The Haunted Hoard: Down the Oubliette (Playdate)

While the Playdate comes with a nice selection of included titles, on March 7th of 2023, the Catalog was added. On your device you could now purchase new games directly, and part of the launch line-up for this new curated digital store was a tower defense game called Down the Oubliette. While no doubt many Playdate owners have gotten used to the mystery of seeing what how its crank will be integrated into a new game type, Down the Oubliette actually avoids using the system’s quirky control method entirely. It’s not without a standout idea though, since while you will be placing down towers for protection in this game, Down the Oubliette actually makes the thing all the enemies want to kill you, and you’re free to move around as you please during play.

 

Down the Oubliette has you playing as a girl called to a country house to investigate odd cases of paranormal activity, and as you enter the cellar, you’re quick to find the spirits responsible. Luckily, the spirits are not active until you uncover their haunting place, the cellars beneath the house initially filled with plenty of dirt you’ll need to dig up to find them. A few things do make it hard to know where spirits might be lurking, only a small part of the screen illuminated so you can’t be sure where the twisting tight corridors initially lead, but you do have a small device on the right side of the screen that shows the strength of nearby paranormal activity. Since the halls have a few junctions you won’t always know exactly which piece of dirt hides the adorable but dangerous ghosts out to get you, but you can still make informed choices on what risks to take when you start digging out some room to operate.

Space to move around in is incredibly important in Down the Oubliette because it feels at a bit of a premium. When you first enter a floor you’ll likely find yourself with only a few squares of space to operate in, and this can admittedly be an issue at times. The floors you explore are somewhat randomized so you might not always have the room to reasonably set up for the first spirit encounter, and while touching a ghost will instantly kill it, you start the game with three hearts, lose one any time you touch a specter, and only regain a single heart after finishing a level. A run of Down the Oubliette actually takes place across 16 floors in total and you gradually reach floors with slightly different themes, the dark black and white halls not able to stand out too much but they can at least introduce new appropriate ghosts like a diver spirit for a watery cistern. Thankfully, once you start to get a feel for the way the game functions (which isn’t always explained the best through the brief mechanic descriptions found in your notebook), you can start to really strategize how best to handle your ghost extermination work, especially since other resources travel between floors too.

 

To take on the shades and specters you’re here to eliminate you’ll need to find open spots to place down towers. You cannot place towers when they’d conceivably block the spirits’ ability to follow you entirely, so a clear corridor must be kept open. This does mean the space you can place towers is limited, but figuring out which corners or extra openings you can use as a building spot ends up a bit more challenging because you need to be economical while ensuring a tower can deal damage long enough to wipe out some surprisingly durable ghosts. Starting off the resources you spend on building towers are very limited but will be replenished every time you clear out a spirit den on a floor, these building resources carried between levels as well so there’s another consideration on how you want to use them. You can try to save only to find yourself overwhelmed or you might really feel foolish when you purchase more towers than it took to wipe out the enemies on the floor, but you are at least thinking tactically about your placement instead of breezing through. Early on though you just might not have enough resources to really balance things well and might take a hit just because the randomization meant you had little choice, but one trick you can do if you do feel you messed up a floor is back out to the main menu and then click Continue. The floor you’re on will reset but keep the same layout, meaning any mean tricks that crop up can be worked around with an inelegant but thankfully fast ability to try the level again.

The four towers in Down the Oubliette all have different uses and oddly enough remain consistent across the whole experience. The beacon emits a light that mostly wears down weaker spirits well, the coil zaps nearby ghosts for fast consistent damage, and the torch will send a burst of flame forward that deals the most damage but is the most expensive on top of only facing one direction at at time while the others hit any enemy within a circular range. The fan is the final tower and would perhaps be good in theory in a game that built around it, but its purpose is to slow down enemies its wind blows on, and while it is the cheapest tower and a possible quick build in a desperate situation, Down the Oubliette’s floor layouts don’t leave a lot of space for towers and unless you get lucky with a long corridor, they might not even really impact your foes much. It’s not outright useless, but you can also probably complete a 16 floor run without touching them once you understand some other systems at play. Crates with upgrade materials can be found in lower floors, and they’re a bit more than a way to make a tower more powerful one time. Once a specific upgrade is purchased once, on later floors you can upgrade a tower to that state again for fairly cheap without spending another upgrade crate. In essence, the crates ensure you can do improvements to your towers, and lower floors definitely get more interesting because you can start figuring out how much you want to invest in each tower and towers like the torch can become superb when you find a long hall, upgrade it to max, and watch the flame fire out all the way through a marching row of enemies.

