Beyond The Underworld

I want to root for Beyond The Underworld. It has the bones of something quietly lovely: a solo developer at Peacock Games building a colour-saturated afterlife, region by region, each zone given its own palette and feel. The Crimson Zone with its red fields, the Silver Coast's open beaches, the promise of Elysium at the end. There is genuine visual intention here, and the soundtrack - tagged by the community as a highlight - seems to do real atmospheric work tying each location together. For a certain kind of player, that combination of handcrafted environments, lore fragments hidden off the beaten path, and gentle spirit-guided exploration sounds like exactly the kind of small gem worth finding. The structure is a walking-simulator-adjacent adventure. You play as a girl who wakes in a strange humanoid form with no memory, and the world itself acts as the narrator, parcelling out lore through collectible pieces scattered across expansive levels. Interacting with spirits nudges the story forward. There are puzzles woven through the progression - the Islands area in particular seems to ask players to sequence environmental interactions correctly - and the whole thing reportedly runs somewhere in the six-to-eight hour range if you are thorough. Dream levels sit alongside the main zones, hinting at a slightly stranger structural ambition underneath the surface calm. Here is where I have to be honest with you, though. Beyond The Underworld entered Early Access in April 2020 and, as of mid-2026, it is still there. Community posts on Steam ask directly whether the developer is still active, noting long gaps without replies. Players have flagged specific bugs - visual glitches in the Islands area, a settings overlay that misbehaves and obscures the game while you try to fix it - and there is no clear public roadmap to a 1.0 release. The developer's original estimate was one to two months to exit Early Access. That window closed a long time ago. The full story is reportedly playable and most music has been implemented, but optimisation and polish remain unfinished, and the silence around the project is genuinely concerning for anyone who wants to know their purchase is going somewhere. The target audience for this is narrow but real: players who find something meditative in colour-rich exploration games, who are patient with rough edges, and who are comfortable with the possibility that the version they buy may be the final version regardless of what the Early Access label implies. If that sounds like your lane, the atmosphere has enough craft behind it to carry a short playthrough. But if you need confidence that bugs will be fixed and the developer is actively steering the ship, the current state of community communication does not provide that assurance. This one deserves a proper launch. It just is not there yet.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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