Undungeon is a special action RPG set at the end of the universe in which you play as an immortal messenger named the Void, who has been pieced together by God himself using a primordial stew of hot internal organs, conscious nature and wet ribs. Something very complicated has happened to reality and you’re here to fix it with charming Freddy Kreuger claws and clever dialogue choices.
I’m still not entirely sure about Undungeon. The characters, a series of floating orbs, damaged flesh angels and crystals, constantly try to explain what’s going on, but it never sinks in. Rotating debris rains like a strange meteor shower over a scorched wasteland inhabited by techno-nomads and acid-spewing scorpions. You’re taken down to the dusty mortal plane to plug everything back in and reset the multiverse, like a multidimensional BT engineer.
Undungeon looks and sounds unbelievable, from the stunning pixel art style to the electronic guitar soundtrack, the lo-fi, Ennio Morricone-ish twanging, gives the transcendent sci-fi movie a western vibe. West discord. Everyone you meet is pulled out of some corner of the timeline and looks totally weird and interesting: a mummified cowboy in a witch’s hat will trade you knives for The brain is supplemented by a thick iridescent braid.
About what you really do? Well, you’re doing your standard RPG missions for various locals, tracking down their lost friends, transporting manure around, and investigating the mysterious meat. You know, the typical demigod stuff. For the most part, Undungeon is a loot-centric, top-down action game in which you’re armed with a set of claws to attack, a ribcage to move defensively, and a mask that powers up your dash. You also have grenades, consumables, and arrows, all of which can be swapped out for improved versions or for new weapons that come with their own attributes and special effects.
As an immortal being built from divine biological scrap, the Void is also customizable on the inside, where it has value. You can upgrade your brain, skin, legs, heart, and guts for more advanced versions that come with permanent attribute boosts. Then there’s a bunch of runes and buttons that can be injected into your core to create a fine-tuned build to suit your preferred defensive or offensive play style. The Undungeon is superbly adjustable, overwhelming you with options and items and crafting mechanics from the start. Within an hour, you have at least 15 distinct arrow types to think about and twice as many grenades. But for all its versatility, the game is built on some seriously shaky foundations.
“No matter how you shape your personal Void, there’s something slightly different about the sauce underneath.”
No matter how you shape your personal Void, there’s something a little different about the sauce underneath. Your character has 360 degree motion but only four spheres (as in, you can only face north, south, east or west directly) and a single animation frame connecting them, so just moving around feels rigid and detached. There is no acceleration for the motion, so you feel no friction and distance. You have no weight. I’m not exactly sure how dimensional-hopping architectural creatures composed of primordial nature are able to move, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t look like the marble from Marble Madness.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why Undungeon doesn’t feel pleasant to handle, but it has a lot to do with having too few transitions between sprites and a chaotic visual feedback mess. while fighting. Most of the attacks are weightless, and there are so many different kinds of colorful spells and exploding weapons that are played in the beginning that it’s impossible to explain what’s happening even in the blink of an eye. The simplest time of battle.
Then there are the more difficult mechanics to survive, such as the way the screen dims and becomes cracked when you’re near death, making fighting even harder. Enemies level up and become stronger with each successful attack they land on you, which is clearly an attack way of working. Your custom organs act as an additional health bar, but if you take enough damage, they will be temporarily disabled until you return to the central world or reach a save point, which means is that the more you get injured the less your overall health you can heal with items.
All weapons and items are limited by a sniper stamina bar, see Void – who you will recall as the immortal servant of an eternal demigod whose ability to weave the fabric of spacetime as if they are knitting a scarf – will stop breathing if he swings his arms more than three times in a row. Death is a hard reset and completely wipes your progress, bringing you back to whatever checkpoint you happened to last touch, restoring any exp you gained, any changes you made. exchange the equipment you’ve made and the items you’ve picked up. It’s like this is some kind of avant-garde art project about what it would look like if the bad guys were allowed to design the rules of the game.
I’ve probably gotten tough because the elastic difficulty settings can invisibly turn down the challenge or give more helpful aids as you keep training, but Undungeon feels more obstinate is the challenge. It’s a game that gets harder the worse you play, and even if you succeed, you’ll still be bogged down by a choking wave of too many items and buttons and weapons and equipment. need attention.
There will be much less here, and sadly, the deep problems of Undungeon’s basics stand in the way of its strange and beautiful world, lovable characters, and wild sci-fi plot. its wild.
