A sweet look into the mind of a fledgling game designer.
Underliner is not particularly high-quality, but that's fitting for the super-low price-point. It's certainly worth its cost. It's a cute, relaxing, and fun enough terse puzzle game experience with a strange charm in its simplicity and sparse flair of the designer. And it's among the divine (to me) category of first-person puzzle games with a somewhat unique mechanic—high esteem in my book.
Some of the puzzles I rather quite enjoyed, however some others were hampered significantly by inconsistent and finicky mechanics—mostly in the reflection off the gray marble, though the moving lollipops shared a similar issue. On several occasions, I had actually logically solved the puzzle much earlier than my final executed solution would imply, but the reflection mechanic was so inconsistent and particular—the camera angle or positioning on the previous lollipop [i]just[/i] not quite right—that the execution failed, and it was not clear that the failure was due to shoddy positioning rather than an incorrect logical solution. I do wish that the beam snapped to the center or top of each lollipop rather than just landing and firing from the exact position from the first-person camera angle—this could have made the game a lot more consistent, removing weird cases where the beam died limply on glass, etc. But the flaws of the game are to be expected from a beginning designer, and any such cheap small game, and in a way charming, at least to me.
The art and sound are incredibly basic, akin to a student's first 3D game, but that's again to be expected with this price-point from a new solo developer. Yet, at least to my western eyes, the entire facade feels rather uniquely foreign; only a glimmer of Korean text can be found in the game, but the entire design philosophy simply [i]feels[/i] to me culturally distinct from the thousands of equivalent cheap American games or student projects I've played in years past. The decisions of what to emphasize and what to polish, and what to leave bare, strike me as curious. As a result, I enjoyed the basic aesthetic of Underliner more than I typically do for games of this stature.
Overall, a short and simple 20 to 60 minute first-person puzzle experience (depending on your experience and mindset), worth the money, and worth the time to complete, despite its neophytic flaws and shortcomings. I hope to see more from the designer in years to come.
