The Haunted Hoard: Apsulov: End of Gods (PS5)
In Norse mythology, it is said there are nine realms all connected by the world tree Yggdrasil. The realm we humans live on is known as Midgard, but the other realms contain fantastical and powerful beings, with gods, creatures, and giants all able to tap into a magic we cannot. At least, not until technology reaches the point it can harness it properly. In the science fiction horror game Apsulov: End of Gods, humankind sought to plunder the magic and wonders of these worlds only to realize the power they covet can be quite terrifying when turned against them.
In this first-person horror game, you awaken on an operating table, freshly revived by a cruel, demanding, and mysterious force who you are quick to want to escape. Your character is known as Alice but has a past they can’t quite remember, Alice escaping into the facility on Midgard where researchers had begun using the roots of Yggdrasil as portals into the other realms. At first the promise of a mix of myth and futuristic technology is a fascinating one. You can find the shields of valkyries, listen to log notes as people pick about the truth from the myths based on their findings, and even head to the mythical realms and see where people had built their own advanced structures to begin picking apart things that had once seemed supernatural. However, these are the highlights of an adventure that more often prefers to spend its time trudging around the facility back on Midgard, the player more often seeing computer consoles and piles of boxes than incredible sights, and that is partly because you’ve arrived quite a while after things have gone terribly wrong.
Quickly you’ll come to meet Dr. Henrik Andersson, the man behind this ill-fated pursuit, and with the voice of his wife radioing in, the two try to guide you through the facility while providing important details throughout. The Apsulov itself is an artifact that the myths claim can seal off Midgard from the rest of the realms, and with beings from the other realms already attacking the world outside, this quickly becomes your main focus. Unfortunately, while you are shown some images of the chaos outside, within the facility the main danger you need to worry about are the fairly straightforward humans with deer skulls on their head wandering around crying in the dark. You are given the ability to see magic early on, this useful not only for finding clues in the environment on where to go but also lighting up a small area in front of you like night vision. Apsulov: End of Gods reveals itself mostly to be a stealth game where you’ll need to slink around the men in deer skulls lest they charge you with violent intent. Their awareness isn’t too great, but they will come to a stop and cry on the floor for a while requiring you to just wait it out, but most importantly it feels like they’re often either too easy to slip past, sudden surprises where you run off after since you heal back up after waiting a bit, or the game just clusters a bunch of them together to make it more likely you’ll mess up and get ganged up on.
Thankfully, they’re not all the game has to offer despite being the most prevalent part, but the way the game utilizes other enemies or concepts isn’t always much of a step up. One portion, still in the dark Midgard laboratories unfortunately, has you now trying to avoid the attention of imp-like trolls instead, which are basically just more alert versions of the enemies you already encountered. However, they also exhibit similar weaknesses in detection, the game unsure what to do if you hop up on top of a box for example and other times it’s fairly easy to just outrun the danger and reach the point where the enemy forgets what they were doing and go back to their patrol routes. The trolls and men in deer skulls can have a few moments where you’re trapped in an area and need to do some work where the stealth is actually tense and you have no big tricks so the stealth play can be effective occasionally, and eventually you are given a useful prosthetic arm called the Jarngreipr that is a good meld of the magic and tech on show. Channeling the magic energies harvested from the nine realms and using it like electricity, the arm is eventually upgraded so its able to release pulses of power that can defeat the creatures you’d otherwise need to slink around. However, it needs time to charge, the power cost for the attacks are high, and you often need to be relatively close. Sometimes used for small interactions and puzzles as well, the Jarngreipr helps alleviate some of the repetition as you can start making more informed choices on how to approach sections while also just giving you a means to fight back so it’s not all running and leaning out from behind a box waiting for creatures to move elsewhere.
The Jarngreipr can’t quick improve the stealth fully because segment design stagnates pretty early with the additions like the small segment with the trolls not really shaking it up enough, but the promise of heading to other realms is closer to working out well. Apsulov: End of Gods definitely wants to give you some time to just marvel at the places you enter, quite a bit of time spent just navigating its locations and looking around, but how it uses the other realms can be a mixed bag. In the realm of the frost giants you actually see the towering beings in shadow, their icy stare quite literal as you are still technically sneaking about, but it takes on the form of identifying moments to rush between bits of cover and the giants are used to more interesting effect than just being punched by a guy if he spots you like back on Midgard. You might encounter the fairly forgiving revival realm first through a run-in with a frost giant, Apsulov: End of Gods at least making it easy to recover from the few moments with some real teeth. However, then you have a place like Jotunheim, a name that literally refers to the land of giants, and yet you just run around avoiding some admittedly large but not really gigantic worms in the dark there. It is pretty hit and miss whether a realm works thematically and you don’t visit all nine, Apsulov: End of Gods a bit conservative in showing parts of Norse mythology overall and leaving you with far too many repetitive empty stealth segments in their place.
THE VERDICT: Apsulov: End of Gods comes forth with the strong idea of mixing futuristic tech with Norse myth and magic and bundles it all into a horror game, but the horror isn’t as sharp as it needs to be when it’s essentially carrying the whole experience. Heading to other realms or seeing how humanity’s attempt to tap into godly powers goes wrong are neat distractions, but then you’ll be back to hiding from the same tired enemy type or easily outsmarting them since they can’t figure out some basic avoidance strategies. When you get the Jarngreipr things do pick up a tad since the game can’t lean on the same tricks as much anymore, but the intriguing premise is hard to enjoy when you’re in dark generic research lab hallways more often than not.
And so, I give Apsulov: End of Gods for PlayStation 5…
A BAD rating. There are definitely moments in Apsulov: End of Gods you could carve out and present as being quite good on their own. When your Jarngreipr’s strong enough, exploration can be more engaging since you’re not forced to spend time watching men fall to their knees and weep again and again, and avoiding the gaze of the frost giants isn’t exactly complicated but its still a lively mix of the terror being small and in danger with needing to move quickly rather than tiptoeing about like back on Midgard. The research logs and some background details in some rooms do start to get the mind racing on the creative ways that familiar figures from Norse mythology can turn out to be terrifying, but you don’t get to see quite as many as you’d like and even then some are underwhelming or too shortly interacted with. Apsulov: End of Gods doesn’t necessarily need to pull out the entire grab bag of concepts from old Norse religion, but since they are where it feels most effective, leaning into them more rather than going for underwhelming worms or repetitive stealth sections could have lead to a game that was not only more interesting to play, but more interesting to see. Apsulov: End of Gods does want you to drink in its warped interpretations of familiar figures and even concocts ways to corrupt the ones it might not have been able to do much with without being deemed unfaithful, but with so much time spent trudging around, it’s hard to remain invested in what you’re doing just because the game can whip out a few decent moments here and there.
When the game first proposes the idea of needing to head to other realms for the artifacts needed to seal the Apsulov, it’s hard not to get excited by the potential for unique horror visiting such mythical places could provide. Even when you get your expectations in check when you learn you won’t be heading to them all, you still have the frost giants getting your hopes up only to start seeing more disappointments or conceptual retreads, Apsulov: End of Gods losing its energy and your interest as it keeps stealth too heavily in focus. More puzzles or just leaving the moments of mortal terror for unique portions would have been a more interesting way to spice up this story and thankfully the stealth isn’t so tough that you can’t take a tour of the good concepts it does have. However, Apsulov: End of Gods will still drag you down with its long stretches with little of interest in a game where the unique sights and mythological reinterpretations are meant to be the main draw.