DaRmaZat Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss, developed by Big Bad Wolf (of The Council fame), drops you into a near-future 2053 where dwindling resources have pushed corporations toward the ocean’s darkest depths. What starts as a tactical investigation into a silent Pacific mining station quickly dissolves into a reality-bending nightmare that challenges the very laws of physics.
The Call of R’lyeh’s Echoes
Before you set foot in the abyss, the game asks you to define your experience. You can choose to focus on Exploration (effectively a story mode) or Investigation, which ramps up the complexity of the detective mechanics. These settings are granular, allowing you to tweak how much help the game gives you when analyzing the many puzzle objects scattered throughout the world.
In Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss, you step into the role of Noah, an agent of Ancile—Interpol’s secret occult division—accompanied by your AI companion Key and fellow agent Elsa. Your first lead takes you to the home of colleague Wong Mei, and it doesn’t take long before things feel off. Strange sigils cover the walls, unsettling cassette recordings are scattered throughout the house, and large pools of blood hint at something deeply wrong. By the time you descend into the basement and witness outright paranormal phenomena, it becomes painfully clear: Wong has been meddling with forces far beyond her grasp.
From that point on, the game wastes little time embracing its Lovecraftian identity, sending you on a surreal journey through space, time, and dimension—ultimately leading toward the mythical underwater city of R’lyeh hidden beneath the Pacific Ocean, where reality itself begins to unravel.
Deep-Sea Detective Work
While the marketing highlights the “cosmic abomination” encounters, The Cosmic Abyss is, at its heart, a dense and demanding puzzle game. If you enjoyed Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, you’ll recognize the “Vault” UI—a mental space where you link clues to generate deductions. However, Big Bad Wolf has made this system significantly more complex.
You’ll spend a vast amount of time rotating objects and reading lengthy documents in search of that one vital lead. The game also introduces a SONAR system, which requires you to scan environments for specific materials. You can combine up to three material types into sets within your scanner, allowing for high-tech dowsing to find hidden mechanisms.
Managing your mental state is equally vital. A “Corruption” mechanic layers survival elements over the exploration; as Cthulhu’s influence takes hold, you’ll suffer from disturbing visions. Solving investigations correctly “heals” this corruption and grants extra energy. Failing investigations, on the other hand, accelerates corruption rapidly, turning mistakes into a compounding problem rather than a minor setback.
Plagued by Technical Demons
Visually and tonally, The Cosmic Abyss hits all the right notes. At times, this comes through striking cinematic set pieces; at others, it leans more into subtle, psychological horror that lets the tension simmer beneath the surface. The transition between both is seamless, creating a truly surreal journey through non-Euclidean dimensions. Whether playing in Quality or Performance mode, the game ran consistently smooth on the PlayStation 5 Pro.
However, the experience is currently bogged down by several “ancient horrors” of its own: bugs. During scripted dialogues, you are often completely locked in place—unable to walk or interact—which feels jarringly restrictive. Even more frustrating is the narrative logic; if you skip side content and head straight for an objective, the dialogue order often breaks. On repeat playthroughs especially, it becomes clear how much filler content the game leans on—segments that add little to the narrative or progression, yet still gate your path forward. I even encountered instances where key items simply disappeared from my inventory, forcing unnecessary backtracking to track them down again.
The technical polish is further dampened by clipping NPCs and a disastrous save system. There are no manual saves, and I encountered a bug where a second save slot simply refused to record data, resulting in 15-minute chunks of lost progress. Additionally, the “Pinned Information” feature—intended to help track clues—can become a nightmare; I found no way to unpin old posts, eventually resulting in a screen so cluttered with text that I could barely see the game world behind the UI.
Final Thoughts
Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss is a love letter to the hardcore Lovecraftian investigator. Its storytelling and world-building are top-tier, and the Unreal Engine 5 environments are genuinely breathtaking. However, those expecting a high-action thriller will find themselves “starving” for combat, as this is primarily an immersive, slow-burn puzzle game.
Currently, the bugs are too prevalent to ignore—ranging from disappearing items to save-games vanishing into thin air. If Big Bad Wolf can quickly patch out these technical grievances, this will be an essential title for fans of the Mythos.
Additional Information
Release Date: Apr 16, 2026
Reviewed On: PlayStation 5 Pro. Download code provided by the publisher and PR agency.
Developer: Big Bad Wolf
Publisher: Nacon
Relevant links: Available on PlayStation Store (BE, NL, US) and STEAM
