Going Under

Most games that promise satire deliver a reskin. Slap a hoodie on a goblin, name a boss “Zuckerborg,” call it commentary. Going Under actually did the reading.

Released on September 24, 2020 by Seattle’s Aggro Crab and published by Team17 Digital, this is a roguelite dungeon crawler about the least glamorous job in the tech economy: being an unpaid marketing intern. You play Jackie Fiasco, freshly onboarded at Fizzle, a beverage startup in the city of Neo-Cascadia that sells carbonated sludge with the evangelical fervor of a Series C pitch deck. Jackie’s actual job description, it turns out, involves an elevator. Beneath the office campus lie the literal ruins of failed tech companies, and someone has to go down there and clear them out. That someone does not get paid.

The premise is the thesis. Each dungeon is the fossilized corpse of a different bubble — a gig-economy delivery service staffed by goblins who were never classified as employees, a predatory dating app, a cryptocurrency venture — and each one bottoms out in a boss fight against its founder. Beat the founder, take the enchanted relic. It is the clearest visual metaphor for “disruption” anyone has put in a game: an industry built on top of its own unmarked graves, sending an intern down to loot them.

Positioned in a crowded post-Hades, post-Enter the Gungeon market, Going Under never tries to out-mechanic the genre leaders. It competes on voice. Its combat is a novelty-first system built around smashing office furniture over people’s heads; its progression is deliberately shallow compared to its peers; its runs are short enough to finish on a lunch break. That trade — depth for personality — is the central bet of the whole design, and it mostly pays off.

• Improvised Weapon Combat: Nearly every object in the world is a weapon. Laptops, brooms, keyboards, body pillows, severed limbs. Almost all of them shatter after a few swings, which turns every fight into a scavenging problem as much as a combat one.
• Three Parody Dungeons: Joblin (gig economy), Winkydink (dating apps), and Styxcoin (crypto) — each procedurally arranged, each thematically committed, each ending in a founder who believes they were the good guy.
• Coworker Mentorships: Build relationships with the Fizzle staff between runs, complete their side tasks, and unlock persistent Skills at the office cafe that carry into future attempts.
• Short-Run Structure: Runs are built to fit a lunch break, making this one of the few roguelites that respects a weeknight.
• Workplace-Comedy Writing: Slack-brained dialogue, corporate-speak enemy names, and an office cast that’s written with real affection rather than contempt.

The Gameplay Loop

Going Under runs on a loop most players will recognize instantly: descend, fight through procedurally arranged floors, take a boss, die or win, return to the office, spend what you earned, go again. The skeleton is standard. What Aggro Crab bolted onto it is not.

The core innovation is disposability. In most action roguelites, your weapon is your identity — you build a run around it, you upgrade it, you get attached. Here, your weapon is garbage you found on the floor and it will be gone in moments. A stapler does a few hits and snaps. A desk chair swings wide and slow, then splinters. You are constantly, frantically shopping mid-combat, kicking over furniture to see what falls out, and improvising a plan around whatever your hands close on.

When it works, it’s electric. There’s a specific panic this design produces better than anything else in the genre: three enemies closing, your sword just evaporated, and there’s a decorative gourd within lunging distance. You take the gourd. The system turns desperation into a mechanic.

When it doesn’t work, you feel every seam. The scramble that creates tension in a good room creates pure frustration in a bad one — a cramped arena with nothing throwable, a durability roll that leaves you unarmed against a ranged enemy, a floor where the RNG simply doesn’t furnish you. Disposable weapons are a strong idea executed with an uneven hand, because the design leans on room generation to keep you supplied and the generation isn’t always paying attention.

Where the Combat Falls Short

The honest critique: the moment-to-moment feel is floaty. Attacks land with a soft, imprecise weight, hitboxes read generously in both directions, and the difference between a clean dodge and a clipped one isn’t always legible. Against Hades — a game where every frame of every dash communicates exactly what the engine is doing — Going Under feels approximate. That imprecision matters more as the game escalates, and the mid-run difficulty spikes are uneven. The design can hand you two easy floors and then a room that erases you for reasons that feel more like generation luck than execution failure.

