Recent reviews by J. Whale

Note: This review didn’t fit into the character limits on Steam, so the conclusion is in the comments below.

Played on Steam Deck. Performance was acceptable with occasional crashes. Important: the ending cutscene is bugged on SD and will not play. I had to watch it on Youtube.

What is Below? It’s… hostile. It’s achingly beautiful. It’s sometimes boring and frequently baffling. It’s a roguelite by Capy games, the creators of the excellent short game Sword and Sworcery, with which Below shares virtually nothing in common except a lone wanderer for a protagonist, and a very strong sense of aesthetics. You, as a nameless explorer of the Isle, must descend a large number of dungeons to the very bottom of the Isle, collecting fuel for your lantern, fighting enemies and trying to survive along the way.
To start with, I want to make it clear that my completion run for this game was on Explore Mode, which was added to the game two years post-release. I actually bought it before this mode was released, and gave up in frustration on my original playthrough. The game mode that existed on release is preserved as Survive Mode, which I wouldn’t recommend for any but the most masochistic of players.

“Explore Mode” sounds like some kind of “easy” or “story” mode, but I can assure you it still presents a real challenge. I would put it somewhere on the level of Dark Souls. It basically just removes the most tedious of elements from “Survive”, like the hunger and thirst meters – and it was absolutely the right decision to do that, not least because these gruelling survival elements detract significantly from the things the game does best. The art direction is gorgeous, the atmosphere impeccable – who can appreciate that when they’re stressing that they haven’t found a turnip to eat for five minutes? Savour that turnip, by the way – it won’t respawn until you die.

On the subject of atmosphere, the art and sound design in this game is perfect. Seriously, without flaw. The lighting and low-poly style are unique and attractive. The use of music is minimal, but the music that is used (courtesy of longtime Capy collaborator Jim Guthrie) is all the more impactful for its scarcity. It’s also noticeable that barely any music is repeated; seemingly every floor on the Isle has multiple unique themes. Other sound effects are pitched at exactly the right level – unintrusive but immersive. It brought on a special delight each time I noticed the quiet trickle of water down a cave wall, and a wince when I loudly rattled over a pile of bones in the silence of the ruined city.

That sort of attention to detail is typical of Below. The world is nominally “procedurally generated” but it doesn’t feel that way at all. In fact, I think the developers did themselves a disservice advertising it as such. This “procedurally generated” world is made to a large extent of set pieces that don’t vary at all (some examples being the “safe” city area in floor 7, or the north shore with its numerous shipwrecks). The computer generation is limited to certain minor aspects the “floors” (dungeons). For example, the layout of each individual room is partially randomised, but the overall floor pattern is pretty consistent between runs; while a certain room on floor 15 might contain a different consumable treasure item each run, and have a wall or chasm on varying sides of the room, the macro layout of the level is always an “S” shape with consistent entry, exit, and main quest item locations. This enables a huge amount of handcrafting which gives each floor its own unique atmosphere and challenge.

And it does feel very lovingly handcrafted. There are tons of tiny details that are easy to miss, but make the world feel so alive. For example, if you bleed on the floor and wait around for a bit, tiny black slugs will appear to feast on the blood. If you kill those, they drop sludge, which can be used to craft bandages to stop you from bleeding next time. Another neat detail: the foxes on the north shore follow you around until you do what they want: light the campfire! Once they have a cosy place to sleep, they ignore you and snooze in the fire’s glow.

Explore Mode enables you to experience all of this without the pressure of hunger, thirst and single-use campfires to bog you down. There is still more than enough challenge to satisfy a player who seeks it, but far less punishment. Chill with the foxes on the beach for a bit, don’t worry about whether your meaty morsels will run out. You’ve earned it!

The other thing that Explore Mode helps you out with is, well, the exploration. Exploration is not optional in Below. In order to complete the game, you must explore every nook and cranny of the Isle. Not just because doing so unlocks shortcuts that reduce the tedium of inter-floor travel by a factor of ten, but because without finding every last collectable light bit hidden in the corners of the dungeons, of which there are twenty in total, you will not be able to finish the story. But it’s very hard to explore when the game punishes you for trying to do so. It’s already difficult enough in Explore Mode, where the threat of losing your lantern somewhere barely accessible is enough to induce extreme caution in new areas, without adding in Survive’s offers of one-hit kill traps, warp points that break on use, and the spectre of death by starvation if you don’t find it fast enough.

I struggle to understand why nobody at Capy realised that releasing the game with Survive as the only mode was a bad idea. My understanding is that this game was a financial disappointment, and it’s not hard to see why. The core survival mechanics directly undermine all of the best and most unique features of the game. I’m sure this artistic decision was taken for a reason, early in development, and the team grew attached to the concept of tension between desire to survive and necessity to explore as a key theme of the game. But surely playtesting would have thrown up that it simply didn’t work in practice? Sadly this lesson had to be learned on contact with commercial reality. But full kudos to the developers for introducing a better way to play post-release, rather than doubling down on their mistake.

Below doesn’t have much of a story. There is the bones of one there to be pieced together by a truly dedicated player, but this game runs mostly on (amazing) vibes. The ending is really the only time when any context is given to your actions, and frankly I felt it didn’t work. I never like it when games deceive you about the actions your player character is taking. To spring “actually you were evil all along” on the player in the last thirty seconds of the game just isn’t narratively satisfying for me. But in any case, I suspected from very early on that ending wouldn’t offer any easy satisfaction. This is, after all, a game that begins by forcing you to watch a small dot on the sea for about five solid minutes. Easy gratification of players clearly wasn’t foremost in the game design!

