I’m not really one for patience in games. I’m definitely the hack and slash ‘em to bits kind of player rather than a slick stealthy player. My approach to games is pretty unruly is what I’m trying to say, but there has been one game that tamed my rampaging ways and that was Cappybara Games’ Below.
Below is a game that’s best played slowly. You’re tasked with reaching the bottom of an island’s subterranean caverns, trying to survive against monsters, traps, starvation, and dehydration. Each layer is shrouded in darkness meaning that you only have the small ring of light from your torch to watch carefully where you step. Charging through these levels is the quickest way of getting sliced and diced, and when you die, you begin back on the beach right next to the boat you arrived on.
]]>The roguelike-like survival game Below was a bit more difficult when it came out than its moody, fog-filled trailers suggested, even to me who had been following it for multiple years. Capybara Games announced a while back that they'd heard community feedback and had decided to add a second mode to the game dubbed Explore Mode. Capy are giving PC players a chance to try out the new mode early by opting into a beta branch through Steam from today until next Tuesday, April 7.
]]>Last year's Below was a stunner. A beautiful subterranean puzzle-box. A real shame, then, that for so many explorers it was also brutally, unforgivingly difficult. But while developers Capy one stood firmly by the belief that a cursed hole in the ground should be a torturous experience, they've since changed their tune. Below will soon receive a new Explore mode, cutting back on more obtuse mechanics and survival timers to make its lovely caves less frustrating to traverse.
]]>"Under the hood, too many games are just primarily about finely-tuned reward systems. Nothing more than expertly crafted dopamine injectors which often border on, if not fully embrace their Skinner box-like qualities."
Kris Piotrowski didn't want to create a game like that. As the creative director and co-founder of Capybara Games, he and the team spent years working on Below, a roguelike in which you steer a tiny person to explore a labyrinthine cave. "Players have been trained to expect soft padding around their games, but if they don’t pump the brakes and take it slow when they begin venturing deeper into Below, if they don’t play carefully, if they don’t prepare their backpack for deeper exploration, then the game eats them for breakfast."
The problem: a lot of players didn't like being eaten.
]]>A weird thing happened after I’d been playing Below for a few hours. See, the thing about Below, which I spose is a basic feature of all underground things, is that it’s dark. Your little adventurer has some species of magic lantern, but it’s powered by crystals collected from dead enemies, and upon your death it’s left with your body for the next you to find and collect. If you run out of crystals or die, both of which will happen, it becomes very dark indeed. (Below is a difficult game to take screenshots of.)
And the other thing about Below is that the camera is quite far away from the action and said action is at a small scale. You end up squinting, very close to the screen, like an elderly lady trying to facetime her grandson. I felt like an entomologist trying to divine the behaviour of a lone, squishy beetle making a journey through a nest of angry termites. So, unbidden, my mind provided its own David Attenborough voice over:
]]>It's the RPS/Gamer Network annual day of chest-thumping/excessive consumption/enforced PowerPoint-watching, so we'll all be offline when Capy's much-anticipated rando-dungeon-runner Below launches this evening.
Hence, let's say this now: Below's out today! Somehow! After half a decade! Is that even a long time in games development any more? I don't know I've been here 11 years so it feels like Below only got announced like, last summer! Anyway! It's really happening! Happy days!
]]>Very pretty/entirely menacing rand-o-dungeon-o game Below has been tantalising us from a distance for half a decade. "It'll never happen!", bellowed Derek Misery from a Twitter account with 12 followers, sometime in 2016.
Well, suck it up, Derek - all of a sudden, the closest thing there is to a follow-up to peerless adventure/musical odyssey/exploratory crisis Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP is out in seven short days.
]]>As we stare into the weary, craggy face of the final quarter of 2018, there is still a glimmer of hope. The games are not yet done. They will never be done. And the impending release of them, some close, some a little further away, stirs something within us. The delicate, easily crushed butterfly of excitement. We may catch it yet, to keep in our collection of emotions - the sharp pin of time pushed through and through it into the cork of eventual disappointement.
]]>The video game Below is absolutely going to happen. I know you can't read my tone here but I am using my most Serious Voice. It's probably coming out now. It may already be out. Who knows? Maybe we've already played it together and had a wonderful time. Do you remember that night? We all shared secrets and ate crisps. I had too many beers and you were like "Brock, don't get drunk, we've been waiting so long for Below, we need to enjoy it together." I said something inappropriate, but we all circled back and had a wonderful time. I apologized later to you in private and we're all good now. Maybe we're even closer because of the experience.
