This review contains spoilers
Criminally underrated, or so I thought.
Audiovisually (with particular emphasis on the audio), this is one of the most beautiful games I have ever experienced, and I don't know of any other game that captures the essence of descending into the deep dark unknown as well as this.
It starts out great. First, a 4-minute long zoom in (that’s gotta to be a record) from a star-like expanse that resolves into a vast ocean with a tiny boat. Then the island overworld, the discovery of The Lantern, and the unlocking of the entrance.
Tip: The spike traps at the beginning can be extremely frustrating. Use the lantern. It highlights them. You can also swipe at the spikes to trigger them safely and render them harmless.
Then caves (1-3), and an ice layer (4) that leads to the dark tech corridor and the first boss fight. Then onto the necropolis (5-6) and the catacombs (7-9), with those dual-wielding zombie cultist assassin dudes that gave me so much trouble initially.
Then a brief cliffside reprieve (10-13), which leads to… the dark abyss (14-19). And this is where things start to go sour.
The dark abyss is a long, repetitive, relentless, exhausting gauntlet played in near-total darkness, with spiders and tentacles harassing you every second of the way. It would have worked if it was just a level or two, like the ice section, but this goes on for 5 levels straight with little variation. The only resources are embers and rocks, so you have to come fully prepared (at least 5 bottles of stew, hundreds of light bits, some bombs/bomb arrows, and lots of bandages).
This is where the tension among the game systems begins to show.
BELOW is a survival/crafting game, but resources are limited and the game is constantly pushing you forward (in survival mode, old campfires are destroyed and made unusable).
It’s also a roguelike game, but there’s not enough randomization to make it worthwhile, and starting back at the beach feels like a huge setback. If you play carefully, it’s actually not, as you keep any lantern pieces you’ve collected, shortcuts are still unlocked, resources and campfires are reset, anything you’ve stashed at the pocket is still available, and you can retrieve the rest of your stuff (including the all-important Lantern) if you can make it back to your body. Nevertheless, the punishment for death, which can come in seconds, translates to hours of lost time.
If you can make it through the overly long abyss section, you reach floor 20, which is an underground sandy beach with ruined buildings? And another dark tech section with a boss that is exactly the same as the previous one, just slightly different attack patterns. And then there’s a hard-to-notice underground body of water that you swim through to reach… another shore with another boat? It doesn’t make sense.
So you finally complete the Lantern, take it up to the top of the lighthouse under the stars, and then you gotta go back to the middle of the nasty Abyss to reach the Sarcophagus. And If you think your new supercharged Lantern is going to make a difference against the tentacles, nope, it doesn’t.
Then you unlock the Sarcophagus, warp back to the shore where the island is cracked and falling apart, and then there follows this clumsy, poorly rendered, macro-blocky ending cutscene showing the wanderer getting squished into a red drop by the tentacles, which then take over the whole planet. You go from a 4-minute-long zoom in during the opening to a planetary jump-cut in the ending. It’s out of place, lazy, and demoralizing. I think the ending cutscene was something they created at the very beginning of development (this game was in dev for over 5 years apparently), and then threw it in with no refinements.
And while it’s not Game of Thrones season 7 tier awfulness, the ending just made the entire thing not worth it. I was expecting an epic boss battle against whatever those tentacles were connected to, and hoping that at the very least the completed Lantern could, you know, do something. But no and no.
After that crappy ending cutscene, the game just resets and loops back to the beginning. Some people on the Internet call it New Game+, but as far as I can see, there’s no “+” to it. All your progress is wiped and the game just starts you over from scratch with no changes. No ending credits, nothing. Just start over, exactly the same as before. A disappointment, to say the least.
My personal theory is that the developers just ran out of ideas, steam, etc., so they stretched out floors 14-19, threw in their rudimentary ending cutscene, and called it a day. Other players have said that this game is a capital-A work of Art, and I’m not inclined to disagree. There were moments of genuine transcendental awe in this game, and I will never forget swimming through the wreckage of the old ships on the north shore as the thunder crashes and the music swells. But even works of Art can be flawed or incomplete, and this game feels like both.
As it is, BELOW feels like 75% of one of the greatest games of all time, and that’s a damn shame.
