Look, it’s not that I want to keep writing about roguelikes. They just keep coming out. It’s a popular genre for indie developers, and there’s nothing I can do about that. Except stop playing them, I guess. But that’s not going to happen. What would I do then, my job? Not a chance. Instead, let’s play Going Under, a game about… an underappreciated intern in a go-nowhere job.
Oh no.
“Unions!”
Jackie Fiasco applied to a marketing internship with Fizzle, a carbonated drink that can double as a food-replacement. Cubicle, a package-delivery service branching out into all aspects of life, bought out Fizzle. They have high expectations for the team. Jackie shows up to work on her first day in the prestigious Cubicle incubator, which houses a number of other prominent start-ups.
Unfortunately, when she arrives, she finds that the job isn’t quite as advertised. Avie, an Alexa-esque AI, runs marketing. It doesn’t really need an intern. Thankfully, her scuzzy boss, Marv, has another task for her. It seems like something weird is going on at start-up located a floor below Fizzle, Joblin. A Fiverr-esque company where you pay a pittance for a ‘Joblin’ to perform any task you want, they went under recently. Now its employees appear to have been transformed into… well, into goblins. Could Jackie just head down there and see what all the fuss is about? Oh, and there is a sulfurous odor coming from the offices of Winkydink, a failed dating app. And they don’t even talk about the noises coming from the Styxcoin offices after their cryptocurrency went bottom up. Just… take care of it.
Since there’s no real need for a marketing intern, Jackie explores the dungeons of failed start-ups past. But Marv might have a more sinister motive for sending her raiding. Can Jackie fight her way through the failed start-ups,earn herself a real job, and prevent Fizzle from… Going Under?
“They’re the worst!”
The writing in Going Under is the real winner. A game like this, satirizing Silicon Valley start-up culture, runs the risk of feeling a bit too blunt. There are times when it goes waaaaay past that line, in fact. And yet there’s a real wit to the writing here, and a genuine fury. As a nation, we poured so much power, wealth, and influence into some of the stupidest, meanest, and most manipulative people imaginable. The devs at Aggro Crab Games clearly have strong feelings about this culture. That’s risky. How do you satirize something that’s already so exaggerated?
For Going Under, it is the specificity of the characters and situations. The cast here is small, but they all feel distinct. These aren’t complete caricatures. Instead, Going Under recognizes the difference in the toxicity of the boss and the workers who just want a paycheck. They have distinctive, flavorful dialogue and meaningful relationships with one another and with you. Even when the humor is at its broadest, the characters ground it and bring something genuinely sentimental to the game.
The game ties itself smartly to our current political moment. From the boss’ hardline anti-union stance to the overreliance on algorithms to do things they just aren’t built to do, Going Under just… gets the current political moment. Without spoiling too much about the direction the game takes, early dungeons find you chasing after ‘relics’ from these failed companies, things that increase productivity or give the boss more power but also make Fizzle a worse place to work. One of these relics end up edging towards #MeToo territory — nothing explicit, but definitely uncomfortable — in a way that comments very specifically on the power dynamics between a boss and his employees. The fact that the game, a slight roguelike, is capable of recognizing that trend, abstracting it into adventure gameplay, and giving us robust enough characters to make the moment land is a remarkable feat of writing.
“Never even THINK about joining one!”
The art design of Going Under plays its part too. The characters initially appear broad, cartoony. They are distinctive, but something seems off about them. Thankfully, friend-of-the-site Dylan caught an influence that I had missed: The entire game is animated in the cutesy, shallow style of corporate propaganda. Immediately, the itch in the back of my head went away. That’s why everything looked just a little… wrong.
But the designers make great use of the limited style. Creature design in this game, for instance, is phenomenal. The dating app demons in Winkydink are buff dudes, scrawny nerds, sexy demons, or literal slime, each of which is distinctive in the way they move and feel. None of the dungeons recycle those enemy designs, so you have a lot of variety. What’s more, because the art style is cartoony and exaggerated, it is easy to visually grasp what is happening, even in a fairly crowded room. Learning the different attack animations is essential to surviving, so it’s good that they are distinctive and visually appealing.
“If you encounter a union being formed, stop it by any means necessary!”
The gameplay is… less sharp. It’s not bad, it’s just a bit too simple to hold up everything else. Imagine a pared down Breath of the Wild. You find weapons as you play. Each has two basic stats, one visible, one not: Damage and durability. You can carry three at a time, so you want to balance how long you’ve been using a weapon vs how useful it is. You can find office junk — reams of paper, wastebins, pencils — in almost every room, but they’re low damage. Nicer weapons, like basic swords and spears, are relatively common, last longer, and hit harder.
Here’s the thing: That system was incredibly irritating in Breath of the Wild, one of the greatest games of all time. Paring that system down only makes it worse. Roguelikes always have a feeling of randomness to them, but that randomness is really highlighted when a run depends on the items and skills you find early on. The game comes with an enormous number of skills, each of which feel distinct and most of which feel excellent to play. They range from basic modifiers like Go-Getter, which lets you move and dodge a little faster, through build-specific skills, like Financial Gains, in which your strength fluctuates based on how much money you have, to skills that might completely change the way you play, like Yeet, which makes thrown items stronger and faster.
However, the average dungeon is only three floors. Each floor typically only gives you two skills, so it can be hard to make a coherent build. Optional challenges like the Hauntrepreneur can net you additional powers at the cost of making the game temporarily more difficult. And the game’s shop does give you more choices in-dungeon, giving you healing items, weapons, and skills. These choices helped mitigate the effects of the randomness. The worst runs felt like I was just waiting to get a lucky drop. There are ways for good players to mitigate that randomness, but it never goes away completely.
Thankfully, your ‘résumé’ gives you a little more control over this. As you use random skills in dungeons, you get ‘endorsed’ for them. You pick one ‘pinned’ endorsement, and you always have that skill to start with. Changing it between dungeons to match new needs or add new abilities is helpful. And, similarly, each of the NPC’s can function as a ‘mentor’. They give you side quests, and as you complete them, attaching them as a mentor will give you increasingly powerful benefits to roll with. Between these two abilities, Going Under does a decent job at letting you set yourself up to be successful regardless of your preferred play style. There is a problem with some ‘broken’ skills, though; there are some that allow you to win fights easily or set up infinite combos.
“Beat up everyone in the room if you have to!”
Going Under is not without issue, sure. But overall, I really enjoyed my time with it. I might quibble a bit about the difficulty of some of the later dungeons or the shallowness of the gameplay at times. And I will say, played on a Switch in handheld mode, I did encounter some pretty severe lag from time to time. Interestingly, it rarely happened in the dungeons, despite appear to have more moving pieces. A lot of the lag happened in dialogue. It’s a minor issue, but it might annoy some folks.
That said, sharp writing, clever artistic choices, and solid encounter design pulled things together for me. This is a game that has something to say, and it found a fascinating, novel way to say it. I expect this kind of thematic depth with a visual novel like Eliza, but it is rare in a roguelike. Don’t expect the depth of something like Hades — but Going Under is closer to that than it is to, say, Curse of the Dead Gods. There are real storytelling chops on display here. Just be prepared to dig through a little frustration (or to be smarter than me and remember that the game has solid accessibility features that allow you to change up enemy health, weapon durability, or other issues) to find it.