KickStarter Undungeon - pixel art sci-fi action-RPG

[Infinitron]

 

[Infinitron]

Steam demo is out.

 

[Dexter]

Tried the Demo that's out right now, and this is the pleasant surprise from some that I've tried, and relatively promising. Seems to be a Russian-developed ARPG but with a lot of Multiple-choice dialogues and generally a lot of lore. The story seems to be about 7 Multidimensional earths merging together and some of the Cinematics I've seen so far seem snazzy enough, even though they're Pixely:

It has a bit of a Fallout feel to it too with you traveling a Wasteland via an Overland map containing things like non-combat settlements, temples, ruins etc. while the weirdness of the world and the characters you meet are closer to Planescape. There's lots of exploration of new places and travel takes days getting between two points of interest (although so far I can't see a time-mechanic that would make you hurry up). You have to dig for more information about where interesting places might be nearby through dialogue or exploration and need to do shit like find or buy a Translation device to be able to talk to the locals. There's also random Encounters on the map from Ambushes to other combat encounters or meeting Traveling vendors and whatnot.

There's Barter Trading where you can offer up items to get items, if you do favors for the specific Nomadic tribes they won't Markup their wares quite as much. You have Arm/Chest/Head/Unavailable item pieces that influence your combat skills and abilities, they usually have a main ability and a "charge" ability. Changing them can change the gameplay rather drastically. For instance there are pairs of claws that act more like AoE hitting a wider field in front of you, you can switch them against high-impact point claws or ranged ones you can shoot things with. The chest slot usually has some sort of shield ability (whether one-hit or specific amount of damage) and something else, for instance you can lay exploding mines or similar), but there's also chest-pieces that can make you invisible or similar. The head slot seems to be for Evasion and kiting. Along with three items that falls into the throwable/healing/bombs category and shit like Runes to increase Skills like Barter or general combat stuff Damage, Armor, Shield, HP, Critical etc. and you can Upgrade your internal Organs by crafting better ones from parts you find off slain enemies (the only player character in the Demo so far is some sort of Void Lich).
One of the main resources in the game is Essence, you gain it by killing things, you can also buy containers from vendors and it's used to open ancient chests with good loot inside, Upgrade your stuff or even sometimes solve Quests. You lose Essence by dying or when you travel.

The gameplay itself might not exactly be the best I've seen in all ARPGs, but the interesting lore, design and other elements kind of make up for it - while some ARPGs get boring because 97% is just clicking things dead there's a lot of other things to do here and the Quests seem varied enough, at least so far.

The Demo is relatively long (like 6-7 hours, the complete First Chapter), you should at least give this a try if you enjoy RPGs.

 

[Sykar]

I wish I could like this game but only 4 abilities for a game of this type makes my stomach churn. I need at least the option to have 8 abilities out of a couple more, though I prefer D2 where you could have 16 hotkeys and could adjust how many you wanted from 1 to 16.

 

[Infinitron]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/928990/view/2894116727336134429

The New Preview Demo Is Now Available!
Enjoy the opening section of the Undungeon's final release version

Greetings, Heralds!

Undungeon releases this fall. Although we are not yet ready to announce the release date, we have got something in store for you in the meantime.

PREVIEW DEMO IS AVAILABLE

DOWNLOAD NOW:

This demo features the reworked opening section of the game. The story starts with Void's attempt to reach the city of Archaban and collect the six seals. Derailed by a devastating cataclysm of unknown nature, his interdimensional travel goes awry. We won't spoil much so that you can see everything by yourselves.

Enjoy and share you feedback with us on the forums!

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[cyborgboy95]

FYI, this game is no longer a roguelike with permadeath

Also, we only get 2 of the 7 promised heralds at launch, whether we get the rest depends on how well the game does

 

[Van-d-all]

Damn I thought it's vaporware. The original kickstarter trailer from 2017 was easily one of the best I saw for a good while, but since then, information about the game has been rather scarce. Have to try the demo.

 

[cyborgboy95]

release date revealed

 

[Infinitron]

https://af.gog.com/game/undungeon?as=1649904300

 

[Jenkem]

so anyone play this?

