Below, the newest roguelike adventure game from Capybara Games, is an experience that tries to be subversive and interesting by leaning into its brazen difficulty. Instead of achieving this admittedly noble goal, Below instead only succeeds at being an unforgiving and inaccessible mess of a game, one that will not endear itself to casual gamers or those who want a breezy action game with clear goals toward achieving in-game success. That’s not to say there aren’t aspects of Below that don’t work, of course. The game’s visual presentation is quite stunning and it’s obvious why the project took Capybara six years to construct, but it’s a shame the developers put so much time into something that ultimately proves to be lacking meaningful content.
Below starts with players sailing to unnamed island, in control of an unnamed adventurer. The overhead camera offers an expansive look at the game world, which is mostly painted in dark dungeons and slowly uncovered fog as players make their way through the harrowing missions. This is the first real sign of how aimless and confusing the world of Below is, and the game offers nothing in the way of helpful hints of how to traverse or proceed. Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a game not hand-holding its players, but without a logical map layout at the start of the game or any sense of direction, Below fails to justify this methodology.
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This would all be a little more bearable if Below‘s combat system was at least interesting or fun. Instead it’s repetitive and clunky, lacking refinement or polish and it feels like Capybara tacked it on at the end of the game’s long six-year development period. Enemies are also completely uninteresting, most killed for the express purpose of picking up pieces that fuel the player’s lantern (which is used to access certain pathways of the game). Thanks to the boring hack and slash nature of the combat, there’s little room for creature diversity as well and Below feels trapped by its limitations instead of freed by its attempts at subversiveness. On top of this, the archery system is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the combat, especially on the Xbox One version of the game, as aiming the bow takes more patience than it’s worth.
Then there’s the permanent death feature of Below, a staple of roguelike adventure games, something that should be tense, interesting and requiring players to give serious thought and planning in to how they progress through the game. That’s not how it’s implemented in Below, though, as all the planning in the world won’t save players from dying countless times in a frustrating crawl to the game’s climax. Sure, after an initial death, the game offers players certain shortcuts to make it through dungeons faster than they previously did to find the corpse of their previous adventurer and retrieve their loot. That still doesn’t take away from the almost ridiculous amount of frustration most will feel and it only adds to the helpless, unforgiving nature of Below.
It’s not all bad news for Below. There are certain areas where Capybara shows off exactly the amount of effort their team put into constructing the game. The graphics are truly wondrous and there’s a certain atmospheric presentation to the game that will grab players from the start and make them feel like they’re about to embark on a truly special adventure. This is emboldened by a score that is tense and mixes well with the realistic lightning flashes that strike across the sky and screen of Below‘s top-down perspective. It’s these details that give the early parts of the game the sense that there’s something truly compelling lurking beneath the surface. It’s just a shame most of the rest of the game fails to live up to it.
The procedurally generated cavern-like dungeons that populate Below are also well-designed and with each playthrough, players will find a whole new area to explore with different loot location and enemies to fight. This almost makes up for the combat system being so dreadfully dull and the permadeath feature being so brutally unforgiving. There are certainly a lot of aspects of this system to like, and more hardcore-oriented players will probably have a ball. Again, though, casual players will find more frustration than fun and the procedural generation of dungeons will likely only add to that feeling of alienation.
In the end, Below is a niche title that will probably be defended heavily by its target audience and dismissed by everyone else. It simply doesn’t offer enough diversity or accessibility in its earlier parts or its challenges to justify a purchase from anyone other than roguelike enthusiasts. It also doesn’t help that the little the game does offer in puzzle-solving or crafting mechanics both come off as completely useless. Again, there’s a tacked on feeling permeating throughout the game’s skeleton that it’s hard to shake the feeling that maybe even after six years in constant development by Capybara, Below was simply unready for its time in the dark.
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Below is available now on Xbox One and PC for $24.99. Screen Rant was provided an Xbox One copy for review.
