Developer: Aggro Crab

Publisher: Team17 Digital

Played on: PC

Release Date: September 24, 2020

Played with: Dualshock 4

Paid: $15.73 (Multi-game bundle)

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Late-stage capitalism sucks.  I like to think that’s not a deeply controversial statement to make, though I know there are those out there to whom such talk would be heresy.  Seriously, though: it’s brought us the modern-day hellscape that is the gig economy, grift culture, and selling our privacy for the sake of convenience.  Companies are increasingly unethical in their business practices, and even if you’re doing a good job, you’re at risk of getting laid off just so the execs can line their own pockets.  And all the while, glitzy new Silicon Valley startups keep springing up, promising that this time they’ll make the world a better place.  It’s a deeply depressing situation, and one in which it can be hard to find any sort of humour.  However, with writing that deftly cycles between being severely cynical and surprisingly heartfelt, Going Under effectively satirizes the dire circumstances we all find ourselves in and even gives a bit of hope that things could get better.

As part of the Impoverished Intern Initiative at the corporate conglomerate of Cubicle, Jacqueline Fiasco (Jackie for short) starts an unpaid marketing internship at a carbonated beverage startup known as Fizzle.  Unfortunately, she gets more than she bargained for when Marv – her manager – informs her that there are dungeons under the office full of monsters and “asks” her to head down there to stop them from coming up and stealing office supplies.  Ultimately, it turns out that each of the three dungeons is a past failed startup, and the boss of each is guarding an ancient relic that Marv hopes to harness to increase productivity at Fizzle.  So begins Jackie’s quest to slay gig worker goblins, crypto-mining skeletons, and dating app demons, all the while waiting for the day she’ll get to do some actual marketing work.

The story and writing are definitely Going Under’s strongest suit, from the sharp, Silicon Valley startup-skewering satire to the lovable characters you meet during your journey.  Fizzle has several other employees, from Tappi the accountant to Fern the flavour officer, and all of them are a joy to interact with between runs.  Being a roguelite dungeon crawler, the conceit of Going Under involves repeatedly going into randomly-generated dungeons, trying to make your way to the boss, and probably (at least at the start) dying along the way.  Each time you get dumped back into the Fizzle office, though, several characters will have new things to say, whether it’s fleshing out their backgrounds or exchanging idle gossip.  It really endeared all of them to me (even Raymond, the buzzword-spouting go-getter CEO), and built up my investment in seeing how their stories played out.  Further developing each character are mentorship sidequests that can be completed during your dungeon runs to provide passive abilities to Jackie, while also bringing you closer to each character.  There’s even a Rolodex that can be filled out with business cards from NPCs and enemies, incentivizing you to talk to everyone as much as possible.

Unfortunately, it does feel like the story in Going Under is a bit padded out.  What seems at first to be the final boss turns out instead to only be the halfway point, triggering a great deal of chaos in the office as well as all the dungeons getting remixed to be more difficult.  This second half felt substantially weaker compared to the first half, as there was almost no co-worker dialogue between runs, the mentorship quests dried up as I finished maxing them all out, and the structure was the same (defeat the boss of each of the three dungeons) just with some tougher enemies and more stage hazards.  The ending was still satisfying and charming, and I left the experience feeling positively towards it, but I can’t deny that while I was in the thick of it, the latter half of Going Under could feel like a slog.

