Underhero

The chosen hero is dead. You killed him. It was an accident — you were a masked minion doing minion things, there was a chandelier, gravity had opinions — and now the Chestnut Kingdom’s prophecy has a vacancy and you are the only applicant. That is the opening of Underhero, the debut from Paper Castle Games, and it tells you almost everything about the game’s posture: this is a project built by people who grew up inside the JRPG’s furniture and want to rearrange it rather than burn it down.

The lineage is not subtle, and Paper Castle doesn’t pretend otherwise. The dedicated battle plane — combat pulls you out of the world and onto a flat, theatrical stage — is lifted wholesale from Paper Mario. The tonal trick of a joke-forward script that gradually reveals something bleak underneath is Undertale‘s calling card. The nonviolent option, here implemented as literally bribing enemies with coins to walk away, is the same negotiation that a hundred indie RPGs have been circling since 2015. What Underhero contributes is the removal: it takes the turn out of turn-based, and it makes the difference between a hit and a whiff a matter of milliseconds and musical timing.

Released on Steam in September 2018 and later ported to Nintendo’s ecosystem, it arrived in the crowded middle of the pixel-art indie boom. It is not a landmark. It is a confident, funny, visually striking first album from a studio that clearly has a second one in it, and it wears its structural flaws in plain sight rather than hiding them behind difficulty.

• “Turn-based combat without the turns”: Encounters play out in real time on a side-view battle plane. Dodge, parry, and swing against a stamina bar, with attack windows and critical hits keyed to the beat of the score. No menus waiting patiently for input. The enemy does not care that you’re thinking.
• Bribery as a combat verb: Every fight has a price tag. Toss coins and the enemy leaves. It’s a real economic decision — coins are also the upgrade currency — and it converts the standard RPG grind into a genuine question of whether a fight is worth the money or the time.
• Elizabeth IV, the talking sword: The weapon is a character, a commentator, and the game’s primary vehicle for its comic timing. She is also, mechanically, the spine of the upgrade tree.
• Five regions, five gimmick bosses: Each area terminates in an elaborate set-piece that rewrites the combat rules for one encounter — the game’s best-designed content, without question.
• Hand-drawn pixel art and an orchestral-chiptune score: Stijn van Wakeren’s soundtrack isn’t decoration. Because attacks land on the beat, the music is load-bearing.

The gameplay loop

Underhero’s core insight is that turn-based combat has always been a latency problem disguised as a design philosophy. The turn exists to give you time to read the board. Remove it and you have to give the player a different clock — and Paper Castle’s answer is the music. Attack windows, dodge frames, and the rhythm of enemy tells are all synced to the track, which means the game is quietly teaching players to listen rather than watch. At its best, in the second and third regions, it produces something few RPGs manage: a combat system where competence is legible, where improvement shows in the hands rather than in bigger numbers.

The stamina bar is the honest broker here. It stops the system from collapsing into mash-and-pray, forcing deliberate swings and leaving headroom for a parry. Chain the timing correctly and you get critical hits; get greedy and you’re standing there empty-handed while something with teeth closes the distance. That tension is the design at its best.

It is also, and this is the central problem, a system that peaks early and then doesn’t move.

By roughly the halfway mark every enemy in the bestiary has been read. The tells are memorizable, and once they are, the rhythm no longer poses a question — what should be a test of nerve becomes a compliance check. The word that fits is “sluggish,” and it’s precise. The problem isn’t difficulty; it’s that the encounter’s duration stops correlating with its interest. A trash mob in region four asks nothing new and takes forty seconds to say so.

Which is exactly what the bribery mechanic is there to solve — and it’s a smarter escape hatch than most games offer, because it costs something real. But it also reveals the structural crack. When a game’s best answer to combat fatigue is a button that skips combat, the issue has been diagnosed rather than fixed. The bosses prove the fix was possible: five encounters, five mechanical reinventions, and every one of them is sharp, legible, and inventive. The gap in quality between the bosses and the mobs standing between them is the widest gap in the game.

Traversal, friction, and the final act

Outside the battle plane, Underhero is a platformer-adventure hybrid with light puzzling, hidden treasure, and NPCs who exist mostly to be funny — which they reliably are. The writing is the strongest single element of the production. It’s dense, it lands, and it has the discipline to set up a tonal reversal in the back half that actually earns its darkness instead of just announcing it. Mr. Stitches is a good villain because the script does the work.

The traversal, though, is where the game spends the goodwill its writing earns. There is no fast travel. The regions are long, the platforming is competent rather than expressive, and the game asks players to walk back across it more than once. Combine that with inconsistent aiming — a real flaw in a game where precision is the entire proposition — and you get friction in exactly the places a comedy shouldn’t have any. Nothing kills a punchline like a two-minute walk to reach it.

The final act is the weakest stretch. Pacing loosens, encounters lengthen, and a story that has been tightening suddenly has to be delivered through the game’s most tired systems. Underhero is a game that would be superb if it were substantially shorter. That’s a scoping failure, not a talent failure, and it’s the single most common way promising debuts go wrong.

The art is the easiest recommendation in the package. Paper Castle’s hand-drawn pixel work is lush without being fussy — thick, confident linework, cartoony animation with real weight in the anticipation frames, and a color sense that keeps five distinct regions actually distinct rather than palette-swapped. Character animation in particular carries comic timing that the script alone couldn’t; the masked protagonist gets a lot of personality out of a face you never see.

The battle plane is the strongest piece of interface design here, and it’s worth calling out why: pulling combat onto a flat stage means the game controls its own readability. No environmental clutter, no ambiguous depth, clean silhouettes. In a system where a dodge is decided in a handful of frames, that legibility is a mechanic, not a style choice.

As a 2D game of this scope, it is light on hardware by design. The one technical dimension that actually matters is input latency, because the entire combat design is a timing contract between player and soundtrack. Any added lag between button and blade doesn’t feel like lag; it feels like the game being unfair. Keep that in mind below.

Steam is the definitive version, with one strong caveat: play it with a controller. The parry-and-dodge grammar was clearly built around a gamepad, and the tactile feedback of a shoulder button beats a keypress for rhythm work. PC also offers the best shot at low, consistent input latency of the two platforms, which for this game is not a spec-sheet nicety — it’s the difference between a crisp parry system and a mildly infuriating one. Native resolution scaling flatters the pixel art on a high-DPI monitor.

Nintendo Switch is the more appealing idea. A funny, colorful, region-by-region adventure is a natural handheld fit. Two things complicate it. First, docked play adds display latency on many TVs, and this is a game where that tax is felt directly in combat; docked players should use game mode on their set. Second, the absent fast travel hurts more on a portable, not less. Handheld play is session-based by nature, and a game that regularly asks for a five-minute backtrack is poorly matched to a twenty-minute commute. The Switch version is perfectly serviceable. It’s just the version where the game’s worst structural habit collides with the platform’s best use case.

Underhero is the frustrating kind of flawed debut — the kind where every problem is a scoping problem and every strength is a taste problem. Paper Castle Games had one strong structural idea, executed it with more precision than most first-time studios manage, and then didn’t have quite enough of it to fill the runtime they built. The bosses are excellent. The writing is excellent. The art and the score are excellent and, crucially, integrated rather than applied. The long stretches of trash encounters between those peaks are where the seams show.

What the game does well, it does with real authorial voice — and voice is the rarest thing on this shelf. But voice alone can’t carry a midgame that stops asking questions and a finale that leans on the game’s weakest systems. For most players, that’s a wait-for-a-sale proposition: pick it up discounted, play on PC with a controller, bribe every enemy already beaten twice, and don’t feel bad about it. The game gave you that button for a reason.