End of Abyss Got Patched a Day After Launch, and a Review Aged Fast

A metroidvania shipped with a map that lied to players, and the studio fixed it before most people even noticed. That's the whole story with End of Abyss, Section 9 Interactive's new exploration game, and it's a weirder story than it sounds.

According to GameSpot, the reviewer's biggest gripe after days with the game was the in-game map itself. It would mark a door as locked when it wasn't, or fail to show that you'd already grabbed the key you needed. In a genre built on backtracking across the same winding map for hours, that's not a cosmetic bug. That's the game sending you on a fake errand. Plan a long trek back across a level you've already cleared, only to find out the map fed you garbage, and you've lost real time for nothing.

Then, a single day after the PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC (Epic Games Store) launch, Section 9 patched most of that away. The outlet's review had already published two days before the fix went live. So the review you'd read while deciding whether to buy the game was, by the time you actually bought it, already describing a game that no longer fully existed.

That's not how this usually works. Most pre-launch bug fixes happen in the review window itself, where critics get told a problem is already patched or will be gone by day one, and it just quietly disappears from the write-up. GameSpot's reviewer even had that happen here: a boss that refused to drop a required item got fixed hours before the review deadline, so it never made the final draft. The other kind of big post-launch overhaul is the years-later rebuild, the Starfield or Cyberpunk 2077 route, where a game earns a second look after real time and real patches. End of Abyss skipped both lanes and landed somewhere in between: too late to inform the review, too early to need one.

Which, fine, is good news if you're someone picking this up now instead of on day one. You get the better map and skip the busywork entirely. But it's a reminder that a review is a snapshot of a specific build on a specific day, and in a business that treats day-one patches like a formality, that snapshot can go stale before the ink dries. Section 9 deserves credit for turning the fix around fast instead of sitting on it for a quarter. Whether the rest of the game holds up past its map is still a separate question, and I'd rather hear it from someone who played the patched version than take anyone's word for it, mine included.