 

[Van-d-all]

so anyone play this?

I did for an hour, until it pissed me off. Firstly - I do play survival games, and I'm actually quite tolerant of bullshit meters - stamina, durability etc. but... it's like every annoying thing in RPG getting cramped into a single game.

While the artstyle remained honest to the great trailer released ages ago it also forces a constant close zoom making everything on screen rather huge. Maybe it's meant to alleviate the fact that entire game is split into a plethora of absolutely tiny levels, and I mean "single room two corridors" tiny. To make things worse, every level is a load screen, sure on an M2 drive they take but a second, but do remain a constant nuisance, especially in a goddamn pixel art game which might've had all it's sprites cramped into a PNG atlas few megabytes big. On top of that, usually one third of a level is obfuscated by heightened near plane, like hills and so on, so that only silhouettes of characters are seen through them. Yet, worst of all, someone decided nothing says > multidimensional < like slapping dynamically changing chromatic aberration effect on top of it all, obviously on a huge scale, since everything is pixelated to begin with. Travel between locations is made via minimap, somewhat in vein of Fallout 1/2, with occasional random attacks, and (of course) the travel speed is also painstakingly slow.

The game sure aspires to be a full fledged RPG with dialogues, and so those are presented in Disco Elysium style side bar and offer both written descriptions and regular speech. None of them seem to be voiced by any length, but it's not that I mind. The writing however is a whole separate thing. Now, I loved PS:T, MotB, and even the setting in PS:TON. I can appreciate alternate reality or multi-dimension themed fiction when it's interesting, but here? While it's possible to come across an interesting NPC, most of them just spout mumbo-jumbo, which despite being relatively short (for a loredump) mostly namedrops shit at random ("Marduk this Dharma that") to a point that made me yawn. Every environment interaction has a retarded slowdown - pressing (not even holding) a button once makes a tiny square fill up first, before anything happening...

Mechanically, the game bombards player with possibilities - there are several tabs of upgradable, exchangeable, craftable elements like weapons, armors, runes and what not. Normally, I'd say it's a good thing, but no, there's just so much shit here I don't care about most of it. Honestly - you get like 10 types of throwable items in the first hour, and EVERYTHING has a unique mechanic to it. Weapons deteriorate and break. Consumables have to be dropped and hit (by you or the enemy) to activate. Since crafting is also a thing here, you go around mashing everything that might be destructible - boxes, jars, fences, plants - in a boring attempt to make those tiny levels last longer. Joy.

Since gaming journalism is worth shit nowadays, unlike the reviews say, combat is fairly fluent and has no control issues, but again, in attempt to make it oh-so-hard-and-SOULSLIKE it has stamina meters, heavy attack cooldown points and fuck knows what more. Again, it might've been fine if it wasn't for a fact it's technically a glorified hack & slash, so unless you want to get fucked mashing attack button while your character stands like a bitch and "no stamina" sound plays, you have to run around kiting mobs. Pretty much as fun as cooldowns in a Contra game. Some enemies can deal quite a ton of damage. Punch your lights out in 2-3 hits. From border of the screen. Aaaaaaand there's no save game... So you just get respawned, but the quest is failed. Maybe it's geared towards replayability, but I see no way in hell I'm replaying any of this slow ass boring shit. The first sidequest? Two janky AI escort missions.

The overall atmosphere also quickly takes a hike. Majority of soundtrack seems to be made by the (rather good) ukrainian post-rock band stonefromthesky, however for a reason unknown, most of the time only few droning riffs are being played in loop instead of entire tracks. While the setting tries to be interesting (maybe even too much, given dialogues) it just all falls apart - first character you play is a chthonian void. FUCKING CHTHONIAN VOID. Yet, while some characters pay you respects, gameplay says otherwise - you run around killing little shit scorpions, destroying random cacti, gathering trash and rescuing lost pissants - all the while looking for >> Dimensional Cores << of course.

Overall, just no. I WAS really interested in the game since the first trailer, but while I'm glad it came out at all, after the 3 year hiatus, it's a disjointed mess of tiny bits that just don't make a good whole. Uninstalled.