Below: Review

Canadian studio Capybara Games even among indie developers, where every second person considers himself new Jonathan Blow (Jonathan Blow), stands apart. By their own admission, the authors are involved in audiovisual art and design, so games take a long time to make, carefully, and at the end we get something truly special. In 2011 they released Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP – a game that has become almost a cult, showing an example of that same audiovisual art.

Two years later the studio announced Below, in which the principles of audiovisual art were going to be applied to a much more pragmatic genre than the atmospheric “pixel” adventure of a Scythian girl with a sword – we are talking about survival built on bagel mechanics. The task, of course, was not easy, the development took a long time and in some places painfully, but after five years Below nevertheless came out, becoming the first game from Capybara Games, which you want not only to praise uncontrollably.

Audiovisual art?

Knowing the creators, it’s not hard to guess why their new project can and should be praised. The intro alone should make many directors and cameramen jealous: five minutes of real time, accompanied by enchanting electronic ambient music mixed with the noise of waves, rain and thunderstorms, we see how the camera slowly descends from the sky through lead clouds to a small sailboat lost in a black hole of the ocean, which eventually sails into the bay of a certain island and spits out an even smaller man with a sword onto the shore.

This technique, brilliant in its simplicity and metaphorical nature, immediately assigns the player the role of a grain of sand in an ocean of dangers. To the sounds of rain and lightning, a man with a sword runs along the shore, through fields of tall grass, and there is no one around – only stone stairs going up the walls of a huge rock, mysterious high towers of black stone, circles flashing in the lightning slits, seemingly ritual ones. Yes, a strange lamp lying on a pedestal in the center of the circle. What, where, when, why are we here, where to go, why this lantern? And why, as soon as we took it, the air was filled with alarming beeps – as if these distant ships, dying either at sea or in space, were warning us of an unknown danger? Not clear.

It is only clear that this will be survival in the style of expressionism, where not only the process is important, but also the tragic, dark, almost gothic mood. And we immediately plunge into an atmosphere of anticipation of dangers and uncomfortable secrets, which at the same time worry, frighten, but also attract with their exciting unknown. That is why, to create such an atmosphere, the authors, by their own admission, moved the camera so far away from the character and minimized the “tutorial”, allowing the player to figure out for himself what is happening and how a grain of sand can survive in the middle of this big, dangerous secret.

Look after yourself, be careful!

In principle, it’s clear how to survive. Having entered a tower made of black stone, we dive lower and lower floor by floor, fighting along the way, collecting resources and cooking something at rare fires. The battles focus on hardcore – dodging, blocking, searching for vulnerabilities and dying in two or three hits. True, no stamina at all.

Defeated enemies drop crystals https://mindepositcasino.co.uk/about-our-company/ that serve as fuel for our magical miracle lamp – it is with its help that we open something, activate it, find keys, unlock new passages and move on. In some situations, it can scare away enemies with its light. And in principle, this is a more reliable source of lighting than a torch, which tends to go out.

We also collect all sorts of herbs, roots, slices of bread, stones, sticks, ropes, even cut out intestines from corpses. By the fire you can make food, a healing patch, or mix ingredients and get a nutritious soup that simultaneously satisfies hunger, thirst, and restores health.

Arrows, new weapons, more powerful equipment, elixirs – you can really “craft” everything yourself. There are no specific recipes, it’s not really clear what this or that elixir provides, but the game highlights which ingredients can be combined with what. And it encourages trial and error, independent study and research. So, we ourselves find out that the hero can go fishing or hunt foxes and wolves, which sometimes meet and behave very peacefully. Or that you can simply drink water from puddles in caves to quench your thirst.

With this knowledge we run forward, joyful, shouting “Oh, what are these twigs sticking out of the ground??“we run up to something red on the ground – and in the next moment we settle as a lifeless carcass on a trap that has ripped open the body. And we start all over again – again a small boat sails into the bay of the island, and the path is repeated again until the place of the last death, where you can pick up all your belongings and a priceless magic lamp..

No room for error

Die and start over in Below you will have to do it more than once, not twice, or even three. Yes, over time, having accumulated enough crystals, it will be possible to create a control point from the fire in order to quickly return to this level once. It is also possible to shorten the path to the corpse of the previous hero through open “shortcuts”. But you still get irritated very often, running back and forth through familiar locations (“random” doesn’t change them too much).

Below – a truly uncomfortable and complex “survival game” that does not forgive mistakes. Enemies become more and more dangerous, robots and golems appear, fights with “bosses” begin. Traps are also becoming more and more cunning; they are not always immediately noticeable. On icy levels, among other things, we need to make sure that the hero does not freeze.

And the further you go, the fewer resources. Food becomes especially rare – you can die from the fact that the game simply did not throw in any food. The problem can be partially solved by leaving things and resources in advance in our personal warehouse, where the hero is transferred as soon as he takes a nap at any fire.

At some point you start to criticize the authors – it seems that they have gone too far with all this hardcore. And they themselves somewhat disrupted the carefully built atmosphere of research into something mysterious and dangerous. Because when it’s cold and hungry, your pockets are empty, and the nearest fire is still far away, you have no time for exploration – you just run as fast as you can and “rush”.

And yet, despite the emphasized roughness and reluctance to somehow help the player (well, almost), Below For me personally, it became one of those rare “survivors” that I really wanted to go through to the end. Everything is too atmospheric, mysterious and beautiful in its own way. And I really want to know how it all ends, what kind of Darkness it was, which at some point itself begins to pull its tentacles towards the hero, what these strange structures, pedestals and towers made of stone are, and where we will ultimately end up.

From this here are the combinations of hardcore, atmosphere and mystery Capybara Games and it turned out to be a unique game. Operating with seemingly familiar mechanics (not in everything, however, successfully) and performing in a painfully familiar format, Below managed to preserve its narrative and remain primarily a powerful audiovisual statement.

Pros: a precise atmosphere of mystery and danger, forcing you to explore your surroundings with interest; challenging but addictive gameplay; stylish minimalist picture; incomparable music and sound work in general.

Cons: the degree of hardcore in some places still exceeds reasonable boundaries; too often you have to repeat everything from the beginning, and “random” does not greatly diversify the levels.

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