Post-Game: Going Under
2020 has been, apart from a litany of bizarre, disastrous things, a year of roguelike renaissance. From previously discussed HADES to sequels for classics Risk of Rain and Spelunky, few years can match both the quality and quantity of the run-based games we’ve had to distract us from The Hell We All Must Endure Outside.
New to the field is Aggro Crab’s Going Under, a satirical spin on corporate befuddlement, startup culture, and the parasitic nature of our reliance on technology. With just enough narrative, a cast of likable characters, and some delightful music, it manages to transcend some mushy combat and a few mechanical shortcomings.
Let’s break it down, Reading Friend.
“GOING UNDER
(Steam, EGS, Switch, Xbox One, PS4)”
Going Under opens a corporate onboarding video, as you step into the shoes of JACKIE FIASCO, an impeccable character name for an immediately disillusioned young woman. She’s taken on an unpaid internship at Fizzle, a soft drink company recently acquired by the consumptive mega-conglomerate known as Cubicle. Her first task, nonchalantly assigned by her supervisor Marv: delve down into the dungeon of former startup Joblin and “kill all the monsters.”
Like HADES, Going Under has a consistent narrative that actually unfolds and builds as you complete runs and reclaim artifacts from the startups that failed before you. You’ll learn more about your coworkers as they ask you to do things in the dungeons, each with their own stories of how they ended up working for Fizzle. There’s a genuinely great midgame plot twist, setting up an effective motivator and giving the narrative a bit of weight and stakes it lacks in the early goings. It’s nice to have more roguelikes successfully giving players more than a purely mechanical reason to keep coming back for another run, and watching the goofballs at Fizzle clash and grow in small ways with each other is endearing.
The flow of a “run” in Going Under feels a lot like Binding of Isaac in particular, with its heavy Zelda inspiration. Chambers are broken up into enemy encounters, optional challenges that reward extra gear, shops, and exit chambers that offer one final challenge before you slide deeper down. You get a bit of customization wiggle room, with two things to pick ahead of time that can pretty dramatically affect the flow. Jackie has access to Pinned Skills once she’s found them in a dungeon and “sponsored” them by spending time using them: increased heavy weapon damage, extra movement speed, or an electric stun effect on crits, to give some examples. Additionally, you can choose your Mentor from Fizzle’s staff, which confers a series of bonuses based on the strength of your relationship with them.
The Mentor and Pinned Skill system is really clever, and I love having that extra little bit of choice before going into a run. It lets you plot out, with some confidence, what sort of build you want to try on any one go. Maybe I’ll lean into a very App-focused run with Kara as my mentor, and pick up the Skill that lets me use Apps twice before discarding them. Perhaps this delve into the ruinous caverns of Styxcoin will be Fern-focused, as I bomb each and every room with delicious varieties of the meal-replacing Fizzle beverage. It’s a very smart system that I hope other roguelikes will take a note or two from in the future.
In the course of a run itself, your tools of combat in the moment are often just various pieces of junk and officeware: you’ll bash goblins and lovestruck demons with keyboards, potted plants, and axes. It…well, it’s got its moments. To be honest, the combat doesn’t always feel that great. In more chaotic scenarios, with lots of ranged enemies in particular, there’s a pretty mushy feeling to throwing stuff, locking on to enemies, and trying to just make sense of what’s going on. A significant number of my failed runs came about as I got knocked down and pelted with ranged attacks, with no real way to escape or fight back.
In the moments where it does succeed, Going Under’s combat can be really fun! It can also be very broken in terms of power balance, as a handful of specific Skills and Mentor combos seem to just trivialize any sense of danger you might come into. One Mentor eventually lets you start each floor with a handful of additional minions. Several other skills either increase the odds of charming enemies into your army, or spawning more when you take damage. In comparison to these specific builds, which at a certain point you can start every run with, a lot of the very basic “do more damage, run faster” styles of Skill just feel weak and meaningless in comparison.
There’s a lovely aesthetic and a real sense of style to the various locations and dungeons Jackie travels through, from the Doordash/Fiverr spoof of Joblin to the cryptocurrency, skeleton-filled mining operation of Styxcoin. Each region has its own feel to it, with a handful of unique features, shopkeepers, and weapon options. The dating app Winkydink is full of body pillows, poking sticks, and card suit-themed weaponry, while Joblin’s mix of traditional fantasy and corporate nonsense lets you deal with giant cauldrons of coffee and tablet pens that double as electrified spears. There are plenty of references to Online Stuff sprinkled throughout the dungeons, with a bunch of corporate propaganda posters or an extremely-on-the-nose callout to the Lamborghini Garage Guy. That bit of reference fodder isn’t played too often to be cloying or obnoxious, and I think it works in context well enough. To put it another way, it never feels like the game is just staring at you, pointing at its reference, and going, “Huh? Huh? Remember this?”
Having said all this, I don’t know if this is a roguelike for people who are deeply invested in the genre, people who yearn for the hardcore, “punish me through my actions” sort of style the genre can be known for. Even setting the previously mentioned Skill/Mentor combos aside, Going Under…feels really easy, apart from a couple inexplicable, sudden difficulty spikes in the midgame/endgame bosses. Across the three different startups that comprise the current campaign (Aggro Crab has stated a desire to add more in future updates), I cleared one on my first try, and managed to complete the “second run” for one of them in three attempts.
Is that a bad thing? Not at all, and I think it’s honestly good that we have more games in the roguelike space that aren’t masochistic death carousels. Going Under isn’t without faults, but as I’ve started to think of it as less of a contender for attention in the styles of roguelikes that I prefer, I realized that it’s got a lot going for it in terms of getting people into the genre. If someone works their way through this game and feels the desire for something more elaborate, then they have plenty of options, but so often the roguelike space feels dominated by games that are deliberately obtuse and antagonistic in design.
Going Under offers a plushy, pleasant contrast and an excellent entry point into the genre, even if it’s not always really successful in its ambitions. Aided by an excellent, expressive soundtrack from King Felix, Going Under is approachable, funny, and doesn’t overstay its welcome. When another startup arrives as an option to delve into, I’ll almost certainly go back to Jackie and the Fizzle crew to see what’s there.
Until then, we’ll always have Swomp.
Going Under: “Check it Out?”
Going Under is available on Steam, EGS, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, and Xbox One.
Reviewed with a copy purchased on Steam.
Main story cleared, with a couple of the Mentor tracks filled out.