The story isn’t the only thing that doesn’t provide context. Virtually nothing in the game is explained to you. Some things were inferred easily (“I have to collect the light bits”), some discovered totally by accident (“oh, a short tap on the shield bashes an enemy!”) and some will forever remain a mystery (I still don’t know what a “green elixir” does). A tooltip or two would have been helpful here. I understand why not knowing how anything works enforces a sense of foreignness and isolation on the player, but over a 25+ hour campaign there should be some method of working out the function of consumables or environmental interaction points, somewhere. Once again an uncompromising artistic vision has trampled the basics of game design into the mud.

Conclusion and verdict below...

TL;DR: If you're a dinosaur fan, there's just enough here to keep you busy while you marvel at your prehistoric creatures.

Full Review:

The good:

• The dinosaurs - This is the most important part of the game, and they have absolutely nailed it. They're lovingly rendered and animated and it never gets old to see a new one emerge from the Creation Lab, be it a mighty Giganotosaurus or a humble Archeaornithomimus. Some liberties have been taken with accuracy (this is Jurassic Park after all) but not enough to be irritating. The models for the Edmontosaurus, Herrerasaurus and Suchomimus are especially nice in my opinion.
  
• Longevity - It took me 34 hours to five-star each of the main story islands and I haven't released all the dinosaurs yet. I picked this up on sale and feel like I got my money's worth.
  
• Jurassic Park - They've done a great job bringing the films to life. Personally, I'm more of a JP than a JW fan, but either way, it looks and feels just like a franchise of this scale should.
  
• Voice acting - Some good and some bad here. It's really neat to have Jeff Goldblum popping up every once in a while, and I also liked Dr. Dua's voice actor. But if I ever again hear Cabot Finch say "KNOCK KNOCK! WHO'S THERE? THAT'S RIGHT, NEW CAAAWNTRACT!" I'm going to dress up as a goat and jump into the nearest Velociraptor paddock.

The bad:

• The reputation system - God, this is dumb (and frustrating). There are three departments at your park - Security, Science, and Entertainment - who give you contracts and missions. Increasing your reputation with each of them, and completing their main mission on each island, is mandatory for technology and fossil upgrades. Here's the kicker - when you increase your reputation with one division, you decrease it with the other two. And when your reputation is low enough, they start sabotaging your park. Your Entertainment division should not be releasing your T-Rex to attack the guests because you didn't build an arcade! Which brings me on to...
  
• ...The missions - You should be allowed to run your park the way you want to, and that means that you should not be forced to make dinosaurs kill each other to progress the story. The Security missions are especially bad for this - the second one has you staging a fight to the death between two small carnivores in order to unlock decent fences.
  
• Guest AI - It's non-existent. Guest management is extremely basic and essentially amounts to putting restaurants near viewing platforms.
  
• Micromanagement - The ranger team AI is dreadful - they take a really long time to do even the most basic tasks. So if you want something done, you have to do it yourself. That's fine when things are calm, but during a storm, when the power's out, the fences are broken and your dinos are rampaging? It's frustrating and not very fun. Also, the feeders have a really limited supply until you get to the final island. In the end, I was just demolishing and rebuilding feeders at huge expense rather than refilling them, just because it was so tedious.
  
• Building - TERRAIN CONSTRAINTS BUILDING OBSTRUCTED TERRAIN CONSTRAINTS BUILDING OBSTRUCTED

The baffling:

• Comfort levels - Each dinosaur has a "comfort" rating which decreases if they are not housed appropriately. Eventually, if their comfort threshold is exceeded, they will break out and rampage. However, there are some crazy flaws with this system. For example, Stegosaurus require social groups of five or more to be happy. If they are in a large enclosure, and one of your five Stegos wanders off to the other end of it, the four remaining ones will forget it is there, break the fences down, and start killing guests! And there is no UI warning that this will happen until they are already rampaging!
  
• Enclosures - No dinosaur smaller than a T-Rex should be able to break a hole in a solid concrete fence.

Overall:
The park management aspect of this game leaves a lot to be desired. However, it wasn't offensively bad enough to stop me putting in enough time to five-star all islands on the main campaign. Really, it's a vehicle to keep you busy while you're unlocking and hatching new dinosaurs. I wouldn't recommend this to a general park management or strategy game fan, but I definitely would recommend for anyone like me who is playing for the dinosaurs.
If you can get them on sale, I would also highly recommend the three dinosaur packs (Cretaceous, Carnivore and Herbivore) - the dinos involved add a lot to the game experience in my opinion.

Picked this up on sale and had way more fun with it than I thought I would. Graphics are beautiful (especially the hair physics!), Lara is a strong main character and the gameplay is really quite enjoyable. Only downside is the incredibly cliché story and side characters (half of whom are just crude stereotypes of various nations). I would like there to be a little more tomb puzzling as well - sometimes it felt like the fighting/tomb raiding ratio was a little skewed in favour of explosions and gunplay. Still, had a blast with this game and would recommend it to anyone looking for a new third-person shooter.

Possibly one of the most charming games I've ever played. Good boss fights, great areas, interesting characters and a truly incredible art style and soundtrack. Not only that, but the amount of content you get feels like robbery, even at full price.

Few games give me that unique "souls" vibe of being lost in a hostile world, feeling nervous to continue and yet excited to explore its secrets. This game did. Buy it - you won't regret it.

Lost access to my UPlay account, so now don't have access to the game anymore. Don't buy any AC games if you want to be able to play them without asking Ubisoft's permission first.