This sluggishness was enhanced by the way Going Under handles character progression, namely that there is very little.  In other roguelites I’ve played, there’s often a currency that can be collected in each run and then spent outside of the run to upgrade your character.  Going Under does have that, but it can only be spent on unlocking new skills (i.e. passive abilities) that get added to the pool of skills that can randomly show up in the dungeons, which doesn’t feel as impactful as gaining permanent character upgrades.  Additionally, any skills you collect during each run collect experience points; once maxed out, a skill is considered “endorsed” and can be equipped as a starter skill for each of your runs.  However, only one skill can be equipped at a time, so I found that once I settled into a few favourites, further endorsements were uninteresting.  The aforementioned mentorship quests are another point of character progression, but as mentioned previously, I found it fairly easy to wrap most of them up by the midpoint of the game.  Lastly, you can get a few health upgrades, but they’re only rewards for completing each dungeon in the first half of the game; the second half gives you nothing of the sort when completing the remixed versions.  Taken as a whole, this meant that to a certain extent in the early game and definitely in the late game, I felt like there was a distinct lack of variation between runs.  The main driver for trying again was a desire to advance the plot rather than wanting to experiment with some new power my character unlocked, leading to things feeling grindy at times.

While the structure can be a bit lacking, the gameplay is on point.  The core conceit of Going Under’s gameplay is that you can pick up and use just about anything as a weapon, leading to Jackie wielding everything from warhammers to waste baskets.  Attacks with some weapons can be charged up, though enemies tend to attack quickly and not always with a ton of warning, so this can be a risky play at the best of times.  To incentivize using what you can, each weapon has a durability and will break after a number of uses.  This stat is hidden, though items will start to flash red when they’ve only got a hit or two left in them.  It turns combat into a chaotic scramble where you might start out slashing through hordes with a mighty claymore before taking out the last foe by desperately hurling potted plants at them.  Sadly, the throwing mechanisms don’t feel particularly well-tuned; actually hitting enemies is rare and trying to do so in the middle of a heated combat just decreases your odds.  A lock-on feature helps, but I still all but gave up on throwing after the dozenth time my projectile sailed uselessly over my foe’s head.

Speaking of the lock-on, it can be quite helpful at the start of the game, as I found the sort of jerky, noodly animation of the characters to take some getting used to.  However, one annoyance was that there’s no automatic target switching when you kill your current target, forcing the player to re-lock each time.  It also sometimes loses its lock, particularly with foes that move around more rapidly.  This could be to save the camera from spinning madly around, but this (combined with some skills that incentivized not locking on) meant that as I got further into Going Under, I relied on the lock-on less.  On the other hand, Jackie’s dodge roll was always useful, and learning attack patterns (particularly for bosses) and dodging out of the way in time became critical as I progressed through Going Under, at times almost giving it a Souls-like feel.  Also, a really nice feature is that if you roll over a weapon while empty-handed, Jackie will automatically pick it up, meaning that even playing defensively can help you prepare for your next offense.

The linear, randomly-generated dungeons in Going Under are divided up into rooms, and while most of them are filled with enemies to defeat, there’s a few others of note.  Shops allow you to buy healing items, skills, and weapons, while skill rooms let you gain a new skill from a selection of two.  There are also curse rooms (overseen by the vampiric Hauntrepreneur) that can give you three items (be they skills, heals, or weapons) if you’re willing to take on a curse for your next few combats.  These range from making you catch on fire if you stand still to forcing you to play the game in first-person (a truly headache-inducing affair), and balancing whether a curse is worth it for the benefits it provides is always an interesting choice.  In a similar vein, challenge rooms specific to each dungeon can show up, providing an optional objective that rewards you with better weapons the better you do.  For example, in the Winkydink dating app dungeon, you can choose a demon to “go on a date” with (i.e. fight), and the fewer hits you take, the stronger the reward weapon will be.  Plus, if you take less than two hits before winning, the demon will actually join your team!  Finally, there are card rooms, which allow you to spend money to purchase a blank card: a powerful weapon that – if it deals the killing blow to an enemy – will add them to your Rolodex, along with a short bio.  Filling it out is only necessary for achievement purposes, but I still found it fun to collect all the cards in the game, engaging with tons of amusing flavour text in the process.

