The Underside is a cool exploration based action platormer in it’s creators own words. Although it’s not a complete game currently that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check it out! The Underside is the creation of Arthur Lee with some help on the music front by J Michael Brown and some level design help from David Walton.
In The Underside you play a little character called Ip who stars off in Overside City and you end up quickly getting robbed in the street by a mouse name Chester! Chester steals something off you and you want it back so the chase begins and it leads you to the Underside where you have to navigate your way through the story completing objectives and obtaining cool new weapons and sneakers.
The Underside really is a cute platform exploration game and the graphics are great, with some really well designed graphics, nice use of colour and some tasty stylized pixel work. The Characters are all varied and suitably identifiable as friend or foe, add in some nice cut scene graphics and well designed menus and layouts and you have a very high quality visual style.
The music is also well pitched and keeps you motivated and exploring the levels without making you reach for the volume control. I read that music was created by the game creator Arthur Lee and J Michael Brown with the music program Fruity Loops which you may have heard of, either way the music is just as well done as the graphics and helps to make this game really stand out.
The gameplay is just like the description it’s an action based platformer which is big on exploration, and while i only played the game for an hour or so before writing this review, i found the level design was well pitched bringing you along a predefined path with limited options to start with, occasionally leaving a door that you couldn’t get to straight away for you to find the solution too later but not making you grab the old pen and paper and start making maps of where you had been. highly important for any kind of platform game is the jumping and in The Underside its well pitched, you have depth of jump by holding down the required key and it never feels as though you are being cheated.
Moving onto the controls they work really well, i used the keyboard controls and they are nice and simple with only two action keys for jump and fire, when you get your first weapon that is, and then the four direction keys for movement and interaction with objects.
So to sum up my experience with the Underside i have to say… great job! I loved playing the game and I’m a sucker for quirky world’s and designs, and the characters you meet along the way all have a lot of humour and personality. The various help signs you see along the way also inject some fun and humour into the proceedings with a lot of wit, while giving you the information you need to understand the game and the levels.
Thankfully this review is almost wrapped up and i can go back to playing The Underside some more. If you want to check out the Underside (and you should!) be sure to head on over to its webpage at Insignificant Studios here and download the demo or check out the blog of the creator here.
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