Suffice to say, roguelikes are in a bit of a twist. With many people focusing on the randomized buffs aspect, it feels like the genre’s generally fallen into a rut, with many roguelikes falling into either Hades clones or third-person action games.
Enter, The Land Beneath Us. Developed by Fairplay Studios and having previously been at events like Level Up KL, this charming roguelike has a demo available now on PC- and it’s one of the most unique of its kin.
While at its core, it’s yet another dungeon crawler, The Land Beneath Us shines through how you interact with these dungeons: You equip weapons to each direction, with every unlocked weapon only being usable for that direction. Fights themselves are actually turn-based- nothing moves until you do. And yet, the controls are so responsive it’s hard to not try to play it like an action game, especially as you try to get your demonic enemies in range of your greatsword.
While people obsess about the infinite builds of a roguelike, I genuinely think it’s this innovation that’s behind the initial success of the genre. At the end of the day a game that can show someone something they’ve never seen before is a good one: Just look at breakout hits like Vampire Survivors- the people want a new way play.
Something as simple as locking your weapons to cardinal directions is genuinely fun since you’re forced to make tougher decisions- in one run, I had a cursed Greatsword that could level up without the merchant- but it needed to do so by getting kills. Suddenly, my whole run features me strafing around enemies and trying to get them on the side that the sword is on.
It mixes up difficulty in a fun way too- here, strategy is core, rather than simply building a bunch of follow-up effects to do enough damage for you. I’ve been absolutely melted for gorilla-rushing a boss more times than I’d care to admit- enough that I’ve had to ban myself from using the thumbstick on my controller.
Of course, there’s the argument to be made of how deep the builds themselves get- at the moment the weapon placement is more about scarcity than anything else- I feel like I’m always opting for a four-Greatsword or four-Halberd build, and the mishmash of pistols and swords I actually end up with are more a compromise to getting to that goal.
Still, with a strong gameplay foundation like this, I’m excited to see where The Land Beneath Us goes from here. The demo’s available now on Steam, so don’t forget to try it for yourself if you’re in need of a good palate cleanser in an otherwise crowded field.
