Apsulov: End of Gods is a first-person perspective Sci-fi Horror Game created by Angry Demon Studio, the same developers of Unforgiving – A Northern Hymn. The game is based on Scandinavian Mythology.
The humans delved far beneath the earth to find the mercy of the gods. What they found was never meant to reach the surface. Not on Midgard, nor any of the nine realms of Yggdrasil. Now their discovery wreaks havoc on their world, exploiting their technology, and leaving all in misery and decay. Through all their conquests and revelations they never stopped to consider that some things are buried for a reason.
In a world of technology and mythological artifacts, chaos rules over the human realm. It is in this chaos that you find your purpose and destiny.
In this future viking horror you awake in a sanctuary of steel and concrete, built to research and exploit the worlds of Yggdrasil, and to house an artifact, buried in the earth aeons ago.
Unveil the secrets of the mythology, the artifacts, and the realms of Yggdrasil in Apsulov: End of Gods.
The game was released on August 8, 2019 for PC. It will also be released for PlayStation 5, Playstation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in the summer of 2021.
Apsulov: End of Gods includes the following tropes:
- Actionized Sequel: The game is a lot more action-y than Unforgiving, largely thanks the number of enemies increasing - along with your capacity to run and hide from them - but also thanks to Jarngreipr, your personal Arm Cannon. This is most notable with trolls, which appear in both games. While in Unforgiving, getting noticed by one of them meant your were already dead, in Apsulov, you're capable of killing them (unless you run out of charges in Jarngreipr, in which case back to Survival Horror you go).
- Air-Vent Passageway: You'll spend a lot of your time, especially early in the game, crawling through the vents between various areas of the facility - you and your enemies both, as a matter of fact. Their large size is somewhat justified, as the Apsulov facility is over eight hundred meters underground.
- Apocalyptic Log: Several of the audio logs you find throughout the game belong to people about to die — most notably Phillip, a man who records several messages trying to make sense of what happened as he's transforming into one of the flayed men.
- Applied Phlebotinum: Eitrium, the "magic energy" that Thor's hammer gives off. It can charge electronic equipment, activate machinery, and kill some magical creatures.
- Arm Cannon: Your artificial arm, when sufficiently powered up, can fire a blast of eitrium capable of turning flayed into wraiths, destroying wraiths and outright killing trolls. Unfortunately, the blast uses up most of Jarngreipr's energy, so unless you have a lot of power cells on hand or a charging station nearby, it can't really be abused to FPS your way through the game.
- Artificial Limbs: During your first trip into Niflheim, you get your right arm bitten off by one of the... friendly natives before Hendrik manages to rescue you. When you wake back up, he's installed a prosthetic arm he calls Jarngreipr in its place, which can also fire energy blasts and remotely activate electronics.
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever : The frost giants fulfill this role.
- Aura Vision: The Sight is a natural ability magical beings possess - as well as one that can be granted by an eye implant - that allows the user to see various magical symbols, entities and supernatural power in general.
- Body Horror: In spades.
- You get your first RFID chip from a person who's still alive despite being chopped into pieces.
- The flayed enemies are literally that - people who have been Flayed Alive.
- The beast following you looks like two entities fused together, and even begs you to kill it.
- Loki's body is utterly ravaged because of potentially eons of having acid dumped on his body. He also has a mask grafted on his face to ruin his handsome looks and prevent his shapeshifting.
- The keepers of Helheim, which consist of a headless corpse with spider legs coming out of the abdomen and carrying it around.
- Big Damn Heroes: You need rescue the first two times you step into Niflheim, and both time, someone provides it.
- Hendrik saves you and drags you back to Midgard when monsters tear off your arm, then provides you with an Artificial Limb and, as a bonus, fixes up your throat, which was messed up after whatever Loki did to it.
- The second time, the two-headed dog monster snatches you up from the frost giants and carries you out of their reach, then deposits you by an exit.
- Bowdlerise: In-universe; one of Sara's audio logs notes that the myths and legends known to humans present far softer and less gory versions of actual historical events.
- Brain Uploading: After Hendrik is mortally wounded by Loki, you bring him a soul stone to upload his mind into.
- Cult: Borr Corp has a lot of hallmarks of it, with many people - chief among them the founder himself, Hendrik - worshipping the entities they're researching, and Doctor Yang noting that there is a distinct cult of personality surrounding Henrik. It gets far, far worse when Loki crosses over and starts talking to them through the machines, whereupon it turns into an actual cult, to the point where a significant portion of the facility's employees drink the blood of the roots just because "the spirit" told them to.
