The Land Beneath Us

Just wrapped up my 30+ hour journey with The Land Beneath Us, and what a ride it has been! The core mechanic is deceptively simple, but it forces you into deep-thinking sessions that are incredibly rewarding. The weapon variety is a standout feature—switching between melee and ranged options keeps every run fresh and exciting. For the completionists out there, the achievements are very straightforward and satisfying to collect. If you’re looking for a challenge, the level modifiers (especially the 'Blood Moon' highest ascension) will absolutely test your limits. Ironically, I found the journey through the 'mobs' much more grueling than the final boss—perhaps I ended up a bit too OP by the end! haha. The audiovisual experience is top-notch. The SFX and VFX for elemental effects like explosions, lightning, and burn are immensely satisfying. Huge thanks to the dev team for crafting such a polished experience!

I found this to be a very refreshing variation of the rougelike genre. I feel like most games are about kiting and quick decisions, whereas this allows for more well thought out strategies and slower pacing to play exactly how you intend. Because of the grid system there were really cool weapon abilities. The chip system was a nice addition to reward well thought out movements. I do feel like the power creep came a little too fast and the game became fairly trivial pretty fast with the exception of 1 or 2 levels. Though I didn't feel like the levels were hard, rather the mechanics required certain builds that relied heavily on RNG, which wasn't my favorite part. Overall, I thought it was a great game and have recommended to folks IRL.

Very basic and uninteresting in its progression. Still the bosses change the game completely and sometimes there are nowhere for you to go but die. It seems the game uses the classic "get to the boss, figure out what it does, die and then maybe you have a chance with hindsight". I am not a fan of that kind of game design, the normal game is fun but basic, the boss fights are something totally different that just forces you to go back to grind that basic loop over and over. One hour in, I never cleared the first final boss, I feel like I've seen everything worth seeing here and the enemies are all the same and not interesting

I really wish there was "maybe" option for recommendations. If you're looking for ~10 hours of a neat twist on the tactical roguelite formula, this is a good pick. If you're looking for layers of depth, look somewhere else. I think the devs found a very cool premise -- tying each movement direction to a specific weapon -- and created 90% of a good game. Exploring the mechanics was fun initially, but it definitely got grindy and I have no desire to finish out the story line or come back to the game for casual runs. Strengths: - combat tied to movement is a cool gimmick, with important ramifications for planning - weapon variety is strong - adding the chip system (think spells based on movement pattern) alleviates some RNG from weapons - boss mechanics are varied and make for some good puzzles Weaknesses: - the upgrade system being linked to finding duplicate weapons means that unlocking new weapons is actively bad for run progression - in general, there's just too much meta-progression for my taste. After 30 hours, there were entire sections of upgrades that I hadn't even had the chance to progress and the game had already been grindy for 10 hours before I stopped playing. - the …

The combat is great, it lures you in with being speedy because enemies are so easy at first. Then later down the line you're surely punished for not playing it like a game of ches.

Would love for a way to be more neutral on steam more than like and dislike. Overall, The game is simple. So after not so long you'll unlock new weapon and relics which made the game better. And after even more time (which shouldn't be too much either), you unlock even more weapons and relics and it's the starting point of why you lose game. Don't get me wrong, you're gonna lose because of placement too but there will be a lot of times when you're just gonna die because your weapons don't synergies with your relics and it's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ annoying. There is also one thing that got on my nerves, and it comes from weapons interaction. The cqc (1 range) one will always make you move after killing a foe but not the medium to long range one and I died too many times imo because I killed a mob and had no way other than walking on the lava, poisopn or whatever was under him and could do damage to me. At that point every run whatever the difficulty but even more so at higher one, your gonna lose on you don't have damage (if you didn't make placement error) because your didn't get the weapons or the relics going with it's counterpart. So RNG tier at most and I really dislike RNG tier games.