BELOW

I think a lot of the misunderstanding of what this game is and is about happens and where all the hate comes from. This is a roguelite game. I think a lot of the negative reviews come from players going into this thinking its going to be like Zelda or something similar. It is not. It is a roguelite it has meta progression and the way they handled meta progression far exceeds most other games in the genre. Instead of buying chunks of a castle that give you 2% extra damage the game says no you died you know where you died if you don't remember the HUGE amounts of shortcuts you unlocked to get back there that's your fault. You need to eat. You need to stay hydrated. You need to stay warm. Try again. That brings me to the entire reason I wanted to make this review the two biggest complaints ive seen in negative reviews. The difficulty and the story. It is not that difficult of a game. In 2018, yeah I can see it. There wasn't many games like this then. If you play this for the first time in 2025 after the golden age of roguelites you're going to be extremely confused as to why people say this game has a sadistic difficulty. If you have ever played a roguelite before and have basic resource management skills this game is going to comically under preform the difficulty you expect. There are difficulty spikes in the game and some truly hard sections but the game gives you tools to deal with them, you got swarmed in the lower levels, well you were using the caltrops weren't you anon? The combat is basic but it works so beautifully in game. The game does such a good job at creating atmosphere and immersion if you were running around like Hyperlight Drifter in Hades it would have been a horrible experience. You are just a tiny warrior surrounded by things much larger than yourself. You're not some hero capable of unbelievable feats of strength just a little guy with believable capabilities. As far as story they went for more of an Ico form of environmental story telling over the dark-souls kind. IE there isn't much story at all. I prefer that over a constant stream of exposition but I can understand why some people hate it. Tl;Dr if you're a fan of the ico games and don't mind some roguelite tomfoolery with genuine difficulty that was way overblown and can appreciate some of the best atmosphere put together with no undertones of exposition this is a hell of a gem for you.

This game is a hardcore survival roguelike with a great sense of mystery to it. It's very bold and self-assured, with its instant death traps and slow descent into darkness, its punishing death mechanics and its refusal to tell you anything about the story, and if it had more payoff I'd heartily recommend it. But as is, the juice is just not worth the squeeze; There is a single interesting reveal in the game but that's it, leaving most of the game's buildup as completely pointless. The graphics are simple but some of the vistas are very impressive and the backgrounds always give off a powerful atmosphere. The gameplay is simple and easy but incredibly punishing when you make a mistake, which makes it stressful but rarely fun. I'm pretty disappointed after spending over twenty hours on it, and I don't wanna spend longer writing or thinking about it.

This game is clearly a labour of love and is worth every hour I invested into it playing. It reminded me of everything great I loved about playing the original Prince of Persia/Zelda/Metroid/Castlevania and Demon Souls/Dark Souls. No hand holding, no patronising voice over/explanations just the story explaining itself as the journey went on. I wish there were more games like this, the visuals and music/Sound FX were amazing and the characters/enemies etc and areas/secrets to discover were brilliant! Thank you Below, you are now among the best games I have ever played in 40 years :)

My experience with this game: :D Wow, it's so beautiful and atmospheric. Oh, and the movement is so fluid. :) Oh cool. A crafting system. Make some soup. Ah, this lantern will come in handy! :| Hmm, not sure what I'm picking up. Oh, I can't carry much. Hm, can't drop it either. How do you even get to the inventory? :( What? Every item looks like a white blob? What the hell is this? Crafting is just pressing things at random and hoping for something useful? Am I expected to write down every crafting recipe by hand!? Damn... died to a spike track. >:( Okay, let's see if I can get back to my previous death area. Pick up my stuff. Go to the next room. At least I'm at full health... died to a spike trap. *quits* Looking over the reviews now and I think I agree with most of the negative ones that say "This game does NOT respect your time." I'm okay with games that don't really guide you much as long as the ease you into it (Animal Well did this PERFECTLY!). This one throws you in the middle and expects you to deal with figuring out ALL the mechanics right away. It seems you got to walk through every single place all over again after each death... and it seems to kill you often.

First, the ambiance of the game is great. The music and mood it generates really was immersive. Visually, you need only look at the developers 'Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP' for examples of the art style and world view used as they are very similar. And that is probably what doomed it for me... Spoilers below . . . . . . . I got too into the game, and the protagonist, believing there was a backstory to why he/she/it was there. Was this a quest of some kind? Perhaps a mission of revenge? You will never really know what or why. Even after being there at the end or perhaps cheating a bit and watching YouTube vids that covered the game as a whole or just the ending, there is no rhyme or reason for the protagonist being there that I was able to discern. And this sorta ruined it for me. Players are free to imagine whatever they want about it all. You can imagine your own backstory about everything in the game until the end when you get some slight enlightenment about what is going on. And it wont be good. If you have ever read Stephen King's novel, The Dark Tower, there are some similarities. Not exactly the same, but similar. And that too ruined it for me, not because it happened, but because you will never know if that was the intention the game's designers had for it. Again, you have to come up with your own narrative and it will probably be just as legitimate as anyone else's save for the developers. Maybe they will chime in at some point. As will be noted in hundreds of reviews here or elsewhere, you are left never knowing anything. You will continuously be saying to yourself 'What the F*** am I supposed to be doing here??!' Well, you are expected to simply 'figure it out', which I admit you will in part but not in full, and not without feeling that if you had known some of this at the beginning, it would have prevented you from making so many mistakes. Not knowing is probably what the developers intended simply because it if you did know the ending they strove for, you might not want to play it. Like reading King's The Dark Tower series. But I suggest you do so anyway cause it is has a very cinematic ending. Only thing is, after seeing it you will be asking yourself 'What the f*** just happened???' For most of us this will create an urge to find YouTube vids explaining the game and it will ruin it for you to some degree or make some angry, but you have to admit they put the game together quite well for what they were most likely intending. So what were my other complaints? I do not like the fact I cannot reconfigure the key bindings. Maybe I missed something or perhaps there was some menu link I missed but I could not find it. This meant having actions requiring your hand contort quite a bit. Luckily I have large enough hands to allow me some control but if you have smaller hands it may make things difficult game-play-wise. This too may have been the developers intentions. Again you will probably never know unless they are interviewed about it all. If anyone finds a link to such a thing let me know. I also did not like the length of time a torch could be used. Way too short. Same with using the lantern. It used up resources way too fast. This is made worse by the fact I spent several areas defeating the enemies on the page only to have their 'light source' loot for the lantern go over the edge into the abyss, forcing me to restart the level by exiting knowing that everything done in the map for that area was lost and the room reset. Now comes what ruined it for me the most. You will die in this game. There is no real control over that. And you cannot reload a save because you cannot really save a game. There are check points and such and as will be explained in the other reviews, when you die the game goes to another boat landing on the shore and a new 'protagonist' takes over who has to find your corpse to get all the equipment you dropped. A facet of gaming that is becoming all to common today. The fact you died made me lose a connection to the protagonist. I stopped really caring and with it much of my interest in the game. Now if my narrative told me this was a reincarnation with the memories of your predecessor then it makes sense. But don't hold your breath expecting anything vindicate that belief. Again, you make your own narrative. If this were really thought out you would not be able to do that. At least not all of it because the game makes it sound like you are in some sort of time loop and it's you on the beach all over again like some kind of reincarnation. That too may have been the developers intentions. This kept it from being a complete ruin of a game for me and yes, you have to imagine your own narrative to get to this assumption otherwise you feel like 'what is the point?' and that is what you will feel at every point in the game, specially after the ending. It seemed as if the island and its antagonist created the entire endeavor for the purposes of attracting those strong enough to survive it so they can then pull the rug out from under you making the whole thing pointless. Like a test where the higher your score the greater a potential threat you are to it so they have to get rid of you. The safest bet is not to play. I will not ruin too much more of the ending. You can either play it or watch some vids that cover it. That is the narrative I created. That and you being a reincarnation of the previous protagonist. Or perhaps someone of a race that shared collective memories, whatever. I went through dozens of possible scenarios to help me make sense of the game so as to enjoy it more. Some elaborate, some simple. But it helped. I was able to get around some of the limitations of the game like the fact it sorta saves things if you leave the current area of the floor into another. If I did not like what I saw then I simply exited the game and reentered it where you are just stepping into that area of the floor. Sort of like a save that happens in between maps. This allowed me a do-over. Except when you die. You're screwed then. The inventory is limited, but I didn't mind that part. It added to the challenge. Once you discover the 'pocket' room which you can then get to by sleeping at campfires, you can dump all your excess inventory there so your personal inventory is cleared out. I did this alot. Even though the room has 'storage' containers, they were limited. Just dump the stuff on the floor and move on. Dont even need the storage containers. And it all does pile up even in the early areas. oh, and cold is lethal. I went into level 4's ice area and within a minute my health was down to nothing despite not taking on any enemies on that map. I could not set the map's fire source aflame fast enough. So overall, I loved the mood, the ambiance, the music, Just not some of the mechanics of the game but if you know the workarounds you can limit this and remember, you will have to create your own narrative about the game, the protagonist, and most of the game except the ending. You will probably hate that. And if you don't? Then simply looking for video walk-throughs beginning to end may help you see everything in this 'story' without the frustration of actually playing it. To the developers. Bravo. You are either geniuses who created something special or whatever. Either way, I am looking forward to your other works. Enjoy.

