Those skeletons should unionize

October 12, 2023 3:01 AM

Underlevel (itch.io, free but Windows only for now) is a game made in 48 hours. It's got silly and charming graphics, and it's a lot of Halloween-themed fun! You're the skeleton lord in charge of a five-level dungeon, but a knight has invaded your domain and means to destroy you! Rally your lollygagging skeleton minions, to both lead them to the safety of the downstairs and destroy as many of the gem-laden pots on each level as you can, before the knight gets to them first and smashes them to raise its experience level! If you can't play it (that Windows thing, argh), here's a playthrough on Youtube. (9 minutes)

You start each floor with one skeleton near the upstairs. The knight will arrive in just a few seconds, so use the mouse pointer to get it the hell away and guide it to other skeletons, who are just bumbling around having skeleton thoughts, and alert them! The skeletons with the yellow eyes are active, and will try to reach your pointer.

You'll quickly discover that skeletons aren't very smart (no brain, you see), and will often get caught up on walls. If the knight is close behind, you might have to abandon some. The skellies also stumble sometimes, like undead Pikmin. If you can get them to the downstairs, all of the active skeletons that touch it will leave the level and join your horde at the bottom of the dungeon, all but one. The last active skeleton cannot leave the level until all the other skeletons have evacuated and all the loot is gone.

Two things increase the knight's level: killing skeletons and getting the gems out of smashed jars. If you can get a skeleton to run into a jar first, it'll break and the gems inside will probably disappear before the knight can get to them! But if the knight is nearby it might grab the gems before they vanish!

The HUD has a lot of information that can help you out. The red arrow on the left side points the way to the downstairs. The left side also tells you how many loot jars and skeletons ("enemies") are left on the level; both numbers must reach zero, either because of your actions or the knight's, to move to the next floor. The lower-right corner has a "Knight Cam" that shows you what the knight is up to. It doesn't tell you its location in the dungeon, but it can still be helpful in figuring out what it's doing.

Clicking the mouse button will cause all of the active skeletons to jump, dodging any attacks the knight might make until they land again. (Be careful not to click outside the window!) The knight can attack on the move, and smashing a skeleton to bits doesn't even slow it down. You can't attack the Knight until the end of the dungeon, so don't try to gang up on it. The knight also snatches up gems just by being near them, for it has one of those auto-pickup features. It sucks.

Fortunately, the knight isn't any smarter than the skeletons, and it tends to go after the target that's closest to it. You can even see its AI: its target path is shown onscreen as a thin line. It changes color, from white to yellow to orange, as it gets closer to whatever it wants to destroy.

If you're having a bad game and want to start over, you can press F2 to do so. There is no "Are you sure?" prompt and it happens instantly, so be careful with that key.

The knight isn't done until every skeleton is gone and every loot jar is smashed. It always pathfinds to the closest thing to break, so you can keep it distracted by leaving a jar in an out-of-the-way place for it to waste time running to.

You can see the knight's level at the bottom of the screen, with a red bar indicating how close it is to gaining an experience level. Every skeleton you escape with is 10 HP off the knight at the end. If you can get to the end with the knight at level 9 or less you have a good chance of winning.

posted by JHarris (8 comments total)

This is really cute. I feel like it would be much more fun and have more strategy possibilities if you could see the whole floor at once. The tight view seems like it might be an ok limitation for a 48 hour game but there's a lot of possibility here for more complexity if you could see farther.
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:43 AM on October 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

I don't play video games anymore, and I thought this was a cute watch.

I did feel sorry for the hapless skeletons. The living are such a bunch of jerks!

However, if the Skeleton Lord didn't leave piles of treasure lying around for Knights to steal, they wouldn't level up, and it would all be more manageable.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:46 AM on October 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Adorable! I love the music
posted by Countess Elena at 6:44 AM on October 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is really cute and the floppy skeleton animations are so fun!
posted by mochapickle at 7:43 AM on October 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

That looks like fun! I wish there was a Mac version!
posted by brundlefly at 8:05 AM on October 12, 2023

brundlefly, there's at least one person in the comments of the itch.io page who wishes the same thing. It seems like the game's implemented with Game Maker Studio, and from my experience with it, it's possible, but you have to have a Mac computer to build the App package. For a little free game, that's probably an unreasonable expense.
posted by JHarris at 8:43 AM on October 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Needs a SpookySeason tag!
posted by hippybear at 9:39 AM on October 12, 2023

Thanks for sharing, JHarris! This was so wonderful to watch.
posted by laikagogogo at 4:12 PM on October 12, 2023 [1 favorite]