Picking Up Steam: 99 Levels to Hell (PC)
This year’s Picking Up Steam has been interesting for me not only because I get to see the rest of games I had only dabbled in before, but because it comes with a fun mystery to solve on why I shelved such games in the first place. However, for the game 99 Levels to Hell, I remember exactly why I stopped playing, and it was for the very simple reason that I thought it was bad. I hadn’t gotten very far into it though so I did wonder if actually seeing the whole game through would dispel that notion, and while it wasn’t as bad as I remembered it being once I gave it its second chance, I can’t exactly say I was wrong for setting it aside so many years ago.
99 Levels to Hell is a rogue-like platformer where you need to fight your way through to the bottom layer of Hell to face the devil in battle, and while the game doesn’t come right out to explain the reason, there are books to be found along the way with some deeper details. If you manage to find them, you’ll hear a narrated story told in rhyme about two brothers who were separated after their mother’s death, their fortunes splitting before they one day begin to interact again. At first it can almost seem like a legend rather than a relevant bit of poetry, and with the default character being described as a wizard with a shotgun who bears a monocle and large handlebar mustache it can almost seem at odds with the actual tone of the game, but the thought put into writing this optional story element makes it an interesting find even if you’ll be hearing it piecemeal and might even miss some of the books along the way. Beating the game does provide the uninterrupted tale as a reward and is probably the best way to experience it, the main game not really building up to much and what little details it does hide in the background about the story are more meaningful in retrospect with the art otherwise mostly focused on providing varied settings for the ten major dungeons of the underworld.
Despite being a rogue-like, 99 Levels to Hell does not require you to make the whole adventure from the first level to the final one in a singular life. Instead, Hell is divided into ten layers, each one a dungeon with a unique aesthetic and a boss to cap it off. Once you beat a dungeon’s boss, you’ll unlock a door that lets you hop into the next dungeon immediately from the start, 99 levels a far less daunting prospect as a result. Unfortunately though, despite an adventure to the end requiring you to push through that many stages to reach its end even if you did it perfectly from the start rather than needing to replay any part due to deaths, the rogue-like design does hamper it with very weak level randomization. There likely aren’t even 30 unique arrangements a level can assume, and that “likely” there is to hedge my bets against the fact that it is possible some familiar locations undergo minor changes while still playing essentially the same. You’ll come to recognize level layouts rather quickly, the vertically oriented stages even making themselves a bit memorable in the wrong way for how time can be lost from unfortunate drops or how you might need to leap through a teleportation portal the right way to pop out the other side and end up where you like rather than plummeting down and needing to attempt another climb. There is some conceptual variety to be found, like areas where you need to break through a lot of blocks to explore, one focused on long ladder climbs, and one where far too many enemies are crammed in a small box in the bottom left corner that can make it hard if the key you must grab to unlock the exit ends up down there. These arrangements stand out a bit compared to more mundane but inoffensive platforming spaces that make up the bulk of the standard level layouts you’ll encounter.
The different layers of Hell can change how such levels feel a tad though. Hell initially starts off looking more like a castle, but as you plunge into the later dungeons you can find spaces more befitting a place of eternal torment like fleshy areas crawling with bugs or areas filled with blood and flames. Curiously, there are also spaces that feature advanced technology more befitting the future than the usual image of the afterlife, but each new place comes with a few new enemies and traps. Admittedly, a good deal of these are just light variants on what you found before. Early traps will comprise of something like a block where spikes will come out a bit after you step on it, then later you get faster ones or ones that release an explosive instead. In the first area of the game you face things like bats and later you’ll face faster bats or bats that split into smaller bats. That isn’t to say areas don’t come with new foes, you’ll see a strange green tank mutant crop up for example, but then when you’re in the cybernetic area, you face little machines that fire upon you in a similar way and realize the game sometimes just does a better job of reskinning a familiar threat. Most of the regular foes fit into some archetypes you encounter early on in terms of their movement, but what can make them particularly pesky is that 99 Levels to Hell makes no effort to account for their placement when it comes to your own survival. The box of baddies in the bottom left in one layout can be rough if you’re ill-equipped, but sometimes right as a level starts a foe might be close enough to hurt you before you could react, and with certain enemies being very small and blending into the background of already dark rooms, you feel set up to take some hits in a game that aims to punish you should you die.