 

Down the Oubliette does a poor job introducing ideas like how towers can be picked up and rotated freely and it doesn’t explain how resources carry over between floors so you might go a few runs before realizing the resource management matters across the entire experience, but one thing that does become immediately clear is the fact you are the target for the spirits slowly drifting through the cellar halls is key to how you can handle them. They will always home in on your position, meaning even if you uncover multiple junctions in a basement, they might not get used as the ghosts take the best path they can to reach you. At the same time, you can keep operating while the ghosts are coming towards you, meaning in more complex floor layouts you can bait them around, this a bit of a double-edged feature as it feels satisfying to so easily lead them to their doom but in other levels it can end up invalidating the difficulty when you just walk in circles and let the towers wear the monsters down. It is at least sometimes a way to operate despite the shaky nature of resource scarcity when starting out and it feels like something should have been done to make this strategy a little less foolproof. There are different enemy types all with their own weaknesses and strengths, but it’s more in regards to how they’re harmed by specific tower types since they’ll all happily move in a line and rely on physical contact to harm you. A bit of attack variety or some trick to maybe discourage the occasional goose chases you lead them on could help curb the runaround tactic, but Down the Oubliette wraps up a little unceremoniously after it’s 16th floor and instead leans on the idea you’ll want to replay it because it technically will be different every time.

THE VERDICT: Limited room to operate and the player serving as a moving target for the marching monsters are good ideas for the slightly spooky tower defense game that is Down the Oubliette, but limits placed elsewhere don’t always pan out. Leading enemies around sometimes saps the difficulty of an entire floor when things line up right, and randomized designs leads to some moments where you have the opposite problem of too little feasible space. Luckily, once you do figure out for yourself how some things function, you can start engaging with a satisfying tower upgrade system and the strategic considerations involved in laying out your towers still keep you on your toes and involved enough that you’ll get more sweet spots than rough spots during your 16 floor runs.

 

And so, I give Down the Oubliette for Playdate…

An OKAY rating. Down the Oubliette really needs to explain its systems a little better or at least flesh out the notebook you’re given to peruse for more info if needed, but once you’ve settled into an understanding of some of the systems that I’ve helpfully explained here, you can start to instead get a little engrossed in how they all function. This isn’t a tower defense game where you’ll end up with walls of incredibly powerful towers, each time you uncover a spirit den there’s a little nervous energy as you wonder if your placed defenses are going to be just enough or just a little off. With more concrete level designs though the game could have maybe upped the variety in enemies beyond their weaknesses and health and maybe a few of the designs where it feels like the some damage is all but necessary could have been pruned out. Down the Oubliette does become more entertaining as you go even if at the same time you might encounter some of the easiest floors as you get deeper in, but that will also sometimes be from your own smart management of resources instead of just finding a convenient loop to run around in as you lure spirits into your death maze.

 

Many Playdate games make learning and understanding the crank a core part of the challenge, but while Down the Oubliette forgoes the crank, a growing understanding of its mechanics despite their inadequate explanations almost mimics that experience. It’s not a positive really and it might make some players leave before they start to realize the appeal of the cramped hallways, limited information on the enemy forces, and the strategic weighing of vital tower placement. Some concessions in complexity likely came from the system of choice, but Down the Oubliette does find its footing and clearing out a haunted country house does become more engaging the deeper down you get in a run.