UnderRail

I spent the first three hours of UnderRail getting humbled by rathounds and metro-station thugs while quietly suspecting I had built my character all wrong. I had. That is the honest entry ticket for this game, and if you can accept it, what opens up on the other side is one of the most rewarding isometric RPGs made by anyone, at any budget, in the last two decades. Stygian Software built a world set entirely underground, where humanity survives in a labyrinth of metro station-states, each with its own culture, politics, and agenda. The factions pushing and pulling your protagonist feel lived-in rather than painted on, and the writing earns its ambition more often than it stumbles. Combat is the heartbeat of the experience. It is turn-based, grid-flavored, and loaded with action-point economics, movement points, cooldowns, and a noise-propagation system that lets you lure enemies with thrown grenades into minefields you laid thirty seconds ago. Weapons span pistols, rifles, crossbows, energy weapons, sledgehammers, and knives, and on top of all that sits a three-school psionic system covering Metathermics, Psychokinesis, and Thought Control. A rifle sniper with trap expertise plays completely differently to a stealth knife specialist or a psi-focused glass cannon. Each build is essentially a separate playthrough in disguise. The crafting system deepens all of this further. Most weapons and armor can be assembled from components scattered across the world, and crafted gear tends to outperform anything you loot if you actually invest in the relevant skills. Making poisoned caltrops requires biology skill to extract venom and mechanics skill to shape the scrap metal. It is fussy and time-consuming and also quietly brilliant, because preparation is the game's real language. UnderRail rewards players who scout a corridor, pre-place traps, and memorize enemy patrol patterns. It punishes players who expect the fiction to carry them through a sloppy build. The experience system is the design decision I admire most. The default Oddity mode awards no experience for kills. Instead you collect unique oddity items discovered during exploration, which means a stealth build that ghosts through a zone earns the same progression as a fighter who clears every room. That single choice reshapes how the whole world feels: curiosity becomes currency. The alternative Classic mode restores kill-based XP for players who want a more familiar loop, and both sit comfortably within the same mechanical frame. The friction that pushes some players away, namely the unforgiving character construction and the difficulty that stays high even on normal settings, is also the thing that makes every solved encounter feel genuinely earned. The late game has drawn criticism for brutality spikes, and a first-time player who skips the community build guides is likely to hit a wall somewhere in the mid-game. That is a real and fair warning. So is the small font size and a UI that has not been modernized. These are the costs of admission. What you get in return is a game with genuine soul, a subterranean atmosphere that hums with dread and strange beauty, and a soundtrack whose ambient textures do exactly what UnderRail's art cannot afford to do with polygon counts. It knows what it is. A solitary developer vision executed with stubborn precision over years, released into a market that mostly ignored it, quietly adored by the kind of players who read every tooltip and treat a character sheet as a creative document. That is the audience this game was made for, and if you are in it, UnderRail will quietly become one of your favorite games of the last ten years.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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