Disclaimer: I received a copy of Underland from publisher QUByte Interactive as part of #Indieselect. The game was given and received without expectation or promise of a positive review, only that the game be played and the experience be shared on social media channels. All of the words and screenshots, unless otherwise noted, are my own from my own experience playing the game.
Systems: Windows, Nintendo Switch
Original Release Date: February 5, 2021
Underland by Minicatcus Games is a sidescrolling puzzle game where you navigate two astronauts through environmental puzzles to help them reach human civilization that has found itself living underground after the surface of the Earth becoming inhospitable to human life. That is the premise for each of the 30 levels in the game where you start out on one side of the screen and make your way to the elevator on the other side leading down into the next level. How you make your way to the other side of the screen, what tools you are allotted to use in each level, and how the physics engine operates the fluid in each stage are what make Underland a fun and engaging puzzle game.
One mechanic in the game that occasionally gave me issues was selecting between the astronauts and the machines you could manipulate. This was done using the L/R Shoulder buttons, but the order that you selected which object/character you were moving was all dependent on where they were located on the screen. I understand this makes a fair amount of sense, especially when you have machines like the TNT-Bots who are used up when they detonate, but there were times when I thought I was switching back to astronaut #2 and ended up selecting the platform that astronaut #1 was standing on and accidentally shifted it, knocking off astronaut #1 and killing them. There was even one instance when one of the astronauts was standing on a platform in a way that made selecting the platform impossible, so I ended up having to move the astronaut a few pixels to the right to be able to select the platform again.
For me, I found that trial and error was a useful tactic for finding the solution to some of the more complex problems. Failing at a stage though could be any number of factors, most of them human error related. But that was where a lot of the fun in Underland came from was trying out different ideas and seeing how the toxic fluid might move in the trench you dug out, or how few shots with the canon you could use and then what to use the remaining five shots on just because you could. On a number of levels, you would only need to get one astronaut to the elevator with the rest needing to get both, although the reasoning behind this never felt 100% clear. There were a few stages where it made sense to need to get both astronauts to the elevator thereby increasing the difficulty and an immediate restart if one of them died (as the game did not automatically restart for you). Other instances were more self-imposed like if you created too large of a gap for the astronauts to jump with the earth-boring machine, or if you used up your TNT-Bot detonating earth to gain access to an area or free a moving platform you would need to access the elevator.
The only other issue I had in the game was that there were two levels that felt like completing them was based on luck. In one stage, you had to let a little bit of the toxic fluid out from behind a door to knock over some crates you would need later to use as platforms to walk across. But if the crates fell in a way that from what I could tell, you had very little control over, made using them as stepping stones impossible, you were forced to restart the stage. The almost randomness in how the crates were falling made me consider that I was approaching the solution incorrectly, and I assume that I could have done it incorrectly but still having my solution work, but the design of the level seemed to be pointing me in that direction. The other level had jets of toxic gas that shot out from the ground, but the timing was like the turning signal from three different cars, in that they would sometimes line up so that all three jets of toxic gas would alternate to make passage through them impossible. So you would just have to stand there, waiting for the pattern to reach the point where you could probably make it through unscathed.
Coming in at 30 levels, Underland really felt like it was the perfect length. None of the levels felt like padding to make the game longer just for the sake of being longer. There were no times that I dreaded the fact that I had 45 more levels to get through just to say that I beat the game. The end of the game, told in epilogue fashion was nice too, leading to a sequel that was released back in April, but is currently only available on Steam; I would not recommend looking up that game yet if you have not beaten Underland as the description does give away the story here. I was very happy with Underland, despite feeling that some of the levels did not play as fair as I would have liked, and my occasional confusion with the character selecting, but everything else about the game worked well and I am hoping very much that QUByte decides to bring more of minicactus games' catalog over to the Switch.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Leave the Rest of the World Behind
P.S. Apparently unable to find the best place for this mention, but I wanted to say that I greatly appreciated that at no time do the astronauts take any kind of fall damage. They could fall from the top of the screen to the bottom and still be fine. There were only a few levels in that this could have played a factor, but I am glad that it did not.
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