When starting a dungeon delve in 99 Levels to Hell, you will enter packing some sort of firearm and that’s about it. The default shotgun has a limited range that can be quite bothersome to use in the more spacious levels or boss fights, but there are unlockable characters you can find that come with different weaponry as their standard options like a rifle with a ricocheting bullet. However, no matter who you pick, after the early dungeons, you’ll find their default damage output quite weak. Regular baddies take quite a few shots to reduce to a copious amount of bloody bits, and this is where upgrades should come in to save the day. While you can get lucky and find an upgrade just laying around a level, the more reliable means of earning them is finding a shop and spending the gold you get for clearing out breakable blocks and beating baddies. Shop prices are very high; you usually only get a single piece of gold per monster or block broken and even just getting a single healing heart is 75 gold, with meaningful upgrades priced around 250 gold or higher. You lose all gold on death and your initial health is fairly low, and while an occasional heart or the bombs you can use to break open tougher blocks can be found in stages more regularly than upgrades, you may feel the pressure to spend gold before you can really build it up to any degree. However, sometimes you just find a giant pile of gold that gives you hundreds to spend, or you do find an upgrade within the stage that suddenly inverts how well you can handle danger. While upgrades are not explained anywhere within the game, the main meaningful ones increase bullet size, strength, and range, and while these won’t be felt too much, the LvLUp box is a whole different story. Often priced out of reach at the store, find a LvLUp in a stage and your weapon will become so much stronger that you can go from maybe struggling to clear ten stages to clearing half of Hell without breaking a sweat. It seems to provide a pure upgrade to your current firearm, and while some like the bubble gun are still a bit eccentric since you need to trap and then pop every bubbled foe to kill them, LvLUp can feel like the difference between spending more hours on the game or racing through it without much issue.
There are other items of note to find in hell, the different guns available to every character should you find them for example, but the other combat options are often less than exciting. Symbol powers can be found but their lack of explanation also means it’s difficult to figure out how to use them properly. Essentially magic spells, they can freeze or harm enemies within a certain unclear radius, although the skull is at least straightforward enough in that it clears a layer of all regular baddies and the heart is a repeatable heal. They take so long to recharge though that they might not see much use even if they’re one of the weak ones you’d expect to recover more quickly, but there are the orbs that can sometimes be a find you’re actually happy for since a few of them will also launch an attack to back up your weapons fire. Generally though, beyond just having the luck to find something to make you much stronger, most finds aren’t going to be eventful or exciting, this certainly the type of rogue-like where you mostly try to make yourself less weak rather than finding interesting or fun combinations to alter how a run plays.
The boss fights are perhaps the worst part of the experience though, the game’s continuing struggles with creativity hitting these the hardest. Most bosses tend to just move around an area unleashing smaller foes constantly, and since the arena will get too flooded with baddies to handle if you don’t take some time to clear out the rabble, you’re spending less time hurting the boss that just gives them time to make more minions. A majority of the boss fights aren’t challenging because of what they’re doing but just because you have to keep splitting time between trying to chase them down to actually deal damage and the constant crowd clearing, a battle of attrition that is much more tedious if you didn’t manage to have gold or LvLUp luck. Some bosses even have invincibility periods including the final one where it can go on seemingly as long as the game decides, leading to periods where you’re sitting around unable to do much in an already far too long fight. For the most part bosses do tend to have just one or two tricks beyond enemy swarms though so you can force your way through, and while regular levels have a timer in the form of ghosts that appear and chase you down if you dawdle too much, the overly long boss battles can take as much time as needed. The fact that one little bit of pick-up luck at the right time can save you so much time is almost the only reason to return to previous dungeons, potentially giving you more chances in a run to stumble across the LvLUp before you do face fights that can drag on. With the final layer of the game not only having the slowest boss but many seemingly unidentifiable flame burst traps in the regular levels along the way to wear you down, it can be disheartening to be stuck with standard fare not because it makes the game more challenging so much as it makes it more likely poor luck in battle will do you in.
THE VERDICT: 99 Levels to Hell is a messy attempt at a rogue-like platformer, not having a good sense for how to mix its elements so that 99 stages do feel tedious despite the frequent visual shifts. With moments of almost guaranteed surprise damage in a game where death can rob you of the few useful upgrades you can find, it feels like many runs are an effort to find something to make your character decent while the bosses will almost always be a slog even if you find something powerful. All too similar enemies and level layouts don’t mix well with the mostly plain combat and platforming, the action not outright grueling when you’re weak but 99 Levels to Hell is still a game more about overcoming its rough edges with your better tools rather than chasing any sort of thrilling challenge.
And so, I give 99 Levels to Hell for PC…
A BAD rating. I did say I had identified 99 Levels to Hell as a bad game in my first short brush with it, but even though that assessment was ultimately correct, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected it to be. Spending a little more time with it meant there were more moments I could stumble across a pile of gold, decent weapon, or the LvLUp, and while the rough runs test your patience especially with boss fights that don’t have much compelling substance to them, the experience can at least be made a bit more tolerable when you’ve got the upgrades that do matter. You can more easily press on, see what strange themes await at each dungeon, and become curious about what the new enemies are going to do before you recognize their familiar attack patterns. Before you know all the game has, you might have moments where you wonder if you stumbled across a powerful new tool, and while there are special effect items with both positive and negative outcomes to learn about, mostly you’ll come to understand that most finds are fairly limited in how they’ll even impact things. When something like the ability to skip a few levels is best ignored since you’re often just rolling the dice each stage and hoping a random LvLUp or gold hoard happens to be there to completely invert your fortune, the rogue-like randomization feels like it only gets in the game’s way.
Considering it doesn’t even hit 99 truly unique layouts as its name seems to promise and the stage designs can cause problems with enemy placement as well, it’s hard to point at an area where the randomization is doing it any favors. At least its limited scope keeps things from truly dragging on and a little luck can help you push past the smaller problems, 99 Levels to Hell not as grueling an adventure as its name implies but also not as exciting as a plunge into the underworld could be.