This game really makes it a point to waste your time. In every instance of choosing between "make it fun" or "make it tedious" they chose tedium. Because of this, I can not recommend the game. It just doesn't respect your time at all. I think it's a perfect illustration of an artistic idea being put on a pedestal to the detriment of everything else. So, as an art project, it probably works. As a game? Absolutely not. A shame, I really wanted to like this one. The music and visuals are charming and beautiful though. Also, they did add "explore" mode, but I played it the "intended" way (survival), and have zero desire to go back and check if explore is worth it. Besides, unless they also multiply the character's speed by at least two times, it is still going to be way too slow.

A game for those who enjoy being lost among sprawling immensity. A game for those who like to explore in silence. A game for those who like picking up a stone & finding dangerous, secret things underneath. A game for those who like cooking soup on their campfire with water they drew nearby. A game for those who know death is but one step along the way.

Despite the nice looks and initial fun exploring this mysterious dungeon might be the game turns absurdly oppressive towards the end and you'll likely give up when all the hours spent grinding turn into hours wasted. Even on explore mode the difficulty is sadistic even when you know what you're doing (or should be doing). Had to give up on level 16 when the key to he next level was nowhere to be found. After wasting my plentiful resources entirely searching every room for that key I've had enough. Could be a bug too, I'll never find out. Below is a game that is nice to look at, sounds great, but is miserable to play for the vast majority of people. If this doesn't scare you off... maybe it's for you. Try at your own risk.

Below is an interesting and intimidating game, much different from everything I have ever played. It's strange, humid, solitary, somber, and most importantly, SILENT. Water droplets, rain, rocks dropping, small animals, fire burning, all those things can be heard clearly, the soundtrack is soft, and in the end it contrasts with the silence, making the loneliness even more apparent. You are nothing in this giant vertical island full of immense structures. It's combat, albeit simple, is fast and relentless, one mistake and you're dead. You have to carefully plan expeditions, food, water, and remedies because the survival aspect is also steep, and you can die easily. I decided to embrace the challenge and play the game on Survival Mode. Gotta say, it feels incredible learning all its nuances in order to avoid deaths, but it can also be extremely frustrating, learning to deal with the losses is also part of this experience.  Overall, this is a very unfair, brutalistic, and intense game. I don't know how different the Explore mode is, but Survival will make your blood boil on several occasions. Beating it, though? Makes it all worth it. I strongly recommend Below, if you are up to the task. 🎼 All of my stories are Below; Beneath the surface, cannot grow; Curled and naked I defer; To shaky thoughts, all in a blur. 🎼

Below is, without exaggeration, one of the most mind-numbingly boring games I have played in my life. It looks like it will be a top-down Zelda-esque mix of "action" *coughs* and exploration / puzzle solving. And maybe it is that, it's just that within an hour of playing it all I had experienced was a complete absence of any of those things. The first five minutes of the game is the intro, and all it comprises of is a very, very, verrrrrrrry loooong shot of an ocean viewed from a million miles away. Eventually a distant speck is revealed to be a boat as the camera moves in at a pace that would shame a dead snail, but hey! Even though its more boring than watching paint dry, its "super atmospheric" and "scene-setting" in a way that's meant to evoke 'Shadow of the colossus' / 'ico' / 'half-life', albeit lacking anything remotely interesting while it does so. After this dull introduction you'd think they would do something to invite you in and get you excited, and you'd be wrong. The game tells you nothing of what you have to do, continues with the view being so far out that you can barely see, and does an incredibly poor job of highlighting the exit points of each single screen room. The view is pulled back so you can see more of the landscape, and yet even running you still plod along looking for whatever it is you're meant to find amongst the washed out colours and obscured details. It took me about half an hour to figure out where to go and having done so didn't find anything worthwhile, so I thought, well, if this is the game putting its best foot forward, then it has a pretty crippled foot. Combat is simple but unrewarding, given that, like everything else, you can hardly see it due to the view staying practically in orbit its so far out. When you add up the drab graphics, boring game-play and it obscuring everything , including what the heck you're supposed to be doing, it didn't take long before I was wondering why it was worth carrying on playing. Maybe if you're super patient it will reveal something of interest, after maybe a few more hours of mind-numbing sh*te, but I'm of the mind-set that a game ought to draw you in somewhat faster than that. As is: it's quite helpful to be so rubbish this early on, as at least you can still get a refund if you find it to be a load of crap like I did. It cost me about £3 and so far that's wasted money. Having played it for an hour it was the most boring hour I've spent recently on a game. Compared to the likes of Hyper Light Drifter / Tunic, which this fundamentally does share some DNA with, this is painfully dull to experience, both in the game-play and in the presentation. If there's anything even vaguely redeeming to be had from it, they needed to push it upfront much quicker. There's no narrative to give a sense of mystery and so provide something compelling to hold onto it, so overall it's just dull as f**k whichever way I look at.