Made in Abyss: Binary Star Falling into Darkness

Made in Abyss tells a deceptively cute story about a bottomless pit that mutilates anyone who tries to climb back out of it, and its 2022 video game adaptation is built around exactly that tension. Binary Star Falling into Darkness puts players in an original story set in the same world as the manga and anime, descending layer by layer into the Abyss while managing hunger, equipment durability and a curse mechanic that punishes ascent far more than descent. It's a faithful, structurally interesting idea for a licensed game -- and its Steam audience, Mostly Positive at 79.2% of 2,789 reviews, largely agrees the source material comes through intact. What they don't agree the game earns is its price tag.

The curse mechanic is genuinely the right idea

The Abyss's defining rule -- going down is fine, coming back up inflicts the Curse of the Abyss, with severity scaling by depth and speed of ascent -- is the single thing this game gets structurally right. It gives every expedition real stakes: dive deep enough and fast enough, and the climb back to camp becomes a genuine risk-management puzzle rather than a formality. Longtime fans specifically credit the game for not softening this mechanic to make the game more approachable, including specific character mutilation and death animations that multiple reviewers call out as faithful to just how unforgiving the source material actually is. For a series whose whole identity rests on that particular horror, getting this piece right matters more than almost anything else the game could have done well.

Combat and exploration don't match the ambition

Everything wrapped around that central mechanic draws far more mixed reactions. Combat is repeatedly described as clunky, with reviewers pointing to repetitive audio design, unsatisfying hit feedback and visuals that read as budget-constrained rather than stylistically deliberate. The bigger, more specific complaint is enemy density: monsters spawn frequently enough, and often enough outside the player's field of view, that exploring the Abyss's more atmospheric spaces turns into a steady stream of low-stakes skirmishes rather than the tense, deliberate descent the curse mechanic sets up. That complaint is serious enough that the game's own modding community built and maintains an unofficial spawn-rate fix -- a strong, independently verifiable signal that this isn't just one reviewer's pacing preference, but a real, widely felt design problem.

The price complaint that won't stop repeating

If there's one thing that unites this game's review history more than the curse mechanic itself, it's price. The single most-upvoted review on the entire page opens with "Triple A pricing for a B budget game," and that framing -- full price buying more polish than the game actually delivers -- recurs across dozens of reviews on both sides of the recommendation split. Positive reviews routinely open with disclaimers like "only buy this on a steep sale" before recommending the game at all, which is a much stronger and more specific signal than typical "wait for a sale" advice: it's coming from reviewers who like the game enough to recommend it, qualifying their own recommendation around price rather than content. At its heaviest discounts -- as much as 85% off, bringing it under NZ$12 -- that calculus shifts considerably; at full price, the game's own fans are telling you not to.

Who actually gets the most out of this

Reception splits sharply along one clear line: familiarity with the source material. Reviewers who know and love the manga or anime describe real excitement walking through a recognisable version of the Abyss, and several put 70 or more hours into the game despite listing the same combat and pacing complaints as its detractors. Reviewers going in without that context report a much thinner experience -- a generic survival RPG with an unusually grim tone and comparatively little else to distinguish it. That split is worth taking seriously before buying: this is a game built for an existing fanbase's investment, not a survival RPG designed to win over players unfamiliar with what it's adapting.

Survival systems that occasionally work against themselves

Underneath the curse mechanic sits a fairly conventional survival layer -- hunger, equipment durability, crafting from resources gathered on each descent -- and reviewers who stick with the game describe it as functional rather than distinctive on its own terms. Where it becomes a genuine source of frustration is how those systems interact with the curse: one detailed negative review describes losing hours of progress to a cascading failure of broken tools, poison, paralysis and a snapped rope all converging at once with no save point in reach, which several other reviewers echo as a real, repeatable failure state rather than an unlucky one-off. That kind of compounding punishment is arguably in keeping with a story about a pit that mutilates anyone who climbs it, but it reads very differently depending on whether a player finds that thematically appropriate or simply badly balanced -- and the review corpus splits close to evenly on exactly that question.

What the achievement curve suggests about how far players get

Global achievement data shows a fairly ordinary shape for a survival RPG with real difficulty spikes -- completion falls from around 90% on the earliest, story-tied unlocks down to roughly 10% for the hardest tracked goals. That's not an unusual curve on its own, but read alongside the repeated "lost hours of progress" complaints above, it's consistent with a real share of the playerbase hitting the game's harsher failure states early and not pushing much further, rather than simply losing interest gradually the way a longer, more forgiving RPG's completion curve usually falls off.

Final verdict

Made in Abyss: Binary Star Falling into Darkness gets its one truly essential ingredient right -- the curse mechanic captures exactly the brutal, escalating dread that makes the source material distinctive, and its willingness to actually punish the player for that premise is more than most licensed games manage. Everything else, from combat feel to enemy density to a price tag its own audience keeps flagging as out of step with what's delivered, keeps this from being more than a conditional recommendation. Fans of the franchise willing to wait for a deep discount will likely find real value here; everyone else should look elsewhere first.