The Land Beneath Us

The game is actually pretty enjoyable with fastpaced turnbased gameplay. But it baaadly needs a "save and exit" feature. I know runs aren't that long, but when you play maybe 20 minutes a day and are juggling 2-3 games depending on the amount of mental energy available, then it feels superbad to lose all your progress because you closed the game in the middle of a run.

starts off strong, but gets incredibly annoying later on as it starts sticking you on smaller cluttered areas with more and more enemies with larger and larger attack patterns where the gameplay breaks down, while their health growth outscales your damage, and you run into rooms where there's literally nothing you can do to survive. roguelikes where an rng coinflip ends your run are not enjoyable, and the further you go the more of those you hit.

такое только джойстиком ковырять

The Land Beneath Us is a roguelite dungeon crawler that manages to feel familiar and fresh at the same time, blending tactical grid-based combat with a striking pixel-art underworld inspired by Welsh mythology and sci-fi invention. Developed by FairPlay Studios and published by Dear Villagers and Gamirror Games, it places you in the role of Sven, a mechanical being equipped with Soul-Tech and sent into the depths of Annwn to find the lost Creator. While the overarching story is intentionally sparse, the world carries an air of mystery and melancholy, and the fragments of lore you uncover give the setting a sense of ancient power intertwined with futuristic decay. It’s a game more interested in mood and mechanics than heavy narrative, but what little story exists enriches the atmosphere. The core of the experience lies in its unusual approach to combat and movement. Every action takes place on a grid, and movement is tied directly to attacks—each of the four cardinal directions can be assigned a different weapon, meaning the simple act of stepping forward, back, or sideways becomes both a positional choice and a tactical strike. This system creates a satisfying rhythm that encourages planning several turns ahead. Enemies move the moment you do, making the battlefield feel alive and reactive. Early encounters teach you the basics, but it’s not long before new enemy types, hazards, and environmental installations turn each room into a miniature strategic puzzle. Positioning becomes essential, especially against foes that manipulate space, fire projectiles, or rush you in tight corridors. Boss battles elevate this further, demanding a careful balance of aggression and survival instinct. As in any roguelite, experimentation is key. The Land Beneath Us supplies you with a broad arsenal of weapons—close-range blades, polearms, guns, magical implements—and an equally varied spread of relics and upgrades that modify your build from run to run. Because weapons are tied to directional input, swapping even one slot can drastically shift your playstyle, encouraging you to rethink how you approach enemies and navigate space. Relics provide meta-synergy, enabling combos like chaining elemental effects, boosting damage based on movement, or adding utility actions that reshape the board. Even unsuccessful runs feel valuable, as you accumulate resources for permanent upgrades and gradually unlock new tools that influence future attempts. The game’s structure walks a thoughtful line between punishing failure and encouraging learning. Visually, the game’s presentation is a major highlight. The pixel-art style leans into stark contrasts, eerie spaces, and animated flourishes that make Annwn feel at once haunted and mechanical. Every area carries a distinct visual identity: looming catacombs, corrupted machinery, ruined sanctuaries, and the occasional unsettling shrine carved into walls. Enemies are designed with clarity in mind, but many also possess an intimidating presence that reinforces the game’s oppressive tone. The soundtrack matches this aesthetic with moody electronic tracks and ambient flourishes that heighten tension during exploration and give boss fights an energetic pulse without overwhelming the senses. Despite its strengths, the game does face some pacing and balance issues. The randomization that gives roguelites their charm sometimes works against the overall experience—occasional runs feel doomed simply because the relic and weapon combinations never coalesce into an effective build. Certain combinations can become noticeably stronger than others, which might discourage experimentation once players find a reliable strategy. Environmental diversity is also a mixed bag; although the art direction is strong, some floors begin to blur together after several runs, and enemy variety occasionally feels limited. These issues don’t sink the game, but they do create moments of stagnation where the excitement of discovery diminishes. Still, The Land Beneath Us succeeds in offering a tactical roguelite with a distinct identity. Its combat system rewards intelligence and adaptability, its upgrade loop encourages replayability, and its dark mytho-techno world feels cohesive even without a heavy story. It’s a game that thrives on decision-making rather than reflexes, and it offers the satisfaction of mastering a system that seems simple at first but reveals depth the longer you spend with it. For fans of turn-based strategy blended into roguelite structure—and for players who appreciate atmospheric dungeon crawling with a strong visual signature—it stands out as a compelling and memorable experience well worth descending into again and again. Rating: 7/10

Fun game, simple to pick up but hard to master. Great aesthetic with a very cool branching story. Mechanics are clean and simple. Only major downsides at the moment are the inability to save mid run, given they are fairly short so not a huge deal but very annoying, and that tracking your ascension style difficulty is tough as there is no real indicator for what moon levels you have completed. [strike](And possibly the inability to see multiple endings without starting a complete new save file? Not sure about that one as there is still some end game content for me to go through.) [/strike] Seems once you farm enough of moon to get a single extra boss soul than you can face Arwyn / see the branching stories without making a new save. Rather un-intutive, but at least its there. (Facing him randomly in moon quests will NOT complete the quests) Great game, needs some QOL adjustments to address the above issues, but otherwise highly recommend.

