UnderDungeon, a great, albeit short dungeon crawler, that will unfortunately fly under many people’s radars.

I recently finished [UnderDungeon](https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/underdungeon-switch/), a pretty recent game that I only accidentally stumbled upon, but enjoyed a great deal. It’s a bit of a hidden gem that needs more eyes on it.

I’ll just paste the review I left on metacritic:

UnderDungeon is a top down 2D dungeon crawler reminiscent of early 2D Legend of Zelda games, even featuring some references to the franchise.

You play as Kimuto, an anthropomorphic cat starting his first day as a delivery boy for Unlimited Distributions. Each delivery brings him to a new area full of monsters and puzzles he needs to conquer to successfully make his delivery. The premise is silly and the game wears its quirky humor on its sleeve. The jokes do not always land but they usually got a chuckle out of me.

The main attraction, the dungeons/areas are all well done. Each one has a unique setting with unique monsters, puzzles, secrets and a boss encounter at the end. They also feature lots of minigames and breaks from the usual gameplay, not unlike Undertale. They are refreshing changes and never outstay their welcome.

While the dungeons themselves are open, the game in itself is very linear. You wait at your desk or walk around the office until your phone rings, then you’re automatically transported to the next dungeon. Unlike the Zelda games, there is no overworld here to explore.

Combat is well done. Attacking is slow, so you’ll have to watch the enemy’s movements and time your attacks right. You’ll find a small variety of weapons and upgrades that are fun to use, and items to help you along the way. While this is all well and good, there are some issues. Switching between weapons and items can be annoying, especially while fighting monsters. You have to scroll through a list of options until the weapon/item is selected before you can use it, all while dodging enemy attacks. It’s clunky and I feel like this could have been done a lot better.

Regarding items, most of them are helpful, but you can’t choose what items to get. There is a merchant in every dungeon but each time, he has a fixed selection of three items to sell. It would have been nice if the player had more agency over what they can buy, although I do understand that this might have made the game too easy.

The presentation is great. Despite being in black and white, the visuals are nice to look at and clear (with some minor exceptions). The soundtrack is also great to listen to.

Finally, a minor issue I had with the Switch version. I played in handheld mode, and for whatever reason, the touchscreen controls are activated and mapped to the A-button. It doesn’t add anything and I sometimes touched it by accident, making me skip text while I was still reading it. It should be possible to deactivate them.

The game is rather short with around 5 hours of playtime if you take your time exploring everything. But I had a lot of fun with it and would definitely recommend it if you’re a fan of Legend of Zelda and Undertale. Unfortunately, I feel like this game will fly under most people’s radars. I only found it thanks to it being heavily discounted right after launch. But I hope the game will still enjoy some success, and I hope to see more from this studio in the future!

by cedriceent