Two weeks ago on the podcast, our guest Chris Gardiner talked about his upcoming title, Below: Which is a browser based rogue-like. Below is an interesting take of the genre, by aiming for more of a hard-core audience.
Going Down:
The gist of Below is that you are an adventurer who wants to explore a dungeon for fame and treasure. At the start you’ll pick a character class from the available selections (there are currently 2 available in beta, with more coming at launch.) The class determines special skills, starting equipment and how they will improve over the course of their adventure.
While Below draws many similarities of design to Chris’s other game he worked on: Fallen London, Below has a bit of a bite to it. As in other browser games you have action points that represent the number of actions you can take in one sitting. Unlike Fallen London that starts at ten, Below is set at twenty which gives you the ability to make some decent progress in one sitting.
As in Fallen London, your character’s chances in events are determined by their stats. But here, winning challenges will not raise them, only by finding and improving equipment will your stats get better. This makes the game more challenging and feeds into the rogue-like design of the game, specifically by the fact that characters can die.
A character starts at ten spirit and failing events can cost the character spirit and when it hits 0 the character dies. Every character can get one additional life by bargaining with death but as with a rogue-like — death will eventually happen.
When your character completely kicks the bucket, you can choose what kind of memento to leave for your next character which acts as a bonus supply of the game’s main resources.
Events will pop up often, forcing you to decide how to handle them and what resources to use.
The most common use of action points is drawing a card from a deck. The below deck will draw cards associated with the dungeon and represent the events that you’ll have to decide your fate.
The surface deck allows you to further define your character which will affect quests and rewards along with recovering spirit.
However the game warns that if you use the surface deck too much, you’ll eventually lose it for that character, further driving home the point that you can’t avoid death forever.
While Below is similar to Fallen London in terms of design, I do like how Chris is distinguishing it with harder choices from the rogue-like mechanics. Given the nature of having to create new characters, I hope that over time there will be permanent achievements or awards that you can attach to your profile to give the game a greater sense of progression.
One annoyance for new players is that the game can inflict several conditions that can drain your spirit overtime. And the only way to cure them is to use specific resources , but in some cases you won’t know ahead of time how many you need to conserve to cure yourself.
As it stands, the last time I spoke with Chris he is aiming for a release by the end of August for Below and you can currently play the beta version from the Below Story Nexus site. After launch, Below like other Story Nexus titles will allow you to buy premium currency in the form of “Nex”. Chris is planning on further developing content for Below with new characters and new dungeons to explore.
Similar to Fallen London, you’ll draw cards to determine what’ll you be able to do next.
The idea is to release free content, then paid content and repeat the cycle.
Traditional browser based games have stayed more on being simple games meant for quick plays or daily visits.
But we’re now seeing cases like Below and Card Hunter where developers are leveraging the strengths of the platform to try something different.
