Demo emerges from Undergrounded

• Announcements by Jack Allin
• Published:

Isometric adventure set in time-spanning labyrinths beneath Manhattan coming this year to Steam

There are lots of side-scrolling adventures, and more than a few vertically ascending ones, but as the title of Game Studio Inc.'s upcoming Undergrounded might suggest, we'll spend the bulk of our time playing it going ever deeper and deeper into the earth, never imagining what we might find there. 

Poor Scott is heartbroken when his proposal of marriage on one knee to his beloved Olivia ends in rejection. Perhaps the streets of Manhattan weren't the best place to pop the question, because in his consternation, Scott drops the ring into a nearby storm drain. Not into a stinky sewer, or even a subway station below – or at least, not JUST those. Down, down, down the ring tumbles, past a seemingly impossible series of labyrinths representing eras from American history. In order to retrieve the wayward ring, Scott will need to venture through these subterranean layers, solving puzzles and even playing retro arcade games to affect the environment along the way. 

Controlled with either the keyboard or gamepad, Undergrounded is presented via a delightfully cartoony isometric art style that befits the unusual sights you'll encounter as you descend further into a maze-like "dungeon where America's past lives on." Each level represents a different decade as you traverse such "nostalgic landscapes" as an Old West desert, a mall, a movie theater from the "golden age of cinema," and pioneering science facilities from the space race, to name just a few of the places one would definitely NOT expect to find below New York City. The levels are all tightly compacted as the journey is ever downward, but to progress you'll need to collect items, solve puzzles, and help the random people you meet who have lost something of their own. Perhaps strangest of all are a series of "terrifying, powerful bosses waiting for you" that can only be defeated in the real world by completing various 80s-style retro minigames on the scattered arcade cabinets in your travels, thanks to a mysterious special power that Scott didn't even know he possessed. 

Undergrounded is certainly a unique experience, which we'll get to play in full sometime later this year. If you'd like to take the first small plunge before that, however, you can do so through the playable demo available now on Steam for Windows PC.