Going Under, Intern Action RPG impresses at PAXEast

In a world where many startups pop up and almost as many eventually fail you might sometimes wonder "what happened to that company?"  In Going Under you get a fantastical adventure that takes place in a world where those poorly-conceived start-ups left behind some unpleasant baggage for those who came after.

You play as Jackie, a new intern who starts work at new soda drink startup Fizzy.  Fizzy's foundation is build on the many failed start-ups that have gone before it. Seems these failures that had gone before left behind some nasty residue in the form of various monsters and it is is your task as intern to go down in the catacombs underneath the company and clean house.

Going Under is played as a fast paced action dungeon crawler. The levels in the game combine fantasy dungeon archetypes with satirical start-up premises.  After preparing yourself with the needed items for you quest in the upper office of Fizzles headquarters you make your way down the dungeons and you will use various weapons in chaotic battles with the various monsters in the game. You will find a lot of junk down below that can be used as a weapon and will end up swapping them out a lot in an effort to mop up the baddies and epic bosses.

The thing that stands out as soon as you start playing is the unique art style and the bright colors. I know , it is something that gets thrown out a lot these days, but it is true. Especially in the upper levels it is a rainbow of colors that saturate the screen and the games character designs are much different from what you normally see out there.  There is no realism to the look and feel of this world, it is all in the realm of the fantastical and imaginary. Take the characters in the game for instance. The designs are high def and brightly colored with reds, yellows and blues. They have no hands, or fingers. They are more like giant noodles with a stomp at the end, but they are powerful arms that can wallop a punch. 

But simple hand to hand combat is not enough and it becomes important to find some weaponry in the game. Many items in the rooms can be smashed to pieces and either thrown at enemies or sued as an instrument of pain. Sometimes you would run into a vendor type NPC where you can buy items but the game would not go to a menu , you rather pick and object in real time and pay for it. It was a cool feature that felt immersive. In other areas such as broom closets I found power ups such as "Explosive Temper" were available for pickup and increase the characters stats and/or abilities. 

Going Under is fast paced and the gameplay is very smooth. The battles early on seemed fairly straight forward at first but quickly it became clear that a good combo of attack , avoid and defend can be helpful as you deal with more fierce enemies. Though we saw only a little bit of the game there seems to be a lot more depth in it then you might expect. It was a bit hard to tell because we had no text in the text bubbles and it seems that the game was running in debug mode accidentally which might have caused us to miss out a thing or two but even then the game was a joy to play and I cannot wait to see more of it in the coming months. 

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Game information:
Title: Going Under
Developer: Aggro Crab Games
Publisher: Team 17

Release date: 2020

Platforms: PC, Consoles

ESRB: TBD