Abyss of the Sacrifice is a terrible name... but the game isn't so bad. It's one of those escape room things - i.e. through most of it you'll find your protagonist trapped in once scenario or another, and they'll need to figure out a sequence of puzzles to unlock a door (literal or metaphorical) to progress. Each of those locked rooms comes in the context of an overall, massive, "locked room" with the ultimate goal being to escape an underground city that the characters are trapped in.
Abyss of the Sacrifice was originally released on PSP back in 2010, and clearly draws inspiration from the Zero Escape take on the visual novel genre (the original Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors being a 2009 release on the Nintendo DS). What distinguishes this one is that the entire cast are girls, and there's a pretty healthy dose of fan service that comes with that. Nothing explicit, but you sure do get a good look at their legs from some very choice angles.
These girls can be absolutely horrible to one another, depending on the path you take through the narrative (indeed, Abyss of the Sacrifice can go to some really dark places). With that being said, given that the life-and-death stakes are so core to experience, the writers were relatively sanitised in how they handled it. Perhaps I'm too desensitized at this point, but to me, Abyss of the Sacrifice lacks the sadistic edge of titles like Danganronpa and Quantum Suicide (and the Nonary Games titles themselves), which can leave a plot that should have been intense often feeling quite flat.
I also found the presentation to be very uneven. The key art CGs are excellent (and, as I said, very leggy - this game likes its short skirts), and the backgrounds are beautifully detailed and evocative of an exotic and vaguely unsettling underworld. It's a little "cleaner" than the Saw-like aesthetic of The Nonary Games titles, as a point of comparison, but it sets the scene well. The character portraits and sprites, however, are a little too plain and clash uncomfortably with their surroundings when they're talking to one another. I would hazard a guess that different artists were involved in the background and character design, and they don't resolve well with one another.
With that being said, this game was clearly made on a budget, and the aesthetics do what they need to with carrying a story that is by turns dark, sinister, and at times sexy. It could have done with being a little shorter, though. There are plenty of twists and turns that keep things exciting, but Abyss of the Sacrifice is about 50 hours to run through (give or take, depending on your puzzle-solving abilities), and that's just too long for what this narrative deserves.
Abyss of the Sacrifice is close to being something special, but its little irritants around presentation, puzzle consistency and design, and localisation mean that you'll need to be pretty far down the visual novel rabbit hole to want to play this. It wasn't long ago that Root Double was debuted on the Nintendo Switch, for example, and that game too takes place in an underground facility that the characters are trapped in. It might lack the puzzles, but it is incredibly well written, and as we see with Abyss of the Sacrifice, sometimes a VN is better off without the puzzles anyway.
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