't help this either. Whenever you try to climb a wall, a bunch of butterflies start spawning. Taking out those critters really wears down your weapons and stamina.

The weapons in this game have durability which means that if you are in a fight and you are out of weapons, you have no choice but to give up.

Also if you run out of hunger and don't have any food left, it means you cannot climb walls and you are pretty much screwed. If that's the case you can either load a save file or give up cave raiding with the risk of losing all your equipment.

You have to plan each delving carefully.

You will die a lot in this game. Some of the enemies will absolutely destroy you and some can push you to your death. Few of the enemies will kill you instantly making you pull your hair out.

They really tried to capture the lethal nature of the Abyss and succeeded in doing so.

The graphics aren't really anything to write home about. They get the job done, and they work.

This game is a little bit buggy. Once I was forced to wait for an enemy's body to despawn because I was stuck in a T pose inside the body after defeating it. Another time I was killed and fell on top of a mineable object and didn't die, so I was forced to load my save.

There's a short story mode with the main characters of the original story which I wished would have been longer. Then there's the "Deen in Abyss" mode where you get to customize your own character and will be able to delve to the bottom of the 5th layer of the Abyss and obtain a white whistle.

I think it was an absolute blast to be able to interact with the familiar characters and see the Abyss with my own eyes, which is the selling point of this game to be honest.

There are few post-game quests and a boss.

I think you should play this game if you're a fan of the Made In Abyss manga and/or anime.

if u don't get filtered by the loli/shota stuff and like exploration you'll have a ton of fun, great game, the music goes hard as fuck too. i'd recommend skipping hello abyss now that it's possible and going back to it after beating the game bc deep in abyss is so much more fun.. i hope this gets a continuation with a bigger budget when tsukushi finishes his manga, i'd have loved to explore beyond layer 5 and seeing the narehate village. the jank was fun and i love tiare

edit: turning off comments bc you guys are weirdos

Why do I have to slog through a 5 hour shoddily put together recap of the anime/manga just to get to the (allegedly) good part? For people who have already experienced the story it's just unnecessary and for those who haven't it's still by far the worst way to go about it. I don't see why they couldn't have put a small gameplay tutorial in the Deep in Abyss mode instead. Also, what are those animations? I'm not a graphics snob by any means but they look SO robotic and stiff. At least the voice acting is still good.

I'm constantly amazed at how much I enjoy Made in Abyss: Binary Star Falling into Darkness as its flaws are as numerous as its title is needlessly vexing. Early on in my playthrough I compiled a list of bizarre design decisions and that list only spiraled out of control the more I played. I constantly used the Switch's capturing feature to post clips of oddities, bugs, and things that made me go 'Hmm...' to Twitter. The game is not all that well put together, and at times it seems poorly thought out. That's all to say nothing of the forced 10 hour tutorial that the player is subjected to.

And yet, I can't say that I don't love the game. Made in Abyss is a great example of a survival game that has real tension, real discovery, and real challenge. The way those three interact on a minute-to-minute basis creates an extremely compelling experience that is much more than the sum of its parts.

At its base the game is about plunging further down into the titular Abyss and the game is not shy about making this a trying experience. Characters suffer a sickness when rising in altitude, not unlike divers resurfacing, and this stops your progress constantly. Walking up a slight incline? Better stop for 5 seconds to quell your character's growing sickness. There's a hunger and stamina system that constantly hamper your progress as well. Your greatest enemy might be a cliff face that you simply don't have enough stamina to scale at your level, or it might be your lack of preparedness as your empty stomach demands you return prematurely.

Now this all sounds like standard fare, but where the real challenge lies is extricating oneself from one's dives. Getting back out of the Abyss is much, much harder than going down there. To say nothing of the risk-reward tension of deciding how deep to dive insofar as what your supplies can accommodate, environments are confusing and clearly designed to be hostile to the rising climber. Some passages are one-way, and on more than one occasion the game pulls the nasty trick of unexpectedly blocking previously used routes forcing the discovery of a new way up. All of this takes place under the ticking clock of your depleting hunger bar. The lack of a meaningful fast travel in areas one hasn't absolutely surpassed means it is very likely that you will fail. The likelihood of a loss is exacerbated by the save system: One cannot save anytime; saving uses a consumable that can only be used in certain areas of the abyss; and entering a new area overwrites the autosave meaning one can be locked into an unfavorable situation.

