Chris InglisThe End of the Sun is a first-person narrative adventure by two-person indie developers The End of the Sun Forge and is an exploration-heavy, quiet journey steeped in Slavic pagan folklore and ritual. This game will heavily test your patience as you lose yourself in an atmospheric, moody folklore mystery that is well worth a play through.
You step into the worn leather boots of the Ashter, a sorcerer and supernatural tracker who wields the power of time. Your task is to hunt down a mythical firebird known as the Rarog, whose presence has fractured time itself around a secluded forest village. When you arrive, the hearths are smoldering and the people are gone. To unravel what happened, you must form mystical bonds with the village bonfires, sending out trails of smoke that guide you toward living echoes of past events.
The heart of the gameplay is its clever time replay concept. By meditating at fully kindled bonfires, you navigate an ethereal hub world representing a Slavic life tree to jump between distinct timelines. The village map isn’t massive, but you explore it across four different seasons. A pathway blocked by summer overgrowth might be perfectly open in the dead of winter, or an item missing in autumn must be retrieved from the spring timeline. It forces you to think across a chronological grid rather than just in the moment which is an interesting twist to the formula.
The downside is that the actual puzzle design rarely matches the cleverness of the time-travel structure. Despite unique thematic setups, the bulk of your tasks boil down to lightweight environmental chores and basic fetch quests. You spend a lot of time locating an object and placing it in an obvious spot or remembering numbers of items or sequences of events. I did have to write some notes for myself which harked back to adventure games of the 90’s without Internet walkthroughs to call on.
Given the game lacks a fast-travel system and features intentionally vague guidance, the lightweight puzzle mechanics frequently come with some heavy backtracking. It doesn’t take much to lose your bearings which can turn into stretches of frustrating backtracking and wandering, looking for some frame of reference to get back on track.
Visually, The End of the Sun is a fascinating mixed bag. The development team spent years scanning real-world museum artifacts, traditional peasant cottages, and natural environments using photogrammetry. The results show forests feeling dense and alive, and the warm glow of fires inside cottages are welcome sights after trudging through snowy sections. The character models look distinctly less quality, with some facial hair being slightly off.
The biggest hurdle for console players is the performance on the PlayStation 5. While the game looks beautiful when you stand still, panning the camera or moving through heavy foliage and smoke effects introduces some inconsistent frame rate drops. Even with an unlocked frame rate setting, the console struggles to maintain a stable 60 FPS. While the slow pace of the adventure means it won’t ruin your ability to play, the constant screen tearing and stuttering are impossible to ignore.
Fortunately, the audio design does an immense amount of heavy lifting to rescue the immersion. The ambient sounds of rustling wind and crackling fire are excellent, but the real star is the soundtrack. It features haunting, mystical vocal compositions inspired by traditional, Slavic folk songs that perfectly match the eerie, meditative atmosphere. The voice acting is generally solid enough to keep you grounded, and without it the game would lose a lot of immersion for me.
Overall, The End of the Sun has some performance issues on PS5 but is an excellent puzzle-driven journey through the seasons. It is a much slower paced game but the solutions are very clever once you review historic events and put the pieces together. The environmental atmosphere and authentic folklore make it a trip worth taking for patient adventure fans.
This review utilised a PS5 key provided by IMGN.PRO and The End of the Sun is available now on Steam, GOG, Epic Games Store, and PlayStation.
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Yonan