UnderDread is an atmospheric, indie adventure horror, puzzle game developed by BigZur Games. I was given a free Steam review key to write this article and share my thoughts about the game.

The Story
I’m going to first start with the story, which I feel is the highlight to this game. UnderDread is set during the 18th century, and a lot of the scenery reflects this in game. You play what appears to be a nameless traveler with his daughter (Who I named Barnaby and his daughter Skye in my headcanon, so I’m just going to call them that in this review), who are on a long journey by carriage. They never go in detail, but I assume they may be on their way home. The father and daughter pair happen to come across a small village, and they decide to stay in the inn for the night to rest.

However, upon waking up, Barnaby discovers that his daughter has gone missing. He searches the town high and low for her but finds no answers. And that is when the stories and rumors come out about a madman that lives in the nearby castle that has been taking children, monsters that lurk in the night, and a determined Detective that has gone before you to go and rescue the kidnapped people.

With hope that his daughter is alive, Barnaby ventures into the castle on the heels of the detective to see what he can find. That is the gist of it anyways. I will get to the gameplay in a bit, but I just want to say that I played nearly 10 hours of this game and nearly reached the end purely to collect all of the notes and journal pages to learn the backstory.

As you venture through the castle you will find lost pages from the Detective’s journal as he keeps account of everything that has happened in the town, and his journey through the castle to find the lost children. On top of this, you will also find notes and clues from a madman, as well as notes from one of the castle owners that goes in quite a bit of detail about everything that was happening in the village several years before Barnaby’s journey started. Using the past clues and information, you can start to piece the story together and learn what is really going on.

The Journal pages are written in a way that looks like it was done by hand, helping with the storytelling element and immersion, because it literally looks like journal pages. The only downside to this is sometimes certain letters are a bit tricky to read, so there were a few times I misinterpreted a sentence or two since the ink letters were difficult to decipher.

This may be a small spoiler, but I think it is important to tell that this is not a new game, it originally came out a few years ago under the title of Slender Man Origins 2 Saga for mobile devices, but was recently ported over to PC on March 1st, 2016. So all of those journal entries you find are telling the story of some of the very first sightings of Slender Man, and the affects it had on several generations of people living in the area. Some speculate that due to copyright reasons the developers had to change the name, but regardless of the reasons, I found the story to be interesting.

In between levels there are drawn sketches and voice narrated cutscenes to help transition each level to the next area. There are four levels in the game, but each one is quite long with a unique theme to them, which now brings us to gameplay.

Gameplay and Controls

You move around using the WASD controls, the J key is to read journal entries, G is to use a special magical guard spell to scare away evil, while F is used for hints to get a clue on how to solve a specific puzzle. You can also use the Shift key to sprint and travel faster, which will drain your energy bar. Without energy you obviously can’t run around as fast, and you will have to wait for it to slowly recharge.

You can use the left mouse button to interact with the world and pick things up, ranging from opening doors, to cupboards, to desk drawers. I do wish that with a few of the items there was a bit of feedback for what you could or couldn’t interact with, such as “I don’t need this item” Or “It’s just an old book; nothing important”, or maybe “This looks interesting, but I don’t think I need it now”, so that the player’s guess clicks would have a bit of meaning and give you clues for what was important from what wasn’t.

The right mouse button raises your lantern up higher so that you can see better- I’ll tell more about this in a bit. Last but not least, you can use the CTRL or C button to crouch and sneak around, which will also put your lantern out so that you can’t be seen by the various monsters that lurk about. I won’t go in detail because part of the fun is discovering what lurks in the shadows.

The scrolls, coins, and certain other items are randomly placed in the stage when you start, so finding all of the journal pages can be tricky because they are normally not in the same place twice… unless of course they are. This was a little confusing at the start of the game when I didn’t realize the scrolls were random, and yet somehow a new scroll appeared after going back the way I came. it left me thinking “If I just came from this way, how did a new scroll end up here?”, but after I understood how it worked, it didn’t bother me too much. In fact, you may need to play the game multiple times to collect them all.

One of the first monsters you will come across will be a floating super-skeleton, which I believe the game calls “The Wailing Undead”, but I named her Betty Bones. You’ve probably seen it in the many promotional pictures and in the gameplay trailer. The monsters will travel around the area following a pattern, sometimes the pattern is easy to figure out, other times it is borderline on being random, which can create some true horror movie moments as you run down a long dark hallway and come face to face with a dead end. There are special areas and pillars that you can hide behind so that you can’t be seen, and if done correctly the monsters will pass right by you, if not, it will lead to your death.

I had a few moments where I huddled into a corner with my lantern off, and the monster literally followed me down the long dark tunnel and was inches from my face, and for some reason turned around and went back without killing me. That was probably one of the scariest moments I had in the game because I wasn’t in a proper hiding place, and technically speaking, the monster should have killed me based on the game’s rules for hiding, and yet it didn’t see me and turned around.

There are often times various puzzles you need to solve in order to move forward, ranging from switch puzzles, to finding specific items, to rearranging items to form a pