So Underhero was a title I had read about ahead of time and thought it’d be fun to give a shot to and see if it was as clever as it sounded on paper. In some ways it is, and in some ways it isn’t.

The good news is that the writing is pretty strong. It’s a pretty fun spin on the whole “hero collects items from lesser dungeons to defeat the big bad and save the kingdom” story. You play as this drone, goomba-level bad guy who works for the big bad named Mr. Stitch at the last castle of the game. One thing leads to another and you accidentally kill a couple coworkers and the hero. It’s a hilarious way to start the whole game and you become friends with the previous hero’s enchanted sword hilt that basically acts as your sidekick and weapon through the rest of the game as you power yourself up enough to complete the previous hero’s quest to beat Mr. Stitches yourself and save the kingdom.

The world that’s been created is pretty charming, though graphically I thought it was a little bland. They’re going for a 16 bit look that they more or less nailed, but the colors all felt a little washed out to me and in some areas there just wasn’t much going on, like in the haunted mansion level. So the graphics aren’t bad, I just found that I liked this world that was created and I wanted to be able to see more of it as I was running around.

The controls are mostly fine, though I did notice that when you hold the jump button down the glide, the movement is really sensitive. I found it was a lot easier to miss jumps when gliding, which if you’ve played any games that allow this, it almost completely defeats the purpose of it. Also in the beach level, I was trying to grab hold of vines to cross these rivers, and I couldn’t do it because apparently you actually need to be gliding in order to grab them. You can’t just jump and get one. So at several points in the game I found myself wishing the developers would’ve just left the platforming out of the game and just focused on everything else.

So each world has a different theme, like you have your basic forest, tropical jungle, things like that. The main area of the game is Mr. Stitches castle, it functions as a hub where you access the other zones. There’s a bustle of other minions walking around like employees, and chatting with them usually has a lot of funny jokes revolving around workplace humor. Mr. Stitches himself does a lot of jerk-manager humor, like eliminating Taco Tuesday for the minions, eliminating pay, things like that. His delivery of these things reminds me a little of Michael Scott or Dwight Schrute so he’s really entertaining. The rest of the cast is alright, but you can tell the most creative writing went to him and they really had fun with it. The game also has a very self-aware sense of humor so it’ll poke fun at itself for using pretty generic RPG tropes as the game progresses. Like there’s a couple mini games you’ll have to play and the characters openly complain about them.

So the game has a lot of charm to it but for me it fizzled out after a few hours and didn’t really regain much of my interest other than seeing what funny dialogue was going to come up next.

The combat is semi-turn based. If you’ve played the more classic Final Fantasy titles, it’s basically the ATB gauge used in those but it’s a lot slower. Basically you’ve got your choices of different attacks and you can freely dodge and defend whenever you like, though swinging your weapon or successfully dodging or blocking will use up stamina, and how slow that refills is what makes the fight move at a surprisingly slow pace. Actually defeating enemies and surviving the fights themselves reminded me a lot more of Super Mario RPG or the Paper Mario games. You have to learn the attack patterns of the enemies so you’ll know how to properly block and dodge them, and doing so will reward you with stamina boosts that will let you attack more often. Dodging poorly means you’ll get hit more, which means you’ll have less opportunities to fight back, and I promise you that lack of momentum will make the fight a frustrating grind.

Speaking of grinding, there is none. When you defeat an enemy, it’s gone. No respawns, no matter if you exit the zone or go back to HQ and then revisit the area. As someone who actually kinda likes the grind, I really wanted more time to learn the enemies. Granted there isn’t a ton of enemy variety and the color changes in between them mean only slight differences in their patterns, but I did want extra practice.

The boss fights are different because they’re split up into phases. There’s a phase of dodging attacks, then the boss makes themselves vulnerable, then you can let loose and then wait for the next dodging phase to begin. They do admittedly feel a little gimmicky, but then in a way, that’s every fight in this game. Every enemy has a gimmick or tell that you need to learn.

So the game has a lot of charm to it but for me it fizzled out after a few hours and didn’t really regain much of my interest other than seeing what funny dialogue was going to come up next. Had the fights gone at a faster pace I would’ve had more fun and given it a higher score. It’s not a bad game, it just needed some refining.