The Land Beneath Us [Review]
The Land Beneath Us is a turn-based roguelite dungeon crawler in the classic mold with more depth than meets the eye.
The Land Beneath Us. Credit: FairPlay Studios / Dear Villagers.
Publisher Dear Villagers brings us developer FairPlay Studios’ new roguelite dungeon crawler, The Land Beneath Us. On the surface, the game is a simple 2D grid combat roguelite, but it quickly becomes clear there’s a lot more strategic thinking needed to master the game.
An AI awakens you, the Ultimate Soul Harvester, and gives you a mission—save The Creator. The Creator developed a method to use souls to solve the world’s energy crisis and create miraculous new technologies. No one questions where these souls came from, but now mysterious enemies have kidnapped her and it’s up to you to save her. To do that, you delve into the lands of hell and battle demons, all while questioning your past, true purpose, and intentions of the lab AI that sent you on your mission. Also, you don’t want to be called Ultimate Soul Harvester, you’d rather be Sven. I enjoyed the story in this one.
The Land Beneath Us. Credit: FairPlay Studios / Dear Villagers.
Each run has you exploring a dungeon, with a choice of exits leading to different kinds of rewards as you complete each floor. Floors are generally fairly small, forcing you to carefully consider the space and your movement as increasing numbers of enemies and traps are added. Every dungeon has minibosses and final bosses; once beating the final boss, you return to the lab. As you’d expect, you can spend currency and upgrade points in the lab to boost your abilities.
Movement is on a grid of squares, and attacking an enemy or object is as simple as moving in its direction. After every move you make, all the enemies present will move at once. Tiles where enemy attacks will land on their next turn are highlighted so you can plan movement around them. You equip four weapons, one for each direction you attack; weapons can have different effective ranges and special abilities, forcing you to carefully consider your approach to battle since direction matters. This was the first hint at the strategic depth that would reveal itself later. Equipping a second weapon of the same type over the same slot will upgrade that weapon’s power.
The Land Beneath Us. Credit: FairPlay Studios / Dear Villagers.
Soon the The Land Beneath Us throws more wrinkles to consider in your strategy. You’ll get combos, special moves you can activate by moving in a set of specific directions in order. These include abilities like healing, stun shockwaves, fireballs, and more as you find or earn them. Fortunately, the game allows you to interrupt your combo movement input for a couple of turns before they reset, to allow you some space to dodge enemy attacks or position yourself more carefully. In addition to this, you’ll get a short teleport ability with a cooldown. The combos and teleport give the combat additional layers of complexity; this is the point where I found myself really getting into the game.
The Land Beneath Us. Credit: FairPlay Studios / Dear Villagers.
The game’s visual style features blocky 3D levels with low-res 2D pixel art sprites. Lighting and particle effects add some extra flair. The style works well to make action and positioning legible, something I especially appreciated after the jumbled mess I saw when playing Anomaly Collapse, where overlapping sprites and combat highlights were almost headache-inducing.
The Land Beneath Us hews very close to the original Rogue and early turn-based roguelikes such as Dungeon of Doom. Its gameplay is a more streamlined, user friendly take on the original formula, and I appreciated that. If you’re into turn-based strategy or classic roguelikes, this one is worth checking out.
The Land Beneath Us is available now for PC (Steam), Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch.
Overall Score: 7/10
Played on: PS5
