Underland: The Climb

I've spent enough time with sandbox physics puzzlers to spot the difference between clever constraint and lazy level recycling, and Underland: The Climb sits in interesting middle ground. You play as Ivy, the apparent sole survivor of an alien invasion of an underground city, working your way upward through 30 stages toward the surface. Each stage is a self-contained contraption problem: dig tunnels with pickaxes, redirect fluid with pipes and pumps, route TNT carts, manipulate gates, and coax enemies onto pressure plates so they do half your climbing for you. The core loop is closer to a mechanical puzzle box than a traditional platformer, which is the right framing for anyone deciding whether to buy. What works well is the destructible terrain. Digging feels purposeful rather than arbitrary because the soil physics actually respond consistently, and routing channels for molten steel or acid becomes a legitimate spatial reasoning exercise. The gate-and-switch puzzles, particularly in the mid-game, have a satisfying chain-reaction quality where one correctly sequenced action cascades into progress. New tools are introduced at a measured pace, so the difficulty ramp does not ambush newcomers. That the Steam community sits at 95 percent positive across 47 reviews is a meaningful signal for a game this small, suggesting the people who found it mostly got what they came for. The problems are real, though, and worth pricing in. The interface for selecting machinery cycles through objects with shoulder-button presses, which becomes genuinely annoying in levels that stack multiple interactable elements on top of each other. Small indicator arrows are not enough visual feedback when ordnance overlaps. A reported crash after level 22 has surfaced in the Steam community, which is worth checking patch notes for before committing. Critics who covered the console versions also flagged that the 30-level count comes with some idea recycling in the back half, where the puzzle vocabulary stops expanding before the stage count does. For a budget title this is forgivable, but go in knowing the final third does not escalate at the same rate as the first. The pixel art aesthetic is clean but deliberately spare, carrying a muted Game Boy-era palette and a moody soundtrack that fits the underground setting without doing much to elevate it. There is no mod support, no level editor in active use, and no multiplayer dimension at all. This is a solo, sit-down-for-two-hours kind of experience, not a platform to sink weeks into. For strategy-inclined players who enjoy the puzzles in Lemmings or the contraption logic of something like The Incredible Machine, this scratches a specific itch at a price point that removes most of the risk. The physics commitment is genuine enough that solutions rarely feel arbitrary, even when the interface makes executing them more fiddly than it should.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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