Well this is a charming little project :)

With Aggro Crab's upcoming crustacean-themed souls-like "Another Crab's Treasure," releasing this coming week, I figured I'd familiarise myself with their debut game, Going Under: Internships Are Heck, to give it its full title. Suffice it to say, I was incredibly charmed by the cut of this game's jib.

Going Under is a procedural roguelike dungeon crawler where you play as newly-employed intern Jacqueline Fiasco as she tries desperately to climb up the corporate ladder of her employer, Fizzle, a lowly subsidiary of megacorporation Cubicle. Though she was hired based on her marketing skills, Jackie finds herself instead trawling through dungeons and fighting goblins, demons, and skeletons in the vague hopes of getting a promotion.

It's a cute and humorous premise, and honestly, it gets a lot of mileage out of it, employing (pun intended) a sharp wit (with some genuinely funny dialogue) and a charming cast of co-workers to pull you into its world and keep you there with a simple yet engaging combat loop that never really gets tired, thanks to a rotating roster of skills, modifiers, and weapons that help continuously switch things up.

Needless to say, the art style is, of course, also a huge draw, seemingly drawing from corporate motivational posters as inspiration and spinning that off into its own kitschy, genuinely adoring look and feel for all of its characters and props.

Really, I'd say the only part that could bring the whole thing down a bit for many people is the difficulty spike in the second half of the game. To provide a bit of context, as spoiler-free as I can make it, the game has its own "rotating of the castle" moment at the midway point and encourages you to go through it all over again except with an extra challenge this time in order to get the true ending.

Now, usually, prospects like this (especially if they are mandatory to seek out the "true" ending) generally turn me off, but to its credit, Going Under isn't a particularly lengthy game; it has a really enjoyable gameplay loop, and there are some handy 'assist mode' settings for accessibility purposes that you can tweak on top of that, so it's really not as taxing as that might sound.

So yes, there is a difficulty spike in the second half, but it's much more manageable than it might seem.

Really, my only complaints are down to issues with RNG, but really that's more of an issue with roguelikes as a genre than this game specifically, as its kind of built-in to the whole experience of them. Besides that, the combat can perhaps get a bit repetitive, especially if you're attempting the same dungeons multiple times in a row during that tricky second half, but again, it does the job well enough.

For a first outing, though, Going Under is incredibly charming and supremely impressive in how well it is put together and presented in all facets of the game. There are some setbacks but not enough to warrant caution in recommending it to anyone at all.

In fact, if you're tired of scrolling through Indeed or LinkedIn all day, playing this will no doubt prove to be an incredibly cathartic experience.

8.5/10

Besides being a front-runner for 'most unnecessarily-wordy title', this game also might be up there under 'most impressive celebrity cast for its budget', but regardless, Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure is a quintessential mid-2000s sixth-generation video game. It just has such a style and sensibility that feels like a time capsule of 2000s cool, from the fashion to the dialogue and the admittedly great soundtrack, featuring everything from Kasabian's 'Club Foot' to Nina Simone's 'Sinnerman'.

However, being a mid-2000s sixth-gen video game, it's also a relic of its time in less favourable ways: camera issues abound, half-baked mechanics that never really feel fulfilling and pacing issues with its campaign. It's not a bad game, however; far from it, it just has a lot of jank despite the charm of its premise and art direction.

Combat in particular is pretty lacklustre from start to finish, though the foundation they set up is decent enough as a combo-based button masher. However, when tougher enemies show up, it can be all to easy for them to trap you in a combo with not much of a window to escape it.

As said, the camera can also get stuck on geometry that can mess up combat at times, but more crucially, it can make platforming (especially in tight corridors) more of a slog than it needs to be.

The story and dialogue are... okay. Very much a product of their time in a lot of ways, with a corny 'tough-guy' protagonist, admittedly voiced pretty well by the great Talib Kweli, with a tone that's unsure at times if it wants to be serious and grandstanding or light and fun.

Honestly, the platforming and graffiti parts are really the best part of the game, which is good since that's what the majority of Getting Up is. However, there's not all that much variety mixed in and that can really start to become apparent with the game's pacing issues as the story drags on longer than it maybe should.

Still, its undeniably a fascinating and pretty fun romp from 2006 that stands as a testament to why the sixth-gen of games and consoles are still so cherished.

6/10

Going into this, I assumed Hypnospace Outlaw would more or less be a quirky 90s internet simulator, and it is that—but it's also much more. At the risk of sounding really pretentious, it's kind of a tribute to the internet, regardless of the time period, in all its best and worst forms. For every troll or hacker dweeb with a holier-than-thou attitude, there are just regular, passionate folks that are sharing their hobbies online. For all the games and media in general that try, and sometimes fail, to appropriately capture internet culture or modern culture in general, Hypnospace Outlaw doesn't feel out of touch at all, presumably since it harkens back to a simpler time when the web was this hot new thing with a relatively miniscule install base (at least compared to today).

Now, of course, you could be cynical about Hypnospace and claim that its just capitalizing on nostalgia and has no substance or value for people who weren't on the ground floor of the pre-Y2K fervour it depicts. That said, as someone born in 1997, I could fully get on board with the cosy, charming, and somewhat naïve world wide web that Hypnospace is recapturing. I suppose since the game takes place in a fictional version of the early internet and you play as a newcomer to it, that does help bridge that gap for people like myself. However, the point is that I had no qualms getting on board with the version of the web that Hypnospace Outlaw is selling.

The writing across the board is great, balancing heaps of silly with the occasional serious tones (depending on what sites you're visiting) without it coming across as jarring at all. As you explore the web and act as a firm but fair administrator for its users (and more so for the corporation running it), a mystery narrative also starts to develop that becomes really engaging and kind of takes it beyond the fun, quirky game that it seems from the outset.

The culmination of this mystery is decent enough but perhaps not as dramatic as some may be expecting, although, given the jovial, wacky writing and presentation of the rest of the game, perhaps making it too dramatic and dire would have betrayed the overall feel that Hypnospace Outlaw goes for as a playful examination and time capsule of early internet culture.

Really, my only big complaint is that some of the cases you're handed down by your bosses can have really abstract solutions and unless you've really been paying attention to every detail of every site you visit, you may need to consult a guide once or twice. However, of course, your mileage may vary there.

Even with those quibbles, Hypnospace Outlaw is such a spectacular treat in every way a video game or piece of media can be, whether you're intimately familiar with the pre-Y2K internet or not and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

10/10