This is not my first experience with Undermine from Thorium Entertainment. I actually originally played the Steam version last year when it was released and I fell in love with it then. Sure, I play a lot of rogue-likes, and there are plenty of them out there, but only a few keep you coming back over and over. It’s the games like Dead Cells and The Binding of Issac that really catch your attention. But for how big the genre has become, only a few titles end up more enduring. That makes it all the more impressive that a two man studio from Canada can crank out a polished, fun game like Undermine!
Undermine is a pretty straightforward game. You, as a villager, have been tasked with investigating the local mine by a wizard, so you journey down into its depths. There’s not a deep plot or anything here, but that’s fine. There’s really no need for one. The cursory details and tongue-in-cheek humor manage to convey all the depth you really need! You simply go down the mine, level by level, digging gold out of things, hitting enemies with your trusty pick-axe, and jumping over spikes. And…wait. Crap. You died. And you’re back at the top of the mine. But wait, who the heck is that?!?
I was honestly shocked the first time I died in Undermine. Not only did I lose almost everything I gathered, but I was dead as well! Really, truly dead. Each time you die, a new villager takes your place, male, female, mustachioed, it’s all an option and you never know what you’ll get. Fortunately, you keep any permanent upgrades you’ve gathered from the Blacksmith once you free him from his imprisonment, and a percentage of your gold. Then back down you go. Loops in Undermine can last for as long as 20-30 minutes if you’re good, or just painstakingly slow and paranoid. Sometimes I last a few minutes, then end up worse off than when I started, but that’s the fun of a rogue-like! Or at least the good ones!
In addition to slashing at enemies, you can also throw your pick-axe like a boomerang. I’m not sure entirely how the physics of that work but it’s a fun mechanic and you can toss it pretty far. Useful for nailing those weak, fast enemies like flies that shoot fireballs at you! You can also jump, which means you can try to hurl yourself across pits, over spikes, and even over some rocks and half-open gates. The jump mechanic is more powerful than you might think, as it’s also your dodge. Instead of running away, you can bound out of danger through a horde of enemies simply by jumping. Landing on them only hurts you if they attack as you land, so jump away and do it fast! However, it’s easy to land on spikes or in a pit if you’re not careful, so pay attention! The world is your burrito in Undermine, filled with a random assortment of delicious fun! You also have bombs to blow up rocks and find secret passages and keys to unlock doors and treasure chests. Eventually, you’ll be able to upgrade your boots too, enabling you to walk faster when not in combat.
To assist you, you have possibly the most useful familiar a game has ever had, a small coal-mine canary that helps you pick up gold as you break it from the walls and floors of the mine shafts. As it picks up gold it slowly levels up too, getting faster. And you’ll need that canary because of the damned pilfers! The first time I saw a pilfer, I got pissed. The second time, I had figured out what the heck was going on and it was game on! Every time you knock gold from the walls of Undermine, little high-speed green slimes come out of the walls to gather up the gold and, well, pilfer it. These sneaky green bastards are fast and they run away with your take, making it harder to progress! If you manage to corner or catch them, you can give ‘em a whack and they drop the gold, but often they get away scot free. To make matters worse, sometimes there are bomb pilfers that drop a lit bomb when you hit them and huge powerful pilfers that take stacks of gold and repel your attacks! It’s a challenging mechanic that forces you to be strategic, only smashing gold out when the enemies in the rooms of the mines are defeated.
Combat uses a variety of styles, from close-in attacks to pick-axe tosses, but interestingly enough, all the enemies are susceptible to environmental effects as well. This means that if a fireball is lobbed at you and it hits an enemy, they burn! Buzz saws hurt them, spikes stab them, and you can even knock enemies into pits or dodge their charges and watch them knock themselves silly against a wall! It’s a more strategic form of combat than you might expect. And then there are the relics.
