UnderMine

This one is for the player who wants a twenty-five minute dungeon run they can repeat two hundred times without getting bored, and it is not for people who, like me, saw that RPG genre tag and showed up hoping for characters worth arguing about. Thorium's mine crawler is a roguelite with an RPG label stapled on by store taxonomy, and once you accept that, it is one of the more mechanically confident things in its sub-genre. Very Positive across nearly ten thousand reviews is not an accident. The people who love it love the loop, not the lore. The central conceit is the best idea in the game. Gold is your currency, your bank, and the thing you bleed. Take a hit and coins scatter across the floor, which means every mistake costs you the shop purchase you were saving toward, and every panicked scramble to grab your money back drags you into the enemy you were trying to escape. Then a thief turns up, grabs a fistful of your savings and sprints for the exit, and you have about half a second to decide whether chasing him is worth eating two more hits. That single design choice does more work than most roguelites' entire economy systems. Risk, reward and resource management collapse into one readable object on the floor. Moment to moment you are swinging a pickaxe around a top-down room, or throwing it, which is the more interesting half of the kit because it leaves you unarmed until it comes back. Rooms are compact and readable, enemy patterns telegraph honestly, and bombs let you crack suspicious walls open for secret rooms, which turns paranoid wall-tapping into a genuine second gameplay loop. Relics are where the build variety lives. Individually most of them are small, but they stack in ways that reshape a run, and the memorable runs are the ones where three unrelated pickups accidentally combine into something absurd. Curses are the counterweight, a permanent drawback you accept because the thing attached to it is too good to refuse, and then quietly regret for the next twenty minutes. Potions and blessings round out the pickup pool. Bosses gate each zone and are properly built set pieces rather than damage sponges, which is more than I can say for a lot of the genre. Between runs you are back at the hub, spending gold on the blacksmith for pickaxe damage, on health, on the various people who make the next disposable peasant slightly less disposable. Thorium is the harder currency, hoarded for the upgrades that actually change how a run feels. This is a well-tuned treadmill, but it is a treadmill. The opening hours are deliberately underpowered, and if you tend to bounce off games before their unlock curve opens up, you will bounce off this one around hour three and never see why the relic pool gets fun. There is also an endless mode for people who finish and want the loop without an ending attached, which tells you exactly what the developers think the appeal is. So here is where I get grumpy. The story is scaffolding. There is a wizard, there is a mine, there is a reason you keep sending peasants down there, and the writing is charming in small doses without ever asking you to care. Nobody has an arc. Nothing you do changes anything except your own stats. If you came looking for what I usually look for, choices with weight, dialogue that rewards a second read, a cast you would defend in an argument, none of it is here, and to be fair the game never promised it. Its tags did. Build variety is real, but it is run-scoped variety rather than character-building variety. You are not making a fighter or a mage across forty hours. You are making this run's pile of coincidences work before the goblins take your wallet. Judged as what it actually is, it is sharp, generous with secrets, and respectful of your evening. Judged as an RPG, it is a very good mine with nobody interesting living in it. Set your expectations accordingly and you will get a lot out of it.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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