While getting the achievement for completing the Rolodex was a fun challenge, Going Under is one game I don’t plan on getting 100% on, and that’s due to Imposter Mode.  Unlocked partway through the game and accessed through Jackie’s mirror in her apartment, Imposter Mode forces you to play through all the dungeons strung together one after the other.  For each dungeon you have to fight through two regular floors (mercifully cut down from the main game’s three) before fighting that dungeon’s boss.  Finally, there’s a fight with The Imposter: a dark manifestation of Jackie’s imposter syndrome.  The catch?  You start with no upgrades whatsoever.  All the health upgrades, mentorships, and endorsed skills you’ve gained over the course of the campaign are utterly meaningless, as you’re forced to start from scratch every time.  This makes Imposter Mode feel incredibly futile and demoralizing, and while I get that the developers were going for sort of an arcade mode separate from the base game, it’s nonetheless far more frustrating than fun.

What can ease the burden of Going Under’s difficulty (though not enough to make me want to complete Imposter Mode) are its host of accessibility options.  Everything from lowering enemy health to increasing your own and even increasing weapon durability are available, and are great assets to those who may be struggling with the challenges put forward by the game.  While I didn’t take advantage of them for much of my playthrough, I did increase my health a bit after a glitch saw my killing blow on a boss go right through them, allowing them to retaliate and kill me.  This was immensely aggravating, and wasn’t the only glitch I encountered while playing Going Under.  Items occasionally got stuck in walls and floors, vibrating madly and disappearing in a few cases.  While it’s not a glitch per se, enemy pathing also isn’t the best, sometimes leading to them getting stuck on objects or walking through hazards to get to you.  Jackie has an annoying idle animation that causes her to drop her currently-equipped weapon in favour of looking at her phone, and there were a few times where I almost forgot my weapon in a shop after spending too long perusing the options.  It’s very possible to get gank killed by enemies, or at the very least stunlocked, and this happened more than a few times in particularly hectic fights.  Aside from the boss fight glitch, nothing was particularly egregious, but there were nonetheless some quirks that left Going Under feeling a bit less polished than it could have been.

In contrast, the presentation in Going Under is totally on point throughout.  Channeling the modern Corporate Memphis design ethos of rounded, bubbly, minimalistic character designs, Going Under looks like it was ripped out of a Facebook ad campaign, and given its subject matter, I consider that to be a huge compliment.  Its vibrantly coloured characters are all distinct from one another, making it easy to pick out the different enemy types and prioritize as needed.  Each of Jackie’s colleagues are also portrayed through some wonderfully expressive character art, and while images are recycled throughout the many dialogue exchanges, they lend each character a great deal of charm and relatability.  The music is also funky and catchy, never failing to get me grooving during my many, many runs through the dungeons.  Roguelites are the kind of games where it can be very easy to throw on something else in the background while grinding through runs, and I never found myself wanting to do that with Going Under.  The only exception is the final boss music, which had an annoying refrain that grated rather than being engaging.  On the positive side, though, special mention goes to the tracks “the grind”, and “‘crypto’ type beat”, both of which were highlights in the score for me and well worth listening to on their own.

Going Under is a game of two halves, literally, and it makes my feelings on it very complicated.  Without a doubt, I have my grievances with it.  The latter half feels largely like padding, some glitches and lack of polish rear their heads at times, and the progression isn’t very engaging compared to other games in its genre.  That said, I kept coming back for the lovable characters, addicting gameplay, and exceptional presentation.  The biting satire had me laughing throughout, even if a part of me cringed with just how close to home it hit.  Going Under is a stellar game hampered by some unfortunate design decisions, and while they do temper my score a bit, I also have to recognize that it was a game I continually returned to not because I had to, but because I wanted to.  Even now, I’m thinking about cranking up all the accessibility features and taking another few runs at Imposter Mode, despite basically swearing off it in this very review!  It’s hard to come down on a score for this, but I think it has to reflect the fact that – in stark contrast to my complaints and the game’s bleak subject matter – thinking about Going Under gives me such an overwhelmingly positive, warm feeling.  It’s comforting to see so many of my qualms with corporate culture reflected in a game this enjoyable, and I think Going Under is well worth checking out for anyone with an anti-capitalist bone in their body.

8/10