The Land Beneath Us (Nintendo Switch) – The test

Based in Bangkok, Thailand, FairPlay Studios develops games with the aim of “brightening our day” as gamers, according to their words. This noble cause has until today had little echo in our ears with a few game releases of which we were unaware. But today it's different. The Land Beneath Us, the latest from the Thai studio, has received some awards around the world. So it was with a lot of curiosity and desire that we started playing this game. Did it brighten up our day? This is what we will see in this test.

Sven, the Soul Collector

We begin the adventure of The Land Beneath Us in the metallic skin of a UCA (Ultimate Soul Collector) robot. But since this robot didn't have a name, it gave itself one: Sven. When it was first put into service, Sven discovers, through a video left by its creator, that its mission is to collect souls in order to save humanity. Indeed, its creator has found a way to cure diseases, obtain an inexhaustible source of energy and even repel death thanks to animatechnology. This technology works with the help of souls. To collect them, the creator has therefore decided to go and look for them in the depths of the Earth, a place sometimes called “hell”. Unfortunately, at the end of the creator's video, we discover that she has been kidnapped. The future of humanity and the creator now rests on our electronic carcass.

The goal of our hero, to save the world, is not the most original, you will agree, but the way to achieve our ends, it, is out of the ordinary. The story is revealed as we progress in the game and then arises a strange feeling of guilt. Are we really on the side of the good guys? Depending on our choices, the end of the game will be different, but that will be up to you to discover.

The atmosphere of the game and its universe are very pleasant to discover. The scenario, for its part, is sometimes complicated to follow but that in no way spoils the game experience.

There's a fight in the underworld

The Land Beneath Us is a roguelite dungeon crawler played turn-based (that's a long thing to say!). With each of your attempts to harvest souls and defeat the final boss of an underworld region, you will be able to use your harvest to improve your skills. A region is each made up of around thirty rooms in which you will often encounter enemies that you will have to defeat to move on to the next room. Each room has a particular reward: a weapon, a relic, money or souls. Sometimes you will also meet a kind soul who will help you improve your equipment for gold coins or a little life.

Regarding the combat system, we are on a turn-based system similar to the game Crown Trick, whose review can be found here. You don't know Crown Trick? Then let me explain. Our character can move up, down, right, and left, one square at a time (except for special powers). As long as we haven't moved, our enemies do nothing. We have up to 4 weapons, one for each direction. So, if we have a sword for the right direction and we go in that direction, if there is an enemy, we will strike with this sword. But if we want to use our magnificent overpowered pistol on the left, we will have to make sure that our enemy is on our left. As you may have guessed, the positioning of our character is of crucial importance in The Land Beneath Us.

In addition, we see in advance which squares enemies will do damage to. We will therefore sometimes be forced to go in one direction so as not to lose life. This combat system is very intelligent because you will sometimes have to position yourself well to make a devastating attack. But it is not finished ! Our robot has an electronic chip that can activate if we follow a combination of directions. When the chip activates, the power associated with the combination becomes operational and ready for use. We are therefore sometimes “forced” to go in one direction to be able to use our chip. Each direction you take therefore has great importance, whether to attack or to use a power.

We really liked this combat system which, ultimately, brings a welcome touch of originality.

Continuous improvement

Through the different rooms, it will be possible to improve our equipment in order to optimize our damage and perform powerful combos. Indeed, our weapons can be improved in two ways: either by spending gold at the blacksmith, or by recovering the same weapon, several times. Add to that the possibility of recovering up to 10 relics which grant more or less powerful passives, and it will be possible to make multiple very effective combinations. But obviously, we are in a roguelite, so let's not draw too many plans on the comet. Each room and each reward is generated randomly. It will also be necessary, sometimes, to have a little luck.

Where is the roguelite aspect here? Simply in the fact that once our journey in the underworld is finished, victoriously or not, it will be possible for us to obtain advantages for our next attempts such as, for example, obtaining more gold or chances of having a rare relic, etc.

All these mechanics make the game extremely addictive. As soon as we finish a run, all we want to do is return to the underworld.

Unequal difficulty

We were slightly surprised by the overall difficulty level of the game. We don't know if we are experts in the genre, but we very quickly reached the last world without too much difficulty by chaining victories. But once we reached the last world, we saw the difficulty level rise quite sharply.

Fortunately, it is possible to redo already completed worlds with a higher level of difficulty, with the aim of collecting more souls and therefore possibilities to improve our character.

So we took this opportunity to see if we really were strategy game geniuses (we'll let you guess what we concluded).

This possibility of increasing the difficulty does the game a lot of good to satisfy fans of tactical games.

Decent pixel art and a nice soundtrack

The Land Beneath Us is made in pixel art of a quite correct level even if sometimes some creatures are not very visible. The soundtrack, it, is rather good and allows us to have a very pleasant musical background, although redundant.

The Land Beneath Us is, at the time of writing, priced at 15 euros on the Nintendo eShop. For a game of this quality, it's very honest, although the game is finished in about twenty hours at most.