- Dead Person Impersonation: Sara died before the game even started, and Loki assumed her identity to manipulate Hendrik.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: At some point, Hendrik and Sara realize that if you get killed, you come back to life, and Hendrik chokes you to death just to check it out. When your character comes back and gets understandably angry, he points out that death has pretty much no meaning to you.
- Discovering Your Own Dead Body: When your soul escapes from Helheim, you get a new body (since, obviously, your corpse didn't go with you). Since Jarngreipr wasn't part of your soul, you need to find your dead body to get it back.
- Electronic Eyes: Hendrik's left eye is artificial, glowing bright blue. This is quite recent - he took out the original one in an attempt to emulate Odin and reach the Well of Wisdom.
- Elevator Action Sequence: There's a section where you have to ride up to the surface on a massive cargo elevator. Unfortunately for you, it's infested with the Niflheim spiders. Fortuantely for you, it's also filled with numerous nooks and crannies to hide in.
- Escaped from Hell:
- An actual mechanic. Whenever you die, you end up in ether, a small chamber with a hole in its centre. If you manage to reactivate the whirpool in the hole and jump into it, the game returns you close to where you've last died; if you fail (and from second death onwards, this grows harder), you're sent back to your last save point instead.
- After you destroy the ether, Loki sends you into Helheim, the actual Norse afterlife. Your next goal?
Escape from the land of the dead. - Flaying Alive: The most numerous enemies in the game are people who have no skin. They're employees of Borr Corp who flayed each other alive after drinking the blood of the roots, driving them insane.
- Foreshadowing: Your character being a reincarnation of Hel is foreshadowed a few times.
- At the start of the game, Loki orders you to pick "your symbol", with each rune you can choose corresponding to a statue that - if you know some mythology — represents a god. It's not actually a choice, as there's only one of them that he'll accept, and if you pick another, he'll rage about how you're completely wrong.
- An audiolog you can find talks about the soul stones you've been using as save points, and how according to documents, only "higher beings" can use them.
- Fungus Humongous: Jotunheim greets you with a whole copse of those at the entrance, and they grow in spots all over the place, with the smallest reaching up to your waist and the largest slightly taller than you.
- Gameplay and Story Integration: The save points - or soul stones, as they're called in-universe - actually work as advertised, storing a copy of a person's soul and restoring it from that moment in time in case of death. There's an entire branch of Apsulov facility dedicated to figuring out how that's possible, complete with theories of time travel and branching realities.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation: The first flayed you see is crawling through the vents ahead of you as a scripted jumpscare. When they're actual enemies, they will not actually crawl into either vents or pipes, meaning you can hide from them there.
- Giant Spider: The keepers of Helheim are human-shaped spiders that use human corpses the way hermit crabs use shells.
- Great Offscreen War: While within the facility, things have calmed down somewhat by the time you wake up (if only because everyone else is either an enemy or dead), the scant few messages coming from the surface indicate that there's a full-blown apocalypse underway, with people dying in droves and numerous monsters crossing over into our world through the roots.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: After Hendrik is attacked by Loki, you find him again in two pieces. Miraculously, the upper half is still alive enough to instruct you on how to save him.
- Immortality Seeker: Hendrik's entire reason for exploring Apsulov was to find a way to rid humanity of disease and pain, and achieve immortality. Loki used this to take over the facility by planting the idea that drinking his blood would achieve just that.
- Immortality Immorality: The flayed were created when the employees of the facility drank Loki's blood flowing through the roots after a "voice in the machine" (AKA Loki himself) convinced them it would make them immortal. By the time you wake up, they're utterly insane and, in many cases, violent.
- Innate Night Vision: Apart from working as an Aura Vision, the Sight allows for seeing in the dark - which is crucial, as several areas of the game are pitch black. Unfortunately, it has a cooldown, so it pays to plan your passage accordingly.
- Last Disc Magic: When visiting Helheim for the second time, you gain Hel's power, which not only allows you to replenish Jarngreipr from the souls of the dead - a plentiful currency in Helheim - but also halves the cost of the killing blasts. Suffice to say, your way back out of Hel is a far different experience than your way in.
- Luck-Based Mission: Non-crucial, but to get the "Good choice" achievement (as well as avoid Loki's ire) at the start of the game, you have to choose the proper symbol among ten given to you, and unless you know not only the twist regarding your identity but also either the runes or the paraphenalia of Norse gods, you're picking blindly. The correct answer is the "N"-shaped rune under the statue of Hel, the goddess with half-rotten face.
- Lean and Mean : Loki is hideously emaciated, and is as evil as in the myths.