So now that we established that failure comes often, what is the cost of such failure? Time, mostly. At any time the player can select to "Give up" from the menu. They are returned to the top with absolutely none of their progress. None of their experience; none of their collected items; none of their exploration remembered. It's all gone. Given that I've spent hours on one run into the Abyss, I want to stress how big of a cost this is and how miserable a failure feels. With that in mind, the aforementioned tension created by the game is palpable, as any failure is hours of progress gone.

Discovery is another feeling the game nails, though I'm reluctant to praise it too much on this axis. Each layer of the abyss is visually compelling, functionally unique, and filled with distinct areas unto itself alongside a variety of imaginative flora and fauna. However, being based off an anime (and in turn a manga), the visual design is derivative of another work. A good realization, but not an original idea. Still, seeing this environments brought to life to explore at one's leisure is the kind of experience fans wanted when experiencing the parent works. More importantly, it creates organic and intrinsic rewards to enduring the exploration and the overall feeling of stress the game provides; one wants to push deeper not to collect an item, but to see more of the Abyss.

Another element of the game I enjoyed is its status as an "Arceus-like". This is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek "genre" I've created to note games that involve a lot of mindless open world collection, monster killing, box checking, and inventory management in service of finishing not-at-all-rewarding sidequests doled out similar to a randomly generated MMO. The name, of course, coming from Pokemon Legends: Arceus, a game from earlier this year. Despite how boring and tedious that description sounded, I enjoyed those elements of that game, and Made in Abyss very much scratches the same itch. Every area has a "Collect 50 items" sidequest to complete, and it's fun to run around spamming the collect button. This is despite the need to drop half of those items because of your encumbrance limit and how the reward for the quest is basically nothing. Perhaps the term "Autism Simulator" is more evocative of the feeling I'm trying to convey here.

The final point I want to hit on is the 10 hour tutorial mentioned much earlier. At the onset of the game players are presented a choice between two games, one that follows the characters from the anime, and another that follows original characters. Despite being presented a choice, only the former is able to be chosen at first. This "Game A" is one that is stripped of many features: you only go downwards through the Abyss; many areas are blocked; you cannot craft any meaningful items; weapon types are locked out; weapon durability is disabled; there are no sidequests; there is no leveling. I could go on. Game A is a shallow facsimile of the true experience, and it's vexing to me that it's the one forced onto the players. While it does serve as a soft tutorial to ~60% of the game's systems, it just is not compelling in the slightest. I imagine many players will give up on the game before getting to Game B, whether they stop playing after the credits in Game A or just don't finish it at all. The abrupt ending of Game A is also a point worthy of criticism, but to be honest it just shouldn't exist in the first place.

At the very least, Made in Abyss: Binary Star Falling into Darkness rewards players who stick with it. They are rewarded with a much deeper Game B. They are rewarded with challenging gameplay that scales very well unlike other survival games that plateau once a certain rank of gear is unlocked. They are rewarded with increasingly fascinating layers of the Abyss as it descends into the earth. And of course they are rewarded with new, fancier whistles.

This game carries an absolute recommendation, but keep in mind what you're getting yourself into here.

"It gets good after 10 hours."

Indeed.

Very janky
The Hello Abyss mode is an 3 hour long tutorial that feels tacked on, unfinished and generally makes for a terrible first impression
Deep in Abyss is half fun half frustrating but still miles better than the first mode
The controls are a mess and I spent the first half hour of the game trying to make it comfortable to play in the options
It's fun to explore the abyss when you're going down but if you're trying to go up and you're lacking resources you're gonna have a bad time.
The original story content is fine and I loved seeing more of characters that didn't really have the chance to properly shine in the manga/anime.
As Nanachi once said: "It's not bad, but it's no better than my cooking." and that's how I feel about Made in Abyss: Binary Star Falling into Darkness

Full review: https://youtu.be/90TRM-7j6s4

Made in Abyss is a fantastic anime, one of my recent favorites. So I was pleasantly surprised to see this pop up on Steam, the series has the potential for a fun video game.

