Games are always a sum of their parts, and it's very possible for a game with sub-par gameplay to be rescued by the composition of its other overlain elements. Going Under is an extremely well-composed game that ties a knot between its anti-corporate prose and systems extremely well, but its combat is so voluminously bad that it became impossible to care past a certain point.

Writing-wise, I thought Going Under would be a surface level 'capitalism bad send tweet' game, but it goes beyond just platitudes and uses every inch of the game's setting, character interactions and gameplay mechanics to convey the wasteful, discomforting nature of corporate America. From its UI choices, metaphors in items and stats, UX-drenched artstyle, even down to the fact that combat involves constantly discarding disposable, cheap weapons - it understands its subject matter far better than its salespitch would make you believe, both in terms of style and substance. Character writing is also really great, with a supporting cast that feels more nuanced than the often black-and-white interpretations that games are (in)famous for. I think the only thing I disliked about it is that the dungeon villains are extremely one-dimensional 'person I argued with on twitter' caricatures, and there's no way to make these writing archetypes look like anything other than pathetic. I also think Jackie's a pretty mediocre protagonist, it doesn't feel like the game knows if it wants her to be a blank slate to project onto or a girlboss: You get tonal whiplash where one moment she acts naive and clueless so the game can explain systems to you, and then another she'll hear to the most innocent, supportive comment possible and respond with indignant sarcasm - And I promise this isn't a 'you should smile more often'-tier complaint, it's genuinely unwarranted each time, with the only real exceptions being some dungeon characters, Marv, and Ray.

Anyway uh, combat's fuckin' terrible! I knew going into this it would have roguelike tropes that I despise, and yeah, those are there. But man, the core challenge and game mechanisms reek too. I have a shitton of things I'd like to wail on, but it'd be easier to say this: It's trying to fit the weighted feel of BOTW's combat into a genre that demands snappiness, and it causes 90% of losses to be the result of shit you cannot react to due to visual clutter and overbearing wind-up frames. At the very least, it FEELS good to hit things, and the appeal of fighting with an amassed loadout of random shit ticks off a very fun part of my brain. But it stops being fun when you take 5 consecutive hits because a wave ganged up on you, your i-frames suck, and a bomb appeared out of nowhere.

Styxcoin's re-visit was where I gave up, I realized at a certain point that there was no way to effectively win fights without just letting enemies kill themselves off of stage hazards, and that was when 8 hours of suffering finally ticked and made me say, 'why bother?' My backlog's too large to give a shit about one zelda roguelike in a sea of literally limitless options.

It's hard to be mad about this game when it's good points are so well-integrated and many of its 'bad' and 'tedious' elements also complement its narrative. But once you reach the breaking point as a player, your motivation's gone. If I took most people's advice and quit after beating Marv, I would've given this an easy 8/10, because I liked the focal parts of its game loop a lot! But, y'know.