I really like the *idea* of this game, but unfortunately I have a hard time recommending it because I feel like too much of its design is in conflict with itself. It's comprised of several different conceptually interesting directional/positioning systems, but at least in my opinion, they don't work in concert the way a good, high-intentionality design ought to. Too often you're making choices, where you might, say, pick a weapon with a knockback or teleport effect, thinking "this will buy me out of a pinch", but then you're thrust into a situation where it's the correct context in every way except the direction you're after. The teleport is a nice pressure release valve, though I think it would be better if it was tied to a certain amount of kills rather than a cooldown. Between that and contriving the correct contexts to use your weapons in ways that are beneficial, you spend a lot of this game moving around and jockeying for positioning in a way that, unfortunately, feels degenerate, but also isn't at all disincentivized by the design. Restart scumming for a good initial item selection also isn't disincentivized by the design, but the player also isn't given a "quick restart" button, leaving the game caught between two designs it doesn't want to commit to either of. Chips are unfortunately what broke me. The above would be a tolerable, if-slightly-messy combination of factors, but chips, while a fundamentally conceptually interesting idea, all require too much commitment and too specific a context to meaningfully use unless you're wasting a bunch of time to contrive a use for them, and in that time you could have just been positioning to win the fight in a contemporary way instead, and likely gotten along much quicker too. Basically, between the fact that weapons are locked to a direction that more often than not sticks you in contexts where the proper use of your items can't be brought to bear as well as the chip system totaling out to something you'll likely only ever use accidentally (doubly annoying because the game pauses for about 2 seconds when it happens, throwing off your flow), this ultimately feels like a game where, in spite of technically having design intentionality (e.g. you could sit down and math out your paths), doing so involves sliding-car-puzzling several factors that are all at odds with each other, and are ultimately too intellectually-fatiguing to want to do, which forces you to think degenerately and in generalities. Despite its pieces being designed with intentional play in mind, it leads to an almost abstract kind of randomness - not true RNG, but the same to the player in de facto terms, where you're never using your tools purposefully, because doing so is neither intuitive nor straightforward in its planning. Further, any game that has upgrades or abilities that say "using this will change the plot/ending" forces anyone with any kind of completionist tendency to immediately swear off entire swaths of the game, basically being forced to choose between having more fun versus seeing more of the game. It's very sour to have things I want to use dangled in front of me, but when I reach for them, a finger wags at me and says "tut tut tut, having fun is a fail state!" It wasn't enjoyable in Dishonored, Deus Ex, or MGS. When a game makes you feel punished for engaging with more of it in a more complex way, I believe everyone loses. There *is* a version of this design that works somewhere, somehow, and I encourage the developers to keep trying to find it, this thing has bones. Also, I hate being mean, but I'm sorry, I just don't care for the dialogue, it's just a little *too* post-ironic. Main PC is just a slightly-more evil Grok, it speaks trendily and has a slightly-inverted moral compass, and even though I think I understand what they're going for and "get it", that doesn't mean I enjoy it. Sven is okay, though. EDIT: I want to thank the developers for their incredibly professional and kind response, and explanation about the features I hadn't yet seen. I like most of it, though regarding chip lock - I did see that, but as far as I can tell, I don't really *gain* anything by locking a chip, so even only occasionally using it in the correct way by accident is still better than not using it at all. Nevertheless, I'm changing this review to positive for the time being, at least until I get a chance to fairly reappraise the game in light of the developer feedback. It really goes to show how tough design is, though, because while there is sincere value in inconvenience due to the catharsis brought about by mitigating it, everyone has their own bouncing off point. I don't know what the solution to that might be, but nevertheless, I hope you guys can end up where you want to be with it.

This roguelike game must have the a feature lets you continue where you left off, so that i little bit disappointed. Tbh i wish you have this feature soon TT.

This turn-based little gem needs more appreciation, not complex combat and systems in general, but quite enjoyable experience

Decent game, a bit simmilar to crown trick might be a bit tough at first but it gets easier the further you progress game is probably less 10 hours to complete game is basically enter a bunch of rooms which are seperate battles, then kill 2 mini bosses and after that kill main boss of the area you are in, repeat till do this till you kill all bosses of all areas - big variety of weapons - average variety of relics (some builds are way better than others) - nice variety of spells tho you can skip almost everything except heals - some perma character and spell upgrades - nice boss fights - every zone has new enemies and new weapons to unlock

It's absurd that if you leave the game you lose all your progress. Is it 1988? When was saving invented?