Gameplay
Given the atrocity that was the Re:ZERO game developed by the same studio, I expected just another straightforward VN-adventure hybrid. Binary Star is much more than that though. There are still VN segments, but the gameplay takes priority here and there is a full slate of stuff to play around with.

Crafting food and equipment, using various tools to get around, taking in the many different areas of the Abyss, unlocking abilities on the skill tree, hunting down artifacts - it is a much higher-end production than I was anticipating and the studio has done a great job building a solid foundation.

Game Loop
Unfortunately though, that is just the foundation, because the game takes a massive dive in quality once you get to how the actual loop works. Instead of evoking that feeling of exploration and wonder that one would expect to come with diving into the Abyss, the overall feeling I had was one of monotony. This is because the vast majority of quests are simple fetch quests, “go here and kill this” quests, or “go here, talk to this person, and come back” quests.

You would think, “okay, but these fetch quests give you an opportunity to explore the Abyss” and yeah, you would be partially right. The problem there though is that once you’ve seen an area a few times, it becomes a bit boring to head back there for the fifth, sixth time to do something menial like collecting five bird eggs or fishing for material to craft a certain dish.

This becomes especially annoying later on when you have to trek through like four or five different areas just to get to your objective only to have to trek all the way back at the end. I quickly realized I was spending roughly 90% of my time just getting to where I needed to be and that most of that time was spent trekking through the same areas that I had already crossed through in the previous five quests. This is the bulk of the Binary Star experience and it is a massive disappointment given the great base that the game starts with.

Little things add to this disappointment too. Item weight, limited backpack size, equipment durability, and the fact that if you run out of stamina your character literally stops in place until the stamina bar regens to full. Sure, there’s an excuse for realism to be made there, but this is an anime game and a lot of these mechanics are blatantly anti-fun.

Combat
The combat is the most dead simple thing ever, with your one button attacks that only expand beyond that with the skill tree that just makes the combo string longer. The lock-on is a bit finicky, the hitboxes are usually way larger than they appear, and most fights boil down to simply hitting an enemy a couple times, rolling to the side, and repeating.

Story & Game Modes
The game is basically divided into two parts: “Hello Abyss” and “Deep In Abyss”. The former is the “proper” story mode that tells the story from the anime and allows you to play as Riko and Reg. That said, the entire thing only adapts up to the survival training with Ozen - episode eight from the first season - and it took me just three hours to clear. I found this mode to be a vastly inferior method of telling the Made in Abyss story for what it does adapt.

After completing that mode though, you unlock the full experience: Deep in Abyss - or the game mode that most of my earlier complaints come from. This mode allows you to create a custom character and tells an original story with said character. Sounds cool, but the story itself is just there to link things together and isn’t really a strong point. The rest of it is as I described earlier.

Graphics & Music
The graphics are what I would expect from an early PS4 or even PS3 game, with bland textures and boring world design. The music is a bit better, but honestly nothing can compare to Kevin Penkin’s work in the anime and I guess I’m just disappointed that we couldn’t get something that at least tries to be that good.

PC Performance
I ran the game at 4k 144fps, max settings on my RTX 3080 Ti with no performance-related issues. That said, there are some bugs worth mentioning, including voice playback randomly stopping after alt+tabbing and NPCs getting stuck in the terrain when moving. That latter one happened A LOT and it comes with an equally annoying sound effect of someone rapidly hitting the ground.

Overall
Made in Abyss: Binary Star Falling into Darkness is a decent game bogged down by some incredibly tedious quest design. Exploring the Abyss can be fun, but not when you have to do so dozens of times in the same areas just to complete simple fetch quests. It’s a shame, because the studio did a fairly good job building up a solid foundation. It’s just that they didn’t know what to do with said foundation and we get a filler-stuffed experience as a result. Maybe one day we’ll get something to build on this base, but for now, Binary Star is unfortunately an easy pass.