All Atmosphere, No Substance - BELOW
BELOW is a curious game that has many good ideas but is marred by a myriad of problem. It was recently developed and published by Capybara Games, who also published Sword and Sworcery. You play as an adventurer that happens upon ancient ruins to explore. I would give you more of a premise, but I have yet to find one. It is an interesting pseudo-roguelike game with okay combat.
The gameplay of BELOW is a Zelda-esc adventure game. Your character has a sword and shield that can be used to fight various monsters as you explore deep caverns. The combat mechanics themselves are pretty good. You can hide behind your shield and swing at enemies. If you want to be more tactical you can use a variety of different arrows to pepper enemies from afar. Going far enough into the game will give you additional weapons to use. While the mechanics themselves are solid, there is rarely a time when you really get to use them. Half of the game consists of enemies that are far too easy to fight. When challenging enemies, who I had to use strategy against, did show up, they were few and far between and were quickly thrown away as the later game threat emerged. The combat of Below was mechanically sound but was never given a chance to be used by the player.
The exploration side of the game was a mixed bag. On the one hand, I really enjoyed the environments that the game presented. They were steeped in atmosphere and hints of darker secrets. I wanted to learn more about the world I was delving into, and that was the problem. I never learned anything about the world. BELOW is a bundle of mechanics and environments with zero context. There has not been any explanation about why the player’s character is where they are or about the world at large. You are expected to be sold on atmosphere alone and that is not enough.
The lack of context is the main problem of BELOW. A game can bring a player in based on it’s narrative or it’s gameplay (or, hopefully, both). If there is no story in the game then you expect stellar gameplay and if there is little to no gameplay, you should expect a good narrative. BELOW chooses neither option. It has gameplay that could have been good but does not give the player the chance to experience it and there is no story, at least in all of the game that I have played. With so many games that give players a living or historical world to explore, why would you explore a world that only has empty atmosphere to offer? If there are so many great hack and slash adventure games with polished and challenging mechanics, why play a game that does not give you a decent opportunity to use their mechanics? BELOW needed to provide the player with something to keep them coming back to the game, but never really delivered.
On top of that, there is the BELOW’s pacing, which can be neatly summed up by saying that the game starts with a four and a half minute long intro of a camera slowly zooming in on a sailboat with zero dialogue and nothing important happening. The rest of the game follows that same mold. The first round-about two hours of gameplay that the player will experience will have nothing significant happen. You will descend down many levels of enemies that hardly fight back while you stock up on resources that have, at that moment, little apparent value. Every time the player dies, they will either be lucky enough to have made a nearby warp bonfire or have to slog through five minutes of dealing with the nearest shortcut. Basically, iteration time between runs is abysmally long and it takes an eternity for the game to get anywhere. Had I not picked up this game with the express interest in reviewing it, I probably would not have gotten past the first hour of gameplay. The tedious nature of the initial part of the game is juxtaposed to the brutal nature of the late game of BELOW.
What will follow will contain some spoilers of the later floors of BELOW. If you still want to play the game (despite everything I have said) and want to experience it for yourself, stop reading and go pick up the game.
Eventually, the player will descend to a point where the world becomes darker and they are accosted by a bunch of creatures of darkness with tentacles coming from the sides of the screen and constant monster spawning. At this point, the game actually becomes difficult and shows some glaring problems in BELOW’s game design. The first of these problems is grinding. In order to properly survive the depths, you have to enter it with a decent amount of food and resources as there are scant few resources below. If you die and are unable to get back to your sweet pile of loot, it will all be lost. That means that in order to get the necessary resources to survive the depths, you will have to go back through earlier levels. Yes, the same tedious, menial levels that you thought you were done with. Grinding is a terrible element of any game’s design. It is an active waste of the player’s time because the developers either did not consider the resources that the player would need in a given situation or, in a much worse situation, they needed to pad out gameplay time. This is a situation where the developers would have been better off dropping the roguelike elements in order to make a more cohesive and playable experience.
In addition, when you die you drop your lantern. That lantern is the most important item in the game, being necessary to progress through most areas of the game. One of the things that the lantern does is pick up shards, those being the items you need to find to progress. So, if you are tired of constantly dying in the depths and want to look for shards in other areas, you are fat out of luck. You are forced into a cycle of grinding for resources and trying to pass through the five or so floors of the depths in order to be allowed out again. The late game of BELOW is an insult to the players. It turns the game on its head, going from being an easy exploration game to a difficult survival game while giving the player no more of a reason to continue playing then they had before. While there are other issues with BELOW such as one hit kill traps and the zoomed out camera, I will rest my case for now.
Overall, BELOW is a game that had potential but did not capitalize on any of it. The game is painstakingly slow to get started and, even when it does get rolling, it fails to deliver meaningful gameplay. There is no apparent story or context to any of gameplay, just a bunch of atmospheric environments that you will want to learn more about but never will. The gameplay is mechanically sound but the player is never given a chance to really engage with the mechanics. Iteration time is painfully slow and death in later stages leads to a cycle of grinding and trying to get out of the late stage levels that is nothing more than a waste of the player’s time. There was a lot of potential in this title, but nothing came of it. I would not recommend it as there are far too many games that will give you an overall better experience.
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