Going Under (Xbox One)

While initially portrayed as plucky and quirky little groups of young innovators, the form modern tech companies tend to take slowly had its constructed personality peeled back to show it can have its problems just like any other kind of office work. Tech start-ups can just as often be managed by people who spout buzzwords like “blockchain” without any idea what they mean and the people at the top can turn out to be someone who threw their father’s money at various businesses until one didn’t fail. Certainly not every workplace is like this, but Going Under lumps together the many familiar foibles of this business trend and applies a satirical edge to it all, the dissatisfaction funneled through turning such workplaces into dungeons where even the monsters you’re meant to slay are some clever business pun or parody of the current trends in digital culture.

Already it becomes clear what this action game is going for when you first get a good look at its world, the corporate art style common to companies like Facebook used for Going Under’s world design. Characters are presented with rounded limbs and skin colors that are meant to obfuscate normal ethnic assumptions, but the characters in Going Under intentionally subvert generic design by having pronounced personalities. Jackie is the character the player plays as, this fresh young intern bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as she gets her first job. However, thanks to the monopolistic reach of the Cubicle company, she ends up assigned as an unpaid intern to a company she has no familiarity with, the Fizzle startup responsible for producing a drink that also works as a meal replacement. While her workspace has a welcoming appearance with its bright colors and even a slide employees can take to the bottom floor, it is guilty of being run by people detached from the actual work the employees are involved in. The friendly Fern is the individual in charge of actually developing the flavors, the more jaded Kara is the programmer responsible for the company’s web presence, Tappi attempts to be professional in her work as head accountant, and Swomp the barista at the company coffee shop mostly seems along for the ride. These fun side characters bring some humanity to the corporate world you find yourself in and can bounce of Jackie well when the game starts making silly comments about the nature of digital development, but the people in charge, the manager Marv and the CEO Ray, strain relations with their detachment. Ray makes impulsive purchases on the company card, Marv pushes the company towards integrating AI suggested ideas, and in general the more antagonistic business elements of the story emerge from the push for progress and profits with little consideration for the human element that got Fizzle to the point Cubicle wanted to acquire it.

While the harsher sides of this does come to a head in a few cutscenes and ensure the game isn’t just poking fun without addressing the sometimes real issues with such a workplace, you do mostly get to have enjoyable and lighthearted interactions with your coworkers since the game’s action actually takes place in the offices of other companies. Jackie’s work as an intern isn’t to help with marketing like she’s told as she’s instead sent to the workplaces of tech start-ups that went under in order to acquire valuable items that can help your own company. Jackie, already immediately aware of many of the issues that pop up in her own workplace and unafraid to comment on them, is reticent at first to fight, but she worked to get this far and the opportunities for working under Cubicle are too great to pass up. Thankfully, bashing monsters in a dungeon isn’t too morally dubious, but the creatures she encounters on her adventures aren’t just the typical fantasy fare. She may be plunging into a place filled with goblins or demons, but they include clever concepts conceived from various business puns. A freelancer here isn’t someone working for whoever is willing to pay, it’s a character actually wielding a lance to fight. One dungeon is based on cryptocurrency, so the game takes the “crypt” part of the term and extrapolates it into undead miners who have a mix of actual technology and traditional mining tools to fight you with. Blockchains appear not as a form of data storage but as actual blocks on chains hanging from the ceiling and swinging around like wrecking balls.

