Welcome to our review of Below, a game with a certain nonchalance to it and it may be the game I hate the most in my life right now and I adore it for this…
Explore the vast subterranean underworld of The Isle: a dangerous, unfathomable deep. Choose your path through the randomly generated labyrinth crawling with deadly monstrosities, traps and hazardous environments. Perma-death awaits at every false step, and there are no hints to guide you… Spelunking through The Depths of BELOW is a treacherous endeavour, with death around every corner. The world is alive with flora & fauna, and there are many ways to scavenge materials and harvest ingredients to create life-saving remedies or useful survival tools…
What lies below? Only the bravest wanderers will find out. The Depths are filled with secrets and danger. BELOW embraces the idea that players enjoy discovering secret areas, finding hidden passageways and unraveling the deepest mysteries hidden in the darkness…
Below is one of those games you come across in your life and you just wonder what it is about and how do you really play it. Without a single word spoken, no tutorial, nothing, you start in the world of Below. A roguelike dungeon-crawling RPG, a mouthful and this game looks adoringly darkish and noir. So many things combined in this one sentence and it was the best way I could find to really describe this game.
When I started playing, I picked the survive mode and not the explore mode. A lot of instant deaths later, I got so tired of the game, I wanted to quit and not even bother with this review. It was a gigantically frustrating experience and that roguelike aspect of the game did not do it any favors. Every single time restarting the game from the boat, which is the starting point, not knowing what I had been doing and even why.
Explore mode was not really different, despite feeling a lot easier, meaning a lot less of the “death” part. Though I was still struggling with my main feeling of being lost in this game. What was I really doing…
In itself, this game is beyond pretty. This dark, noir feeling, it is simply what kept pulling me back in. I quit Below like 5 times now and yet I keep going back to this debacle of a game. One time I died in the third floor, so I went in for the quick recovery of my items and went to my dying spot asap. I died probably around 5 minutes before I made it.
You know how in monopoly you can draw that card to go back to start and it can be a disappointing feeling? Imagine that multiplied by 10. That in itself is how I describe Below.
I went as far as to read up on some older reviews on the Xbox release from a few years ago. Most reviewers had the exact same experiences as me. Puzzled with what was going on and I was unsure what was happening. I guess that really says it all, doesn’t it?
In conclusion, Below is a game that forgets to make sense at times so I hope my microwave atoms flies over the farm. Maybe in the summer, snow will fall again and make Below a game we can truly love?