- Machine Worship: How Loki first ingrained himself into the Apsulov facitlity — he came over into the computers through the Apsulov and began talking to the personnel working at them. Fast forward a short time, and most of the employees are basically cultists of his.
- Made of Iron: The people in the facility, though nominally human, can survive (at least for some time) events that should kill them twenty times over, from being Flayed Alive to dismemberment to bisection. It strays into Super-Toughness if you consider that it's likely everyone you see drank Loki's blood, which is supposed to make you immortal.
- Magitek: Borr Corp runs on this - literally, the Apsulov facility is powered by Thor's hammer. Additionally, they have turned the magical creatures' Aura Vision into an eye implant and created an Arm Cannon that can use magical energy to destroy ghosts.
- MacGuffin Delivery Service: The nine keys of Apsulov, as well as the eye of Odin is what Loki needs to fully set himself free. He manipulates you and Hendrik, in the guise of Sara, to fetch them and use them.
- Multiple Endings: You're given two options at the end.
- The first is to kill Loki and hope that humanity will make it through the new world alright.
- The second is to side with Loki and rule over the new world with him, which also seems to wake the other gods to fight him.
- Mr. Exposition: Sara and Hendrik take turns filling you in on both the mythology and the circumstances of the current situation.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Destroying the ether and activating the Apsulov are just what Loki wanted.
- Only Sane Man: There seem to be precious few people with any semblance of common sense working at the Apsulov facility.
- Doctor Yang is highly critical of the leadership's full-on believer approach to the magical artifacts found in Yggrdrasil's many realms, insisting on studying them as if they were natural phenomena rather than blindly accepting them as magic. When his coworkers buy the whole immortality spiel and begin to drink from the roots, he transfers out of the facility as fast as possible.
- Lisa Svensson is, as far as can be ascertained, the only person to point out that the entire staff is working right next to an object emitting radiation of unknown properties without any protection or shielding.
- Our Ghosts Are Different: Wraiths are entities left behind by the Jotuns and the flayed that can be destroyed a blast of eitrium from Jarngreipr. They're visible as a shimmer in the air without Sight and a coloured silhouette with it, and can harm you if you step into them. The Jotun wraiths are simply environmental hazards, but a flayed wraith will eventually come back to life if you don't destroy it.
- Our Giants Are Different: Frost giants appear as recurring enemies in Niflheim.
- Purposely Overpowered: Hel's power, which you get in the last hour of the game, trivializes the encounters with the keepers. Deliberately so, considering you gain it by finding out that you're a literal deity.
- Reincarnation: Alice is revealed to be the reincarnation of Hel, Goddess of Death and daughter of Loki.
- Shared Universe: The game shares the same universe as Unforgiving – A Northern Hymn, as Freya's harp is seen as one of the collected artifacts in the facility (with Henrik mentioning that they retrieved it from the Näcken after destroying it).
- Shout-Out: Loki's One-Winged Angel form bears a remarkable resemblance to the final boss of Clive Barker's Undying.
- The Scottish Trope: The frost giants are only ever referred to as "natives" in the formal messages between Borr Corp employees.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: When the employees of the facility start going insane, Doctor Yang transfers up to the surface on the first departing elevator. And not too soon, as by the time you wake up, the only people still alive down there are you and Hendrik.
- The Stinger: A young voice awakens Thor and informs him of Fimbulwinter's beginning and Helheim's awakening. Thor orders the voice to awaken Odin and fetch his hammer, to pay a visit to Helheim again.
- Tempting Fate: One of Sara's early audio logs notes that the expedition team has found proof of the existence of several Aesir, and that the fact that Loki is real worries her. Sure enough, the facility is in the state it is right now because Loki took it over. And for more delicious Irony, he killed Sara and is now impersonating her. She was right to worry.
- Towering Flower: Apart from giant mushrooms and giants, period, Jotunheim also has giant ferns that would utterly dwarf even Midgard trees.
- Unexpected Gameplay Change: The final forty-odd minutes of the game, from the moment you gain Hel's power gets less Survival Horror and more Action Horror as you blast your way through the enemies in pursuit of Loki and then have a boss battle with him at the gates of Helheim.
- Voice with an Internet Connection: Sara and Hendrik contact you from time to time to let you know what's happening and update you on your goal, though they can't reach you outside of Midgard. Later, after Hendrik uploads himself into a soul stone and Sara is revealed as Loki, he serves the same function alone.
- We Can Rule Together: After completely failing to kill you, Loki makes this offer. You can take him up on it if you choose.
- The Worf Effect: When Loki first reveals himself in person, the two-headed dog monster that has been menacing you for some time attempts to attack him. Loki kills them with literally one finger.