Going Under’s areas are flush with fun little extrapolations of real world concepts into fantasy dangers, but it also keeps some things close to life in a way that still feels creative. Jackie doesn’t enter the dungeon with any weapons of her own, instead needing to grab things while exploring to use against the goofy workplace monsters. Picking up a potted plant or computer monitor to smash over the heads of your enemies ends up being your battle option of choice, and the wide range of weapons continues to evolve and even continues the imaginative twists you can give to common elements of tech culture so they better fit this style of action.  While it can be amusing to stab someone with a tablet pen or throw a coffee can like a bomb, you will probably trend more towards the objects more like real weapons, enemies dropping their tools on death so that you’re given a constant feed of new options to offset the fact your weapons have limited durability. Swinging a hammer or sword or stabbing someone with a pitchfork will probably end up your go-to means for dealing serious damage, but different weapons do handle in different ways and some are focused more on being thrown or fired. The impermanence of each new tool does mean you’ll need to adapt at times to what is in the current room, but each room manages a good mix of its corporate theme and its fantasy elements. Goblins will have camps where giant coffee pots sit on their camp fire or the demons who run a dating app will have plenty of romance-associated accoutrements in the room that serve as solid weapons. Rather than a red hot poker you will instead have something like a staff with a finger-poking emoji on it that can mix the cute theming with actual effectiveness, although packing the room with so many interactive objects that can serve as weapons is probably why they sometimes physics freaks out and items end up flying around on their own. It does allow the game to mix its “fight with what you can” approach with appealing environmental design, and by granting some easier to understand weaponry to stick to it won’t force you into feeling constantly underequipped and forced to use bad choices like a calculator to fight.

The battles in Going Under can be difficult at times although that’s more because the foes do pack a punch and can come in rather packed rooms. Progressing through the floors of a dungeon involves clearing room after room before fighting a boss at the bottom, and while there are special rooms to the side like shops and rooms with free upgrades, the actual path to the floor exit is linear and not too demanding in its length. You are given a dodge to help you navigate the sometimes tight battle spaces you end up in, and while the game gives you the option to focus on foes so you can move around that foe specifically, it is often wiser to move freely since a good deal of the challenge is managing the enemy group and knowing when to use your weapons safely. Some rooms can contain dungeon specific challenges like trying to collect cryptocurrency while avoiding the enemies or using the dating app to fight and possibly befriend an enemy who will fight beside you until they die, but mostly the game is about being able to maintain your health well and build up your upgrades by fighting foes, earning cash for the shops, and sometimes getting goodies delivered into the room via drone as a reward for winning a tough fight.

If you do end up dying in a dungeon, you’ll be kicked out of it and forced to attempt it again with their previous skills lose and the dungeon layout randomly altered, but thankfully the dungeons aren’t too long, you can sometimes choose between multiple ones to attempt, and there are ways to increase your abilities for next time. One of the most important elements of turning things in your favor are the Skills that randomly appear during each dungeon run. Sold in the shop, handed out in a special room, or your reward for taking on curses that briefly make the game harder with ideas like making enemies explode on death, Skills can come in many helpful shapes. Some like Go-Getter are simple buffs to attack and movement speed, Fail Forward will let you revive with very little health but an attack boost, and Hot Shot will ignite any items you throw. Some like Open Minded increase critical hit chance when unfocused which again shows how that feature is sometimes best ignored, but others like Thought Leader have a chance of an enemy joining your side when focusing on them. In addition to basic health upgrades these will almost always be beneficial and only a few have true downsides to them unless it is in turn balanced by a huge benefit like getting higher strength in a trade for lower money drops. Much like what items you find, the upgrades you acquire aren’t often something you have an influence over save what you choose to buy at the shop and sometimes doing well is adjusting to your new Skills to succeed, although by using a Skill enough in a dungeon you can later pin it so it is automatically equipped when starting a new run.

