Song of the Myrne: What Lies Beneath

I came into What Lies Beneath expecting a throwaway pixel dungeon crawler and walked out genuinely surprised, then immediately annoyed that it was over. This is a solo-dev action-RPG from Beldarak Games, released back in January 2015, set on the island of Namok where you slash, shoot, and fireball your way through a dungeon to avenge a murder. The writing leans hard into self-aware comedy - NPCs break character, the protagonist talks to the player directly, and the whole thing has a DLC Quest kind of energy where the joke is that everyone knows it's a game. That tone either clicks for you or it doesn't, but it kept me moving between rooms without much friction. The combat runs in real-time and you aim with the mouse, which matters. Left-click attacks, Shift parries when you have a shield equipped, and the range system on melee weapons actually rewards reading the hitbox rather than just face-tanking everything. There are no fixed classes, so you can freely mix heavy armor with spellcasting or stack archer gear while carrying a sword as backup. Bosses have readable patterns: the final encounter throws radial iron projectiles that stun on hit plus three homing missiles, so you want some form of ranged option by that point or you will be trading badly in melee. The crafting covers potions, bandages from fabric scraps, ore-smelted armors, and more, and crucially the game puts item descriptions in-plain-sight so you are never wiki-diving to figure out a recipe. Checkpoint beds respawn you cleanly, and warp items let you backtrack without the slow walk penalty that kills momentum in games like this. The content ceiling hits fast and that is the core problem. The campaign wraps in roughly three to five hours even if you do every side quest, which is maybe a handful of objectives involving boss kills and light environmental puzzles. Poor build choices early have an outsized effect on the late game precisely because there is no fat in the runtime to recover. A post-launch update added a local co-op mode where a second player controls a companion and can drop in or out at any point, plus a short bonus story called The Sorcerer that was previously a browser demo. There is also a local splitscreen PvP mode with a deathmatch and a football-with-swords mode called Score the Cube. None of that extends the experience dramatically, but the couch co-op angle at least gives the game a second shelf life if you have someone nearby. From a pure shooter-brain standpoint, there is nothing here about netcode or ranked ladders because this is entirely offline. The mouse-aim combat is responsive enough that it does not feel sluggish, and the movement speed stat being spendable early is a good design call - slow movement in a top-down crawler is an immediate patience test and the developer understood that. Steam sits the user review score at around 85 percent positive across roughly 62 reviews, which is a small sample but a consistent signal. The pixel art is on the rougher end of the spectrum and players who care about presentation will feel it, but the gameplay loop of fight-loot-craft-upgrade carries the session without needing visual polish to back it up. Who should pick this up: anyone wanting a low-pressure weekend session that does not demand 40 hours of their life, fans of classless build tinkering in a compact space, and households with two people who enjoy couch co-op dungeon runs. Who should skip it: anyone looking for long-form RPG depth, replayability beyond a second build experiment, or any kind of online component. Go in knowing the runtime is the whole game and the charm lands cleanly. Go in expecting a full RPG and you will bounce off it in the second hour.

Fred · Scout Team

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