Undermine, much like The Binding of Issac, is absolutely chock full of a wide variety of bizarre relics, items that power up your peasant (peasant power!!!) in a myriad of ways. Some relics make gold multiple like popcorn kernels, others let you float over holes or power up your attacks with lightning. The assortment is utterly random and you never know what you’ll get, but each level of the mine has a relic, even if you don’t always have the keys to access it. Relics are fun as hell, and you can use them, swap them out in special chambers, or even sell them sometimes! You lose every one of them when you die, but that’s the breaks! Eventually, you’ll find your way down the first five levels and it’s time to fight the first boss! Undermine consists of 5 levels, each with a unique design, new enemies, and new bosses. Getting to the bosses is definitely harder than actually beating them, though everything gets more challenging as you progress. Slaughter a boss and you’re rewarded with an absolute shower of treasure, including a huge stack of thorium, which allows you to unlock new relics from the blacksmiths once you acquire the blueprints!
Needless to say there’s a lot going on here. From the other peasants that slowly populate the main area of the game to the trick chests that only appear when you figure out entirely unprompted how to trigger them, there’s always something new to discover in Undermine. While replaying for this review, I accidentally discovered you could blow up purple floor sconces, releasing relics and items, an entirely new revelation. And they’re cursed. Yes, there are cursed items too, some with unspeakably nasty effects like dropping flame constantly all over the room or switching out door lock costs with your health bar. Curses are nasty as hell, but there’s always a positive item to sort of almost but not really balance out the negatives. You can even take on curses to gain power in randomly appearing treasure rooms. Fortunately, curses, like relics, disappear when you die.
And while levels are huge and meandering, don’t worry. Once you’ve beat a boss, you’re able to travel down to the next area, bypassing the earlier levels. This is a huge time saver, and gives you a fighting chance, as it definitely takes a while to progress in Undermine! And speaking of time, let’s talk specifically about the PS4 version of the game. Having played Undermine in the past, I knew roughly what to expect. Since the Steam version of the game, new mechanics and enemies seemed to have been added, often the case with rogue-like games. But the one major negative I ran into on the PS4 wasn’t a change in the gameplay or an added enemy. It was optimization.
Simply put, the load times on a PS4 Pro are horrendously out of balance for Undermine. I get that it’s an indie game, but it’s not a huge one, and you’re waiting. A lot. Initial load times are long at almost 30 seconds to start playing, loading up saved games takes quite some time, and even loading from level to level within a stage can take anywhere from 15-25 seconds each. For a game that’s entirely designed for action, this is incredibly frustrating because each time you drop down to the next dungeon level, you’re waiting, throwing off your groove. This is not the case in the Steam version, so I can only assume there’s an issue with the way the port had to be programmed to work on the PS4. Regardless of why it happened, it’s incredibly irritating and playing Undermine on the PS4 isn’t ideal. Hopefully there will be a patch for this soon, as it turns a clever and fun roguelike into an exercise in patience. Invariably, just as you set your controller down to lose patience, the next section of the game loads and you end up picking the controller right back up. This will definitely bug some players, and it’s a damned good thing that the game is as fun as it is, because if it were anything less than a thoroughly entertaining title, this would be a game breaker.
Loading issues aside, Undermine is a hell of a fun game, well-designed, with excellent art, fun dialogue when there is any, and some great character designs and mechanics. If you enjoy the rogue-like genre, this is definitely a title to pay attention to, and it’s a crime that it hasn’t been widely available on every console until recently. You can even buy plush pilfers from the Thorium website…and they’re darned cute! With a wide array of mechanics, secrets, and monsters that ensures the game doesn’t get boring, Undermine is honestly a must-buy for any system and the game is definitely worth picking up! So be prepared to slaughter several villages worth of peasants and go gather that gold!
This review was based on a digital copy of Undermine provided by the publisher. It was played with a PS4 Pro on a 55” Sony 1080p TV. Undermine is also available for Xbox One, Switch, and PC on Steam! Oh, and the PS4 is slow at screenshots, causing rapid death in Undermine, so some screenshots are from press releases!