Going Under

I spent an embarrassingly long stretch of my evening hurling a potted cactus at a blob of hypersexualised goo in a dungeon named Winkydink, and my only regret is that I didn't start sooner. Going Under is a roguelite action dungeon crawler that wraps its brawling loop inside one of the sharpest satirical premises indie games have managed in years. You play as Jackie Fiasco, an unpaid intern at Fizzle Beverages, a meal-replacement startup freshly absorbed by Cubicle, a thinly veiled tech giant whose purple CEO Marv is doing a lot of work as a character design joke. Your job, as outlined by Marv during your first HR meeting, is to clear out the ruins of failed companies buried beneath the office. The dungeons are named Joblin, Winkydink, and Styxcoin, and each name does exactly the satirical heavy lifting you'd expect. The combat runs on a weapons-break-constantly philosophy that keeps the moment-to-moment play genuinely frantic. Jackie can hold three items at once, swing with a light or heavy attack, and throw anything in her hands. Keyboards, axes, potted plants, office chairs: the weapon variety is chaotic and entirely intentional. Tracking durability mid-fight can occasionally trip you up, but the system forces improvisation in a way that feels designed rather than accidental. Skills picked up in dungeons are lost on death unless Jackie has used them often enough to "pin" them as run-start defaults, and each coworker you complete tasks for unlocks a mentor path with its own ability tier. Choosing your mentor before a run meaningfully reshapes your approach, which does more for run variety than simply shuffling the loot pool. The Hauntrepreneur NPC adds a risk-reward wrinkle, trading curse debuffs for skills mid-run. It is, mechanically, a competent and enjoyable roguelite, even if it does not reinvent the floor plan. What separates Going Under from the genre wallpaper is that the satire actually bleeds into the systems themselves. The failed startup dungeons are not just aesthetic wallpaper, they are the joke. Styxcoin is a crypt where skeletal workers mine a dead cryptocurrency. Joblin is a temp agency whose workers became monsters. The writing between runs, delivered via visual-novel-style character portraits, is consistently sharp, with the office cast landing more hits than misses. Swomp the drifting customer service guy. Tappi the eternally beleaguered treasurer. Even the app system, where downloading a camera app lets Jackie blind enemies with a flash, or taking the company credit card literally slows her down with a debt-weight shackled to her ankle, feels like a bit rather than a mechanic. That cohesion is genuinely rare. The caveats are real and worth naming. There are only three dungeon types, which means the procedural generation is doing a lot of heavy lifting to sustain replayability. Longer sessions surface the repetition quickly, and the game is best consumed in short bursts rather than marathon runs. The story wraps in roughly ten to fifteen hours, which is the right length for what it is, but players expecting the infinite-run depth of Hades or Isaac will find Going Under a shorter stay. Post-launch, Aggro Crab added the Working From Home update with new weapons, outfits, remixed dungeons and a hard mode, which adds meaningful content if you exhaust the base game. An additional dungeon was reportedly planned but cancelled, and the game is honest about its own limits. An assist mode lets you dial in buffs freely, from extra health to reduced enemy HP, which is a graceful accessibility choice. The soundtrack deserves a specific mention because it earns one. Electronic and synth-forward, it keeps the energy calibrated to the absurdity on screen without tipping into parody music that would wear out its welcome. It is the kind of score that sounds like the startup would have commissioned it, and that is a compliment. For players who have any mileage on the modern gig economy, any memory of unpaid internship listings, or any residual irritation at a CEO who owns a kombucha brand, Going Under is a small game that knows exactly what it is mocking and does it with craft.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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