The Metroidvania genre continues to grow with each year, and it’s not hard to see why. 2025 saw the release of the long-awaited Hollow Knight Silksong to high praise. I tend to love the genre, but it is also a bit oversaturated, making it hard to pick out a game in this genre to try out next. However, I recently got to play a demo for Chronoscript: The Endless End—a new game from DeskWorks Inc. and Shueisha Games with a visual style that could make it the next big thing.
Chronoscript: The Endless End Offers an Intriguing Premise
Chronoscript: The Endless End’s demo threw me right into the game. You step in the role of Frederick G Muller, an editor who has been summoned to a strange estate after finishing work on a long-running series. He suddenly awakens in a living manuscript with no way out. After some exploration, he encounters the owner of the estate, an immortal woman named Viola S Chambers. She has been writing this manuscript called “The Endless End” for a millennium and needs your help to finish it. The editor must now work with her to find out why she can’t finish her manuscript, all while traversing the dangers of it and other stories she has gathered throughout the years.
I think this is a great premise. The idea of having to unwrap an author’s psyche to help them finish their story, all while you have to explore the story itself, is very novel to me. The demo didn’t give us much information about the editor himself, but he has an interesting design, and I would like to know more about him. I find the author fascinating, and I am looking forward to seeing more of the editor’s dynamic with her. Despite the demo’s short runtime, I am sold on this premise, and hope the full game can stick the landing.
In the Pages
Chronoscript: The Endless End is a 2D action-adventure Metroidvania. The demo lets you play through the start of the game and covers the basics of gameplay. It follows the genre’s staples in its combat and exploration. In the demo, you have an attack, a jump, and a heal, but later you’ll unlock a double jump and a faster way of traversal. The demo also lets you fight a later boss, and it shows other moves you will eventually unlock, like a dodge and summon attack. While the combat doesn’t wow me, it has potential. I just hope it doesn’t take long to unlock the interesting moves in the full game
Where the demo excelled was exploration. Since you are exploring a manuscript, each section on the map is a page. The more you explore, the more the pages unravel, and it’s such a nice detail that it made me want to explore the entire section. Each page even has a number in the corner, like an actual book, and it looks like opening each page will be a collectible. The demo also included collectibles, and I am interested in seeing what they are used for in the final game. There also seem to be multiple books to explore, and I am interested in seeing how much the full game expands on this.
A Novel Brought to Life
My highest praise for Chronoscript: The Endless End’s demo goes to the visuals. The game is presented as an unfinished book, so the world is 2D and hand-drawn. The art style is perfect for the world, and I found myself stopping to just look at the environment. It’s not all 2D because you are in a manuscript that’s within a 3D world, so there is an interesting mix of the two.
There are sections where the physical world obstructs the manuscript, and the two styles blend seamlessly. It also makes this world feel more fleshed out, and I’m very interested in seeing more of it. I will say the 3D models are not as strong as the 2D ones, and the one part of the demo that showed the full 3D character model was a bit jarring. Still, this demo looked great and is one of the most promising aspects here.
A Lot of Potential
I see a lot of potential in Chronoscript: The Endless End. While the demo was short, it showed me enough to get me interested. The premise is strong, the gameplay is engaging, and the visuals are a delight. I am interested in seeing how the full game expands on what I’ve seen so far. If it sticks the landing, this could be the next great Metroidvania; if it doesn’t, it will probably still be a fun time. Chronoscript: The Endless End is set to release this fall, and I’m going to keep an eye on it, and you should too.
Disclaimer: Shueisha Games provided a Steam key of the Chronoscript: The Endless End demo for coverage purposes.