Point being, this weekend was another big video game conference and another chance for let leak a bit of news on a game that was first shown to us in 2013. And just enough leaked for us to have the conversation about the inevitability of Below yet again.
]]>Fresh on Kickstarter is a science fiction IF piece called Alcyone: The Last City. A look at the screenshots will suggest something familiar to dedicated IF fans: it looks a lot like StoryNexus, the Failbetter engine that powers both Fallen London and (behind the scenes) Sunless Sea/Sunless Skies.
]]>Newcomers to interactive fiction tend to distinguish just a couple of IF formats — Twine and parser, often, depending on whether you're clicking or typing. Those with a little more experience might also recognize ChoiceScript and inklewriter, as options for creating games with a classic choose-your-own-adventure-style interface and some of the qualities of a gamebook. But in fact there are many other possible interfaces for IF — and the IF community has just seen the release of a new one.
Texture, designed by Jim Munroe and Juhana Leinonen, is an interactive fiction platform intended to be effective across mobile devices as well as the PC screen — unlike parser designs that require fiddly typing. Despite its simplicity, though, Texture gives the reader a little bit more control than the average hypertext piece: to interact, you drag a verb from the bottom of the screen and release it over a hotspot in the text.
]]>Every day for eight weeks you've leapt out of bed beaming. "Hello, birds!" you trill to the stump-legged pigeons fighting over a kebab wrapper on your windowsill. "Hello, sky!" you cry to the clouds. "Hello, fork!" you yell, waving at the fork you've just trodden on. Nothing can put a dent in your day: it is summer, which means today could be the day Below [official site] comes out.
Mate. I'm sorry, mate. Bad news: Capy have delayed Below and haven't given a new release window, saying they plan to "take the time that we need to complete Below without compromise". It's for the best, mate.
]]>Sword & Sworcery is one of my favourite games ever, and Super Time Force was great fun, so I'm terribly excited for Capy's next project, the dark and mysterious explore-em-up Below. [official site] Jim Guthrie (Sword & Sworcery, Indie game: The Movie) providing the soundtrack is really just the icing on this delicious cake.
And a new trailer reveals we're going to be able to taste it this summer. I can already smell its procedural generation and the rotten corpses of Dark-souls-like permadeath. Everyone beat me to all the bad jokes already, so please just follow me below for some more details and a few minutes of gameplay.
]]>We've been pleasantly puzzled by Below since Capy announced it. The game's beautiful, but what is it? The Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery and Super Time Force folks have spoken vaguely about it being a roguelike-like with plenty of exploration and permadeath--and a game suited for PC--but watching the Gamescom trailer demonstrates an important detail. You can carry a shield and hit things with a sword until they burst. And oh me oh my it's still gorgeous, with a tremendous sense of scale as a tiny person wanders a big, nasty world. The trailer's... below.
]]>Below, the gorgeous, mystery-dripping roguelike explorer from Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery collaborator Capy, is looking tremendous. It's got a uniquely dreamy vibe about it and atmosphere that hits like an 18-wheeler driven by a throng of stampeding rhinos. It was set to be an Xbox exclusive, but Capy managed to wriggle loose from Microsoft's iron grasp and set about working on its first ever day-and-date PC launch. That lack of experience might make you wary of a slipshod port, but the developer is dedicated to getting things right on PC. Shortly after citing Ultima VII as a (rather surprising) influence, Capy creative director Kris Piotrowski told me why excluding full-blown mod support from a game - indie, triple-A, or otherwise - simply doesn't make sense in this day and age. On top of that, he added, Below is now being designed with a PC crowd in mind, and that stands to change the game entirely.
]]>I wouldn't be writing about Below on RPS if it weren't coming to the PC, because in spite of the many, many, oh-so-very-many emails from marketers and PRs about iOS hidden object games (and the occasional moment of writer's prerogative), this is mostly a PC site. So we haven't mentioned Capy's Below until now, because it was tied up in Xbox Xclusivity. That's changed, as was revealed in a very elegant fashion in the trailer I've embedded yonder. I'm not going to spoil how they did it, because I think what they did was lovely and speaks to the game's core adventurousness, and I want you to smile like I did.
And just what is Below? Well I've attempted to find out for you bel-, er, beneath. It's not entirely clear.
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