GOING UNDER
Working your way up from the bottom
Menial tasks for little recognition and no pay – sounds great, eh? That’s the pain of an unpaid internship, something too many of us are familiar with nowadays. As bad as ours were, nobody has ever asked us to go and fight in an actual dungeon. Until Going Under, that is, where we play as intern Jackie, who ends up having to deal with more workplace violations than Bring Your Fox To Work Day at the local chicken coop.
In our hands-on, upon joining massive conglomerate Cubicle (as part of the Impoverished
Intern Initiative) we’re drafted in as a marketing assistant at Fizzle Beverages, where we’re promptly told to help clean up the basement. The thing is, goblins keep coming up from the ruins of a failed startup (in this case, Joblin, a goblin worker-ondemand app) below our building to steal precious office supplies.
As Going Under is a roguelike, the dungeons are procedurally generated and, naturally, filled with enemies you have to slaughter in the name of corporate profits. In terms of structure the game is close to The Binding Of Isaac, but its 3D visuals and camera add an extra layer of depth to the levels. Weapons are strewn around the rooms and range from regular office junk like desk chairs to things like spiked bats – no prizes for guessing which are more powerful. However, as all weapons break fairly quickly you have to be constantly weighing up your next potential tool of office destruction.
THE BUSINESS END
A handy arrow tells you at a glance if a weapon is more or less powerful than the one you already have equipped, but they also all handle completely differently, which means you have to weigh up the situational choice as well as your own tastes. Is it worth grabbing that hulking great coffee jug if it’s going to slow you down, or will you go for the weaker, stun-inducing electric jabs of an abandoned tablet pen? The action can get quite rapid, but everything is intuitive enough to pick up quickly, so within a few runs you’ll only be able to blame yourself for your failings.
You obtain new skills on a per-run basis, finding them in special rooms or buying them, or even taking on a time-limited debuff (such as Burnout, which damages you if you stop moving). Skills range from the likes of Scrappy, which deals extra damage with office junk items, to YEET, which improves your thrown weapon damage. The game has a great sense of humour, joyfully lampooning tech startup culture in a way that always meshes with the action. We can’t wait to clock in for our second day on the job.
“HAS A GREAT SENSE OF HUMOUR, LAMPOONING TECH STARTUP CULTURE.”