This is the game’s real ceiling, and it’s worth being direct about it: if you came for combat mechanics, you will find them the weakest thing here.

Meta-Progression and the Office

Between runs, Fizzle’s office becomes the hub, and it’s the best-written part of the entire game. The coworkers — the burnt-out engineer, the relentlessly positive HR presence, the CEO who speaks exclusively in aspirational nonsense — offer mentorships and side tasks that feed into unlockable Skills purchased at the cafe. The persistent upgrades carry forward, softening the difficulty curve across attempts.

The catch is that this system is thinner than the genre standard. There is no sprawling upgrade tree, no long-tail unlock chase, no long drip of new toys. You reach the end of meaningful progression well before you reach the end of what the game has to say. Some will read that as a missing feature. We read it as a scope decision: the meta-progression exists to get you to the writing, not to keep you grinding after it’s done.

And the writing earns it. The satire has teeth because it punches at structures rather than at people. Jackie isn’t a joke; she’s a competent young person being systematically exploited by an organization that has replaced compensation with vibes. The founders she kills in the basement aren’t cartoon villains — they’re true believers who ran companies into the ground and left the wreckage for someone junior to clean up. The game is angry, and it stays funny while being angry, which is a much harder trick than either one alone.

The bright low-poly art direction is the smartest technical decision in the project. Flat colors, chunky geometry, a palette that reads like a startup’s brand guidelines gone feral — it’s stylish, instantly legible, and light on hardware. That last part matters: readability in a game where every room is packed with interactive clutter is a functional requirement, not a taste preference, and the low-poly language keeps “thing I can pick up” and “thing that will hit me” visually distinct even when a room turns chaotic.

The soundtrack is the other standout, carrying the office-comedy energy without ever tipping into grating.

Performance should be a non-issue by design: a 3D game of this scope demands almost nothing from modern hardware. UI design is clean and unobtrusive, though the item and relic tooltips could be more forthcoming about what a given effect actually does numerically — a small friction that compounds when you’re making fast decisions mid-run.

On Steam, this is the version to buy. Mouse-and-keyboard is workable, but the game was built for a gamepad and plays substantially better with one — the dodge-and-swing rhythm wants analog movement. The PC build’s real advantage is the display: at high resolution on a big monitor, the low-poly art and the readability of cluttered rooms both benefit, and the floaty combat is more forgiving when you can see every object in a room at a glance.

On Nintendo Switch, Going Under is a natural fit and a slightly rougher one. The short-run structure is close to ideal for handheld play — a full dungeon attempt fits comfortably into a commute — and the art style survives the smaller screen better than most 3D games do. The cost is precision. In handheld mode, dense rooms get visually busy, and a combat system that’s already imprecise loses a little more clarity on a small panel. Docked, it closes most of that gap.

Pick Steam for feel and fidelity. Pick Switch if portability is the point — this game is built for stolen minutes, and the Switch is built for stolen minutes.

Going Under is a game with a mediocre sword arm and a good brain. Its combat is the least interesting thing about it — floaty, occasionally arbitrary, propped up by a durability system that’s clever in concept and streaky in practice. If that’s your primary criterion, adjust expectations accordingly.

Everything else is solid. Aggro Crab built a satire that actually understands what it’s satirizing, populated it with characters worth returning to the office for, and wrapped it in an art direction that remains distinctive years on. The decision to keep runs short and progression light reads as confidence: this is a game that says its piece, says it well, and gets out before it overstays.

The shape of the criticism around it is no accident. Nobody complains about the writing. Everybody complains about the swinging. Go in knowing that trade, and Going Under earns a recommendation for the right audience — a comedy about labor exploitation that built a dungeon crawler out of a very real, very unfunny idea, and mostly got away with it.