Funded on Kickstarter back in 2017, Undungeon is a gorgeous cosmic-horror action-RPG set after some truly absurd dimensional shenanigans went down. Seven different varieties of planet Earth have been smashed together like multi-coloured play-doh, wiping out humanity and leaving bands of alien weirdos to pick up the pieces.
The demo puts you in the clawed boots of Void. One of the full game’s seven playable “Heralds” - oddball aliens from each of the dimension-smashed Earths - Void is a spooky skeleton man with the ability to lay mines and perform a phase-shifting dash. Opening the demo by crashing face-first into an arid pixel-art desert, I can’t say the intimidation factor holds up - especially when your man’s getting knackered by tiny bugs. What follows is a brief grab-bag of Undungeon’s hack n’ slash / RPG mashup, taking rather more heavily from the latter than I was really expecting. The dialogue is surprisingly dense from the get-go, immediately letting you unpick the game’s layered worlds. Small talk and the odd loot drops will occasionally add new locations to am overworld map evocative of the older Fallouts - and, like those, your line in the sand is often interrupted by chance encounters with friends or foes. It is rather gorgeous, too - barren pixellated landscapes interrupted by the glitches of a world-that-was, distinct enough that it never feels too much like Hyper Light Drifter. Still not sold on the name, though. Undungeon doesn’t tell me much about anything, does it? Undungeon’s playable demo can be picked up free over on Steam right now. The full thing is eyeing up a release sometime near the end of the year. Whatever you call it, hit our E3 2020 tag for more from this summer’s blast of gaming announcements, trailers, and miscellaneous marketing. Check out the PC games at the PlayStation 5 show, everything at the PC Gaming Show, and all the trailers from the Xbox showcase, for starters.
