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### The Underside Preview [PC]

#### http://www.superfundungeonrun.com/insignificantstudios/

#### Previewed By J. Monkman

They say that imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but then people say a lot of stupid things. Whether or not Daisuke Amaya is feeling suitably 'flattered' by the graphical-style Podunkian has adopted for his WIP action-platformer is as yet unknown, but nonetheless, The Underside is an impressive preview of a game that has received very mixed response from the massive Cave Story (Dokutsu Monogatari) fan-base.

The Underside puts you in control of Ip, a cute and unidentifiable protagonist who (at the start of the game) becomes involved with the affairs of unhappy and frustrated supreme being. The appropriately-dubbed Universal King has become so tired of the word's evil and corrupt inhabitants (especially considering the failure of his previous attempt to cleanse the world by flipping it over), that he has finally decided to erase the world from existence. However, as a final ultimatum the Universal King has challenged the inhabitants of the Underside to save themselves - if someone can prove that the World has not completely fallen to evil then the World will be spared from destruction. Predictably, this is where our hero comes in.

Let's get the obvious facts out of the way first. Yes, the graphical style is highly similar to Cave Story, as is the game-play to some extent. It also quite clearly (and unashamedly) borrows ideas from the Metroid series, with the game involving a lot of exploration and back-tracking. In a nutshell, storyline aside there's not a great deal here that we haven't seen before, but what The Underside lacks in originality it more than makes up for in the game-play department.

In all fairness, and without meaning to cause Podunkian any offence, the plot and in-game dialogue currently lacks the maturity of Pixel's masterpiece - the jokes are a little inane and as a result the tutorial soon becomes tiresome. However, as soon as that's over the player is thrown straight into the action - and this is an area that The Underside excels in. The Underside moves at a *much* faster pace than Cave Story, which is probably why many players have favourably compared it to the Megaman games. Within minutes of starting the game you'll be blasting away at the many enemy types, jumping nimbly from platform to platform and generally zipping about the place causing havoc amongst the underground setting. It's a blast.

The only flaw I found with this preview was with the somewhat clunky nature of the in-game dialogue. The wrapping of the faux-typed text is fundamentally broken (with words skipping from line to line as they form on-screen) and there's no really fast way to skip the dialogue altogether - instead, you have to sit through the same old jokes and comments time and time again. Hopefully this is something that'll be corrected in the final version, as Podunkian has already recognised the problem on The Underside's website - which leads me quite nicely onto my final point.

According to the game's documentation, this preview contains roughly 2-5% of the final game. That mean's that there is an incredible amount of work left to go into the project (i.e. *years*), so I doubt that we'll be seeing the finished game for some time yet. This is a real shame, as playing this preview has certainly left me hungry for more...