ABYSS: The Shadows of Elder Cities

ABOUT THIS GAME

In 1985 Ian Bale was writing a game at Vertex Systems, a small software house in Sheffield. One morning he didn’t turn up for work. His desk had been cleared and his notes were gone. Nobody ever saw him again.

Forty years later, builders renovating the old Vertex office found a cassette tape inside one of the walls. On it was the source code of a game that was never released.

This is that game.

ABYSS: The Shadows of Elder Cities is a first-person dungeon crawler drawn entirely in wireframe, the way a 48K Spectrum would have drawn it in 1985: thin lines on a black screen and very little else. The places those lines describe are much older than the machine.

You walk through cities that were ancient before people learned to build. Corners meet at the wrong angles. The towers give off a hum you can almost feel. Mi-Go, Elder Things and Shoggoths move through the dark, and you can’t fight your way past them. You can keep out of their way, or find something worse and set it loose on them.

ZX SPECTRUM VERSION

A free, playable ZX Spectrum 48K version of Chapter 1 (TAP and TZX) is available on itch.io.

THE SIGNAL (CAMPAIGN)

The campaign has five chapters, each set in its own city, with long walks across the desert in between. Every chapter changes the rules. You switch on the old towers, look for orbs and keys, release one horror to get rid of another, and slowly assemble a device that might get you out. Or it might be exactly what the signal wanted from you all along.

There isn’t much text. The story is in the buildings, in the quiet stretches, and in what you gradually begin to suspect about where you really are.

DESCENT (ROGUELIKE)

Descent has fifteen procedurally generated floors split into three acts, and you get one life. The first floors are quiet. Then things start happening, and near the bottom the levels themselves begin to come apart. Mutators and surge events make every run different. Killing an enemy gives you nothing, and some of them take something from you when they reach you: your compass, your map, or the walls you thought you could rely on.

2UP (VERSUS)

2UP is an asymmetric mode for two players. The Explorer plays in first person. The Overlord watches from above and makes their life miserable with traps, spawned creatures, lures, sensors, mirages and blind spots. Share a four-character room code to connect, then swap roles and see who lasts longer.

WHY WIREFRAME

The 1985 look isn’t there for nostalgia. A black screen and a few lines leave a lot for your imagination to fill in, and in this game your imagination is not on your side.

The story of Ian Bale and Vertex Systems is fiction. ABYSS is a new game, created in 2026 by Storm Weavers.