Going Under is a roguelike dungeon crawler game that takes place in the middle of fictive startups and conglomerates. You find yourself hired by an AI that awarded you with the role of being an unpaid marketing intern, but really, you’re more like an exterminator with the task to clear the basement of monsters. And yes, I was listening to the song with the same name by Evanescence, while I was waiting for the game to finish downloading.
I never worked in a Silicon Valley startup but I feel like the game is more than just satirical. In the worst-case scenario, Going Under‘s setting is a sad truth about the worst kind of companies out there. Regardless of that, the game’s visuals are very vivid, cute, and overall rather beautiful. The heroine is a kickass lady and you really feel with her during the ups and downs of her internship and monster hunting.
What’s Going Under like?
Going Under has been developed by Aggro Crab Games and is being published by Team 17 (Worms, Overcooked, The Escapists). Next to a small visualizer project, this is the first title from Aggro Crab and it’s certainly worthy of your time.
As far as the gameplay goes it’s all rather classical roguelike mechanics. You can try your luck at fighting in the dungeons over and over again and you will die, die, and die. Over time your character will develop and your skills will improve. If you find that the challenge is a bit too much, you can also adjust various aspects of the difficulty, which I found really handy as well. In the dungeon, you can grab any kind of object that you find and use it as a weapon. Of course, some objects will be more effective than other ones, but overall the whole experience of fighting and advancing your character is rather satisfying.
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There’s also a bit of a story around the whole startup setting and mostly the characters are lovely and it’s always good when some character has a new dialogue or challenge for you to take on. There’s no actually spoken dialogue but the Animal Crossing-esque vocal squabbles are just as good as a dubbed dialogue, maybe even better.
If you want to have a look at how the game is really like, you can check out the video below with footage of Going Under on the Xbox, via Game Pass. If you don’t have a Game Pass you can also buy the title for around 19.99 USD, depending on where you look and what platform your buying for. You can play Going Under on Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, and Windows PC.
YouTube: Let’s Play: Going Under [Gameplay, No Commentary]
Photo credit: All media shown is owned by Aggro Crab Games and Team 17.
