Underhero - Why is no one talking about it?

Games Video Games
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I started playing Underhero over the weekend, a game that came out about a month ago, and I haven’t seen anyone talking about it anywhere. Which is really surprising to me because it’s super good. But when I google it there are no reviews for anything even remotely mainstream coming up, or even really any announcements. So I was hoping I could send a little love their way.

I heard about the game from a game design video from Snowman Gaming on Youtube about why Super Paper Mario and Color Splash don’t succeed as Paper Mario sequels. At the end of the video, Snowman shouts out Underhero as a new game that cites the Paper Mario franchise as a direct inspiration. I thought it was interesting and decided to check it out.

In the game, you play as one of the dark lord’s minions who ends up becoming the chosen hero. This mostly leads to some fun dialogue where you are able to interact with the monsters as “colleagues” (the game frames working for the dark lord as a almost a stereotypical office job). This isn’t really new, and it’s limited mostly to framing and dialogue. You still end up having to fight all of the monsters, but something cool is that you are able to talk to them before fights, and you can even bribe them if you aren’t feeling up to a battle.

Fights are interesting in that they are a combination between turn based and real time. When you engage with an enemy, you can’t run around (except boss fights which are pretty cool). But you have a recharging action gauge that you use to perform attack whenever you want. You can also jump or duck to dodge attacks, or parry with a shield. There’s also bonus damage if you time attacks to the music. This ends up being a really cool combination of the mario rpg mechanics with a final fantasy active time battle system sort of thing.

If you’re into the Mario RPGs at all you need to check it out. . Buy from Itch as Patrick pointed out in his article today.

Anyway, if you’ve played the game and have thoughts, I’d like to know what you think since I’m not seeing much about it online.

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Oh man, I was thinking recently how I wish for games where you play as a bad guy’s minion, I need to check it out.

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This sounds like something I’d like to try!!

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Probably because its a 2D retroish action platformer, which is the saturated indie genre of the moment, that came out on kind of the tail end of a glut of releases for that style of game. Couple that with the fact that it isn’t out on any console, and i’m not shocked it hasn’t received that much attention.

Is it good? I’m sure it is. I do remember Jim Sterling put a video on it out and liked it well enough.

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Fair enough. I’ll concede that the trailers aren’t that impressive. I was on the fence because looking at screenshots it looked like everything was dark and underground. But I was impressed once I started playing.

For people reading this, it does have platformer elements/look, but it doesn’t play that way much.