Into the Depths is a roguelike city-builder. Set in a cave system, the player is tasked with gradually colonising said cave system by fulfilling specific goals. With each goal fulfilled, the player can descend one layer deeper, plunging further and further into the vast depths below.
Into the Depths’ city-builder elements rely on a deck-builder element, creating an interesting combination of long-term and short-term strategic play. Players begin each run with a deck of potential buildings, with cards being added to that deck over the course of the run. Given that players need both the buildings best suited to the randomly generated goals, as well as those suited for the city’s survival, planning the initial deck becomes an exercise in careful strategy. Runs are won and lost based on this initial deck as much as any choices the player makes, and so understanding how to make a versatile yet effective deck becomes critical to the game as a whole.
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Like any roguelike, there is the expectation that players will lose runs, but in so doing, gain the resources to improve their chances on subsequent runs. Into the Depths’ runs are reliant on food as a pseudo-health bar. As long as a city has food, it can continue its exploration and expansion. As soon as the food is gone, however, so too is the city, and the player’s run with it. This, once again, plays nicely into the strategic elements of the initial deck. A deck needs to be able to both sustain the colony while also being able to integrate the random new cards smoothly into the existing strategy.
Decks themselves consist of a mixture of buildings and actions, with players free to choose for themselves what strategy they’d like to focus on. One strategy might involve investing heavily in fields, mills, and plantations, for instance, using these buildings’ adjacency bonuses to accumulate food faster than it can wear away. Another might rely on gaining huge amounts of gold and then using that to buy demolition, expansion, or food bombs. Yet another might rely on accumulating production to create as tailored a landscape as possible within a limited area. That players can unlock new cards over the course of a run through investing in knowledge-mineral accumulation adds more complexity—is it enough to focus on the cards you have, or do you gamble on adding more?
A final wrinkle in the game’s complexity comes from the maps themselves. Each map is procedurally generated, meaning a strategy that has worked on several other maps in a given run might fail utterly on another. This is in conjunction with the random events that might spawn on the map. Players might face rocks falling and everyone dying, random plumes of fire, or spontaneous cuts to food or production income. While these challenges may not be all that varied—the game has a fairly limited set of random events—their timing and order mean that the results of their appearance are. The challenge of Into the Depths is to construct a sufficiently robust strategy that can adapt to whatever the game chooses to throw at it.
This is significantly more difficult than it sounds.
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I’m going to be honest—it took me a little bit to get a handle on this game. While it’s easy enough to build a deck that works for the first few maps, it is much more difficult to find a sufficiently adaptive strategy. It took me a few runs to get the hang of it, and a few more to buy the upgrades that would let me build a more reliable deck. While the game supports a broad range of strategies for approaching the easier levels, these strategies narrow at higher levels. For my part, every run became a mad spray of dynamite as I sprinted to whatever the level’s goal was, eyes locked on my ever-diminishing food supply. Into the Depths neither forgives nor forgets, and each tile placement needs to be carefully considered.
Which is satisfying, in a masochistic sort of way.
That Into the Depths has a bit of an arcane and nuanced strategy to it means it isn’t necessarily the most accessible roguelike city-builder. That I have nearly seven hours in it is a testament both to how addictive it is as well as to how much I wanted to pick it apart and understand it. For a relatively narrow set of cards, there is a surprising amount of depth to the game, and it was a delight figuring out what to do with what I had available.
Further highlighting just how good this game’s underlying puzzle is are the graphics and music. These are, to put it bluntly, not particularly good. While the game’s buildings are lovely and well-designed, the lighting on the map makes it difficult to tell what exactly a tile is, which can be annoying when trying to, say, place a boat on a large patch of blue dirt. The music loop is also shorter than might be expected for the length of each level, making it obvious when it restarts in a way that feels a bit jarring.
However, within this, there’s also something a bit quaint and humble about the look and feel of the game. I am on an expedition into a cave for reasons that are never entirely clear. The cave is dim and dingy, and so am I. Of course, everything will look and feel and be a bit rough—we’re on a mission, and there is no space for frills.
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Once players get over the initial hurdles of understanding what approach is adaptable enough for the myriad of circumstances awaiting them, Into the Depths is an absolute gem of a game. Its gameplay is nuanced and challenging enough to present an ever-shifting puzzle, and its runs are quick enough to feed into that sensation that the next one will be even better than the last. While its visuals may take some getting used to, players who take that time will be rewarded with an excellent little roguelike city-builder.
Then they too, shall experience the wonders of the deep.
[quote] If you enjoyed this review, please check out the [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41449676/] Summit Reviews curator page [/url] and [url=https:llwww.summitreviews.biz] website. [/url] Thanks to SmelJey for the game, and thanks to you for reading! [/quote]