Audiovisually (with particular emphasis on the audio), this is one of the most beautiful games I have ever experienced, and I don't know of any other game that captures the essence of descending into the deep dark unknown as well as this.
It starts out great. First, a 4-minute long zoom in (that’s gotta to be a record) from a star-like expanse that resolves into a vast ocean with a tiny boat. Then the island overworld, the discovery of The Lantern, and the unlocking of the entrance.
Tip: The spike traps at the beginning can be extremely frustrating. Use the lantern. It highlights them. You can also swipe at the spikes to trigger them safely and render them harmless.
Then caves (1-3), and an ice layer (4) that leads to the dark tech corridor and the first boss fight. Then onto the necropolis (5-6) and the catacombs (7-9), with those dual-wielding zombie cultist assassin dudes that gave me so much trouble initially.
Then a brief cliffside reprieve (10-13), which leads to… the dark abyss (14-19). And this is where things start to go sour.
The dark abyss is a long, repetitive, relentless, exhausting gauntlet played in near-total darkness, with spiders and tentacles harassing you every second of the way. It would have worked if it was just a level or two, like the ice section, but this goes on for 5 levels straight with little variation. The only resources are embers and rocks, so you have to come fully prepared (at least 5 bottles of stew, hundreds of light bits, some bombs/bomb arrows, and lots of bandages).
This is where the tension among the game systems begins to show.
BELOW is a survival/crafting game, but resources are limited and the game is constantly pushing you forward (in survival mode, old campfires are destroyed and made unusable).
It’s also a roguelike game, but there’s not enough randomization to make it worthwhile, and starting back at the beach feels like a huge setback. If you play carefully, it’s actually not, as you keep any lantern pieces you’ve collected, shortcuts are still unlocked, resources and campfires are reset, anything you’ve stashed at the pocket is still available, and you can retrieve the rest of your stuff (including the all-important Lantern) if you can make it back to your body. Nevertheless, the punishment for death, which can come in seconds, translates to hours of lost time.
If you can make it through the overly long abyss section, you reach floor 20, which is an underground sandy beach with ruined buildings? And another dark tech section with a boss that is exactly the same as the previous one, just slightly different attack patterns. And then there’s a hard-to-notice underground body of water that you swim through to reach… another shore with another boat? It doesn’t make sense.
So you finally complete the Lantern, take it up to the top of the lighthouse under the stars, and then you gotta go back to the middle of the nasty Abyss to reach the Sarcophagus. And If you think your new supercharged Lantern is going to make a difference against the tentacles, nope, it doesn’t.
Then you unlock the Sarcophagus, warp back to the shore where the island is cracked and falling apart, and then there follows this clumsy, poorly rendered, macro-blocky ending cutscene showing the wanderer getting squished into a red drop by the tentacles, which then take over the whole planet. You go from a 4-minute-long zoom in during the opening to a planetary jump-cut in the ending. It’s out of place, lazy, and demoralizing. I think the ending cutscene was something they created at the very beginning of development (this game was in dev for over 5 years apparently), and then threw it in with no refinements.
And while it’s not Game of Thrones season 7 tier awfulness, the ending just made the entire thing not worth it. I was expecting an epic boss battle against whatever those tentacles were connected to, and hoping that at the very least the completed Lantern could, you know, do something. But no and no.
After that crappy ending cutscene, the game just resets and loops back to the beginning. Some people on the Internet call it New Game+, but as far as I can see, there’s no “+” to it. All your progress is wiped and the game just starts you over from scratch with no changes. No ending credits, nothing. Just start over, exactly the same as before. A disappointment, to say the least.
My personal theory is that the developers just ran out of ideas, steam, etc., so they stretched out floors 14-19, threw in their rudimentary ending cutscene, and called it a day. Other players have said that this game is a capital-A work of Art, and I’m not inclined to disagree. There were moments of genuine transcendental awe in this game, and I will never forget swimming through the wreckage of the old ships on the north shore as the thunder crashes and the music swells. But even works of Art can be flawed or incomplete, and this game feels like both.
As it is, BELOW feels like 75% of one of the greatest games of all time, and that’s a damn shame.