Undergoes is like how Minecraft would have been if you dreamt it up with a high fever, with such a disjointed experience that makes you wonder how was the game was originally envisioned.
Firstly, I don’t know what it is supposed to be your buy-in for this game. Context matters. For the majority of my experience with this game, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be building towards. There is a recipe notebook that prescribes what I can make, but I have zero incentive to actually make any of the recipes within.
Secondly, the game has uninteresting environments. There are weird insect-like creatures that inhabit the caves, but there’s no rhyme or reason behind the caves themselves. There are no biomes as far as I could tell, except that caves appear to be differentiated between different kinds depending on what resources you could find in them. However, they’re not intuitive and the game doesn’t teach you anything about the caves.
Thirdly, the combat is ineffective. You simply spam your mouse button to hit enemies. This also hits the mechanical feedback of the game in general. There is a visual queue where you’re gathering a resource – there’s a circle that grows inside the reticle that roughly informs you of your collecting progress, but it’s barely noticeable and sometimes disappears randomly. The tactile feedback is also missing. There aren’t any particle effects that you’d expect from mining resources.
There is also no multiplayer as far as I can tell, and that severely limits the game’s potential.
Overall, Undergoes is as sandbox as a sandbox game could get. After a short tutorial informing you of the game’s mechanics, it leaves you on your own to figure everything out. This would have worked out if the game had properly set your expectations, and provided you with a context and a story on why you should care about what you’re playing, but lacking those, this game is simply a playground that you’d stay in until you get bored – and did get bored fairly quickly.
Thank you David Montesi Rivas for providing us with a key to review the game.
The game is out now on PC on Steam.
Score: 3/10