Caverns of Underwood

Cavern of the Underwood is a small game, made with unity. The concept is quite simple: Find your way out of a maze within 10 minutes with a heavily reduced sight. If you don’t, you will fall down to hell. The maze is big enough, so you won’t be able to find the exit by just walking always on the same side – you could either try to map it from try to try or hope to stumble upon it by chance.

There are neither real obstacles nor enemies. You can jump, but – as far as I can tell – don’t need to, except maybe for bunnyhopping – and you shouldn’t. It would disturb the atmosphere, and atmosphere is where this game can shine. The simple models and textures and an monotone, minimalistic, and harsh dungeon synth soundtrack do perfectly mesh with the games concept that might be neither new nor creative, but still does work well. Everything combines into a bleak and comfortless experience – „Cavern of the Underwood“ is a dark little meditation.

There are no credits, only a text file containing some lore, instructions, the information that we are not playing a game developed by Disney, and that any computer running Windows 2000 or later should do fine as far as the dev can say.

The developer is highly active. There are some more free games, and some super obscure dungeon-synth albums available for 1 AUD, everything done this year. Apart from a few short announcement postings made in niche boards there isn’t any information except the stuff they writes on the itch page, and they seems neither to care for marketing their stuff nor to include anything fancy except what they believes is needed in their strife for the desolate gaming experience.

Runs with Wine/Linux out of the box.