There are more elements on your side to help you get off to a better start in dungeons as well. The characters who work alongside you at Fizzle will sometimes ask you to do special things while in the dungeons, these quests going towards building up clout with them so they can mentor you. When a character is mentoring you, they provide unique benefits like Swomp letting you swipe a random item from the dungeon shops for free, Fern giving you a packed lunch to enter the dungeon with so you have a few free heals on hand, and Kara can increase your uses of the phone apps you find in dungeons that each have their own unique effects like temporary invincibility or placing a decoy. Mentorships can provide additional benefits the more quests you do for a character, and although you can only have one active mentor at a time, the quests can sometimes have interesting concepts or provide amusing interactions with your coworkers. Swomp’s quests are quirky things like eating a healing sandwich when at full health and Tappi will often have some business angle like trying to earn a set amount of real cash from the cryptocurrency mines. Some of these will actually add new unique rooms to a run with special enemies while others can actually introduce unique impediments like when you’re asked to walk the dachshund Eclair through a dungeon and she ends up slowing you down during fights as she obliviously ambles along behind you.

Doing these quests are often a reason to return to previously completed dungeons, the core story technically only requiring you to complete each one once but also doing some recycling in the later half. While you will be made to revisit the early dungeons again as part of progressing the comedic plot, they are at least retooled to have new enemies and concepts and the game’s difficulty kicks in here more as foes are more willing to use fast or far reaching attacks. Some other areas also rely more on mixing up familiar content too, but the randomization can keep things fairly fresh while also giving you enough familiar elements that you can start overcoming the more dangerous late game enemies to face the upgraded bosses who definitely do more to challenge you. More unique areas would definitely been a chance to explore more creative recontextualizations of tech sector concepts into dungeon dangers, but the content mostly avoids straining itself despite the repeated use of elements even outside of needing to plunge into the same dungeon again for another attempt.

THE VERDICT: Filled with cute jabs at and clever extrapolations of modern workplace culture while still having some room for dramatic stakes, Going Under blends business concepts surprisingly well with dungeon combat. Weapons and upgrades turning familiar items and jargon into legitimately useful tools makes discovering them a bit more exciting while many are practical enough in a fight that the broadness of the concept doesn’t lead to too many moments of weakness. The enjoyable supporting cast and room for improving your starting advantages for each dungeon run give some helpful extras to engage with even as the main adventure does do a few flagrant moments of content recycling, but it also pushes forward with some new ideas to offset it and a bump in difficulty keeps Going Under enjoyable to play on top of the parody elements that are fun to keep discovering.

And so, I give Going Under for Xbox One…

A GOOD rating. If Going Under had kept up its creative momentum until the conclusion it would definitely have been a smoother experience overall, but the returns to the earlier dungeons are thankfully not without novel concepts to make the necessary repetition still somewhat appealing. The mentor quests perhaps push you a bit too much to plunge in over and over but also add new considerations and conditions to the regular play to disrupt the search for the optimal weapons and upgrades, and with the shape of each failed tech startup turned danger zone changing every run it also makes the extra attempts easier to get into since they aren’t straight rehashes of what you faced before. The need to develop your understanding of your enemies and when to dodge to clear the later game challenges also puts some important emphasis on things beyond what items you managed to grab, and since you always pop back to Fizzle after a run whether or not it is successful, you’re given time to cool down and talk to the other employees who can provide comedic observations or just a chance to get to know them better so their role in the story is more strongly felt.

It feels a little wrong to tell developer AggroCrab this game would be better if there was more to it since scope creep is the exact kind of thing this game rightly critiques or would figure out how to turn it into a cute but useful weapon or dangerous enemy, and Going Under already has quite a lot of ideas combining together without cluttering the game. Apps, Skills, Mentors, curses, a wide range of weapons with different fighting styles, Going Under mixes customization, rewards, and the thrill of finding something useful when you can’t be sure if what lies ahead will be as strong as you like. All of these things help keeps the action entertaining despite having to limit its variety in regards to things like dungeon themes. The creative implementation of its satirical target makes it easy to press ahead to keep seeing more of it while the cast humanizes things well so it’s not all going to be cynical barbs. After all, this game wouldn’t exist if AggroCrab, a then-new tech startup, hadn’t put it together, but exaggeration and lightheartedness keep this game from being too corporate while still steeped in such imagery, its monsters and battles more intriguing because they all tie back to this creative concept for a dungeon crawler.