Once Human's Isles of Abyss Trailer Reveals a Living Ocean That Hunts Its Players
Once Human's free Isles of Abyss expansion turns its world into a hostile ocean, and a new gameplay trailer shows the ship-building and sea-horror driving it.
Once Human just turned its biggest free content drop into a horror story about the sea. Isles of Abyss, the largest expansion Starry Studio has shipped since the survival game launched in 2024, went live on October 21 (PT) across PC, console and mobile, and a new gameplay trailer posted to the game's official YouTube channel shows exactly why the studio spent months rethinking what an ocean in this world should feel like.
A Lighthouse That Shouldn't Exist
According to Lead Game Designer Vincent Tao, the entire expansion grew out of a single unsettling image: a lighthouse standing where no lighthouse should be. Writing on Xbox Wire, Tao said the team drew on H.P. Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" to invert a symbol that normally means safety. "We didn't want the sea to be an empty transit space connecting dry land," Tao wrote. "We wanted the ocean itself to actively hunt you."
That lighthouse became an eye, the eye needed a body, and the body became The Sunken Lord, a colossal living entity that the whole expansion now orbits. Drifting ghost ships with names like "Sworn Never to Port" and "No Return Voyage" litter the water as tragic, directionless wrecks, while anomalous lighthouses function less like landmarks and more like eyes that never stop watching.
Five Seas, Five Ways to Lose Everything
The trailer leans hard into that inverted-horror idea, and Tao's write-up spells out the mechanics behind it. Isles of Abyss splits the ocean into five marine sectors, and each one strips away a different survival pillar instead of simply dealing damage:
- One sector strips away your vision, leaving you to navigate by sound and instinct.
- Another erodes your sanity the longer you stay in its waters.
- A third scrambles your sense of direction, making compasses and landmarks unreliable.
- A fourth threatens to take your prized gear outright.
- A fifth strips away stable ground, forcing constant movement just to stay afloat.
The goal, per Tao, was to force "a radical shift in your survival protocol" every time players cross into a new region rather than letting the ocean become background scenery between islands. Boarding one of the expansion's ghost ships for salvage carries its own risk for the same reason: the game treats every wreck as a trap dressed up as an opportunity.
Your Ship Is Now Your Whole Base
Once Human's modular building system moves onto the water for this update, and the trailer spends a good stretch of its runtime on exactly that. Players can design anything from a stripped-down skiff built to dodge whirlpools to a multi-deck fortress carrying heavy naval cannons, crafting benches and deep-sea diving rigs. That vessel then doubles as the anchor for the expansion's three-layer endgame loop: navigating the open water, exploring the islands scattered across it, and diving to the seabed for the rare resources locked beneath.
Starry Studio is positioning Isles of Abyss as entirely optional spectacle rather than a paid add-on. The expansion is free for every platform, with full cross-play, and anyone picking the game up through Once Human's own site or its Steam page gets the same ocean as existing players the moment they log in.
The Sunken Lord Is the Whole Point
Everything in the trailer builds toward the fight the studio designed as the expansion's centerpiece. Rather than a ranged boss fight against a distant leviathan, Tao described squads breaching The Sunken Lord's outer perimeter, cutting through writhing tentacles and alien chambers, and finally pushing into the creature's heart as a full four-player raid. It's a deliberately claustrophobic climax for a game that usually keeps its threats at arm's length.
“We didn't want the sea to be an empty transit space connecting dry land. We wanted the ocean itself to actively hunt you.”Vincent Tao, Lead Game Designer on Once Human
Free to Play, Right Now
Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members can still claim the Once Human launch bundle through the Game Pass Perks gallery through November 18, and everyone else can jump in without spending anything, since the base game and the expansion are both free to play. Starry Studio has also opened four initial servers apiece in North America and Europe, with two each in several other regions, and the developer's own patch notes describe Isles of Abyss as running in two content phases over roughly three weeks before a permanent version of the mode opens up.
For a studio whose last major update was mostly additive, turning the entire map's relationship to water upside down is a genuine swing, and the trailer makes the case that it paid off: an ocean that watches back, built by a team that wanted players to feel like guests in a hostile stretch of water rather than tourists passing through it. It's also a reminder that Once Human's post-launch plans extend well past Nalcott's shorelines, and that the next expansion the studio ships is unlikely to play it safe either.
Official links
Mira leads previews at Gamers6. She has spent fifteen years playing co-op shooters badly and writing about them well, and she still keeps a spreadsheet of every weapon reload animation worth the frame count.
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