BELOW

nah

Note: This review didn’t fit into the character limits on Steam, so the conclusion is in the comments below. Played on [b]Steam Deck[/b]. Performance was acceptable with occasional crashes. Important: the ending cutscene is bugged on SD and will not play. I had to watch it on Youtube. What is [i]Below[/i]? It’s… hostile. It’s achingly beautiful. It’s sometimes boring and frequently baffling. It’s a rogue[i]lite[/i] by Capy games, the creators of the excellent short game [i]Sword and Sworcery[/i], with which [i]Below[/i] shares virtually nothing in common except a lone wanderer for a protagonist, and a very strong sense of aesthetics. You, as a nameless explorer of the Isle, must descend a large number of dungeons to the very bottom of the Isle, collecting fuel for your lantern, fighting enemies and trying to survive along the way. To start with, I want to make it clear that my completion run for this game was on [b]Explore Mode[/b], which was added to the game two years post-release. I actually bought it before this mode was released, and gave up in frustration on my original playthrough. The game mode that existed on release is preserved as [b]Survive Mode[/b], which I wouldn’t recommend for any but the most masochistic of players. “Explore Mode” sounds like some kind of “easy” or “story” mode, but I can assure you it still presents a real challenge. I would put it somewhere on the level of [i]Dark Souls[/i]. It basically just removes the most tedious of elements from “Survive”, like the hunger and thirst meters – and it was absolutely the right decision to do that, not least because these gruelling survival elements detract significantly from the things the game does best. The art direction is gorgeous, the atmosphere impeccable – who can appreciate that when they’re stressing that they haven’t found a turnip to eat for five minutes? Savour that turnip, by the way – it won’t respawn until you die. On the subject of atmosphere, the art and sound design in this game is perfect. Seriously, without flaw. The lighting and low-poly style are unique and attractive. The use of music is minimal, but the music that is used (courtesy of longtime Capy collaborator Jim Guthrie) is all the more impactful for its scarcity. It’s also noticeable that barely any music is repeated; seemingly every floor on the Isle has multiple unique themes. Other sound effects are pitched at exactly the right level – unintrusive but immersive. It brought on a special delight each time I noticed the quiet trickle of water down a cave wall, and a wince when I loudly rattled over a pile of bones in the silence of the ruined city. That sort of attention to detail is typical of [i]Below[/i]. The world is nominally “procedurally generated” but it doesn’t feel that way at all. In fact, I think the developers did themselves a disservice advertising it as such. This “procedurally generated” world is made to a large extent of set pieces that don’t vary at all (some examples being the “safe” city area in floor 7, or the north shore with its numerous shipwrecks). The computer generation is limited to certain minor aspects the “floors” (dungeons). For example, the layout of each individual room is partially randomised, but the overall floor pattern is pretty consistent between runs; while a certain room on floor 15 might contain a different consumable treasure item each run, and have a wall or chasm on varying sides of the room, the macro layout of the level is always an “S” shape with consistent entry, exit, and main quest item locations. This enables a huge amount of handcrafting which gives each floor its own unique atmosphere and challenge. And it does feel very lovingly handcrafted. There are tons of tiny details that are easy to miss, but make the world feel so alive. For example, if you bleed on the floor and wait around for a bit, tiny black slugs will appear to feast on the blood. If you kill those, they drop sludge, which can be used to craft bandages to stop you from bleeding next time. Another neat detail: the foxes on the north shore follow you around until you do what they want: light the campfire! Once they have a cosy place to sleep, they ignore you and snooze in the fire’s glow. Explore Mode enables you to experience all of this without the pressure of hunger, thirst and single-use campfires to bog you down. There is still more than enough challenge to satisfy a player who seeks it, but far less punishment. Chill with the foxes on the beach for a bit, don’t worry about whether your meaty morsels will run out. You’ve earned it! The other thing that Explore Mode helps you out with is, well, the exploration. Exploration is not optional in [i]Below[/i]. In order to complete the game, you [i]must[/i] explore every nook and cranny of the Isle. Not just because doing so unlocks shortcuts that reduce the tedium of inter-floor travel by a factor of ten, but because without finding every last collectable light bit hidden in the corners of the dungeons, of which there are twenty in total, you will not be able to finish the story. But it’s very hard to explore when the game punishes you for trying to do so. It’s already difficult enough in Explore Mode, where the threat of losing your lantern somewhere barely accessible is enough to induce extreme caution in new areas, without adding in Survive’s offers of one-hit kill traps, warp points that break on use, and the spectre of death by starvation if you don’t find it fast enough. I struggle to understand why nobody at Capy realised that releasing the game with Survive as the only mode was a bad idea. My understanding is that this game was a financial disappointment, and it’s not hard to see why. The core survival mechanics directly undermine all of the best and most unique features of the game. I’m sure this artistic decision was taken for a reason, early in development, and the team grew attached to the concept of tension between desire to survive and necessity to explore as a key theme of the game. But surely playtesting would have thrown up that it simply didn’t work in practice? Sadly this lesson had to be learned on contact with commercial reality. But full kudos to the developers for introducing a better way to play post-release, rather than doubling down on their mistake. [i]Below[/i] doesn’t have much of a story. There is the bones of one there to be pieced together by a truly dedicated player, but this game runs mostly on (amazing) vibes. The ending is really the only time when any context is given to your actions, and frankly I felt it didn’t work. [spoiler]I never like it when games deceive you about the actions your player character is taking. To spring “actually you were evil all along” on the player in the last thirty seconds of the game just isn’t narratively satisfying for me.[/spoiler] But in any case, I suspected from very early on that ending wouldn’t offer any easy satisfaction. This is, after all, a game that begins by forcing you to watch a small dot on the sea for about five solid minutes. Easy gratification of players clearly wasn’t foremost in the game design! The story isn’t the only thing that doesn’t provide context. Virtually nothing in the game is explained to you. Some things were inferred easily (“I have to collect the light bits”), some discovered totally by accident (“oh, a short tap on the shield bashes an enemy!”) and some will forever remain a mystery (I still don’t know what a “green elixir” does). A tooltip or two would have been helpful here. I understand why not knowing how anything works enforces a sense of foreignness and isolation on the player, but over a 25+ hour campaign there should be some method of working out the function of consumables or environmental interaction points, somewhere. Once again an uncompromising artistic vision has trampled the basics of game design into the mud. Conclusion and verdict below...