Below Review

The long drawn-out opening of Below seems fitting for a game that’s been in development for a long drawn-out time (to the point of being delayed ‘indefinitely’ back in 2016) only to finally arrive by quietly sneaking in at the end of the year with little fanfare. As you gaze from a distant top-down view at a boat sailing alone along the dark sea in the perpetual night for what feels like an eternity before finally arriving on the shore of a mysterious island for the first time (albeit the first of many), it also establishes a mentality of just how vulnerable and insignificant you are.

Just why you’ve arrived on this island and your actual goal isn’t exactly clear. Indeed, Below is deliberately opaque with its mystery and story, if you can call it that. Armed with just a sword and shield, you’ll also acquire a special lantern instrumental for lighting your path in the darkness below, and from thereon, there’s no explanations or tutorials to the game’s systems and UI - it’s up to you to figure things out.

Without trying to spoil anything, Below is primarily about exploration, as you navigate your way from one floor to another in the island’s seemingly unending subterranean labyrinths. There’s also combat, which is simple but effective, letting you liberally slash at enemies without managing a stamina meter, although doing so also risks knocking away important light crystals that act as both fuel for your lantern and currency to purchase items later on. On top of that are survival gauges you need to keep an eye on, from keeping your adventurer fed, hydrated, and even from freezing. You’ll need to figure out how best to make use of materials you find on your journey through a crafting system, which at least does highlight what materials can be used to fashion an item so as to not completely leave you in the dark.

Figuring out these elements isn’t particularly difficult after a few attempts, indeed it feels refreshing to learn everything for yourself. That is until you have to learn the most brutal lesson of all: death.

As a roguelike, you don’t just start back at the beginning after death but you’re actually playing a new plucky adventurer (squint and you’ll make out a different outfit or notice they have a different voice) arriving on the island perhaps years later but at a distinct disadvantage. The lantern, as well as any items you had, will be with your predecessor’s corpse so it’s an arduous journey to make it all the way back to retrieve it in order to make further meaningful progress.

This can be alleviated either by spending light crystals at a campfire as a one-time teleport or by unlocking shortcuts a la Dark Souls, but even these are few and far between, and get progressively further far apart the deeper you venture, which means you can be spending hours not really getting anywhere let alone just reaching your predecessor’s place of death.

Since rooms are partially procedurally generated, you can’t just run through based on memory to easily recover it. If anything, you’re encouraged to grind and be better prepared in order just to make it back to your last point of demise, which can make trying to get back into the action a demoralising slog.

No hand-holding is one thing, but while I can appreciate you need to learn from your mistakes, Below is often intent on kneecapping you before kicking the can out of reach.

Still, it’s hard to fault the game’s singular vision and distinct mood, having the audacity to obscure most of your surroundings in darkness while Jim Guthrie’s excellent score adds to the atmosphere. There’s something almost meditative about exploring these environments.

Not that you can necessarily take your time with it, because you also have to keep yourself from starving or dying of thirst. If you’re going to take a diversion in the hopes of finding useful items or secrets but don’t know if you’ll find your next meal in between, all while those gauges are ticking down, making it harder for you to reach where you left off in time, then the survival aspect discourages exploration.

Regardless of this, your journey also feels frustratingly repetitive. Granted, as you progress deeper below, there are different environments and enemy varieties (although worrying fewer enemies that actually drop light crystals), but the procedural generation doesn’t offer any significant variation to make it feel like your next run is going to offer anything different, rather it only makes enough alterations to annoyingly prevent you from being able to make a quick dash back from memory.

It also doesn’t help that from playing the Xbox version (though there are similar reports on the PC build) that after all these years, the game isn’t exactly in a polished state With some annoying crashes, sometimes the game just closing down after a death, as if telling you to pack it in.

Yet just when you feel like throwing in the towel, you may just get over that last puzzle or deathtrap, or finally unlock another shortcut that saves you trekking through the last few nightmarish floors, and you breathe a sigh of relief, thinking that the game’s about to cut you some slack. In reality, the challenge only ramps up, as you encounter enemies that might kill you in two hits or leave you bleeding to death unless you have bandages to spare (not to mention the space and time to apply it).

And when you’ve spent the past few runs back in the same squalid floors, subsisting on the same scraps of rat morsels, you’ll start wondering why you’re even doing this.

A difficult game like Dark Souls feels rewarding when you finally triumph over a seemingly impossible boss from learning its movements and improving your stats and play, while roguelikes offer a lot of variation from your last run to keep things fresh. Below, in its austere design, fails to offer either kind of incentive. There’s never any real sense of elation or wonder in discovery, merely a sigh of relief followed quickly by the dreaded realisation that things just get worse - but to what end?

Some players will gladly relish such a challenge, and you have to hand it to Capy for sticking to its guns on the kind of game it wanted to make. However, even for fans of Dark Souls or roguelikes, Below is a stubbornly difficult game that’s difficult to recommend, and it’s more apparent when in recent years there have been many more fascinating examples of the genres that aren’t quite as po-faced and wilful.