Ci-dessous (PS4) Review – Tough & Dripping With Atmosphere

One of the most difficult challenges a game reviewer may meet is to equitably assess a game that seems to do what he intends to do, but it's not a game he Love personally. Unfortunately, for me, the PS4 port recently published below is one of these games.

Developed and published by the Canadian Independent Studio Capybara Games, below is a Roguelike on a solitary adventurer exploring the underground areas of a mysterious island. The goal of the game is to continue to go further and further in these areas in order to find new weapons, combat mysterious enemies and explore interconnected levels of Metroidvania style. In terms of history, below is the light on the details and, as far as I know, there is no character dialog.

On the paper, this game seemed straight for me. The motion controls were smooth, the descendant perspective reminded me of the old-fashioned Zelda games, and the struggle with the sword and the shield was easy to understand. In the below, I spent my time exploring, dying, then exploring others, which led to finding new weapons such as spears and arcs. Usually, I tried to explore another part of the departure area after each death and I was pleasantly surprised to find useful shortcuts that facilitated the return back after death.

However, one of the biggest problems below is that it is barely explained to the player. According to Capybara, it is deliberate and I can see the attraction of this in a modern game landscape filled with tutorials too useful. But barely explain how your game works a little too far.

For example, there is no explanation in the game for differences between its two modes of difficulty, survival and the new explore. Instead, I had to find this information via an official article of the Blog PlayStation written by the Creative Director of Capybara (which raises the question of why this explanation is not in the game to start). Survival offers counters of life, thirst and hunger while explore has only one life counter. If you are a player for the first time, I would recommend it instead of the real-time inventory management of the game is difficult to use when you have to quickly browse objects to charge your meals of hunger and thirst. .

In addition, there is a lack of gameplay tutorials for important mechanisms such as real-time backup and creation. Finally, I got used to the functioning of the fighting puzzles and gaming door, but there are still things that I am not clear, like the functioning of the campfires of the game.

At first, I thought the fires lit saved your progress but it is only in case you turn off the game, so whenever you die, you restart from the beginning. There are also these special campfires that can be used to make specific foods, transport the player in an area where he can store supplies and turn blue for any reason when collection bursts are used on it. Another unexplained mechanism allows the burning player (perhaps?) Open and bleeding injuries to close them.

Of all these problems, my biggest problem with the game is to have to redo as much after each death. Whenever I died, I had to look at a short but slow introduction, rediscover the relevant parts of the map of each level and retrieve elements of my corpse. I understand that again making progress after death is one of the basic foods of the genus Roguelike and this boredom has been somewhat attenuated by passing in front of enemies to reach the place where I was dead before. But, having to do it repeatedly, started moaning me more I entered the game.

Explore a first level is fun because below has beautiful environments with a strange atmospheric soundtrack that gives the dark and lonely tone of the world of the game. However, this atmosphere was lost every time I died, sighed and resigned me to accelerate through the beaten levels so that you can recover lost objects and try again. The levels have ceased to be fun to explore and have become tedious obstacles that I had to go through just to be able to do a little more progress this time.

_On__ is a Roguelike who excels to make players really feel like a solitary adventurer on a dangerous island filled with secrets. I liked his simple and colorful artistic style, his music and his atmosphere, but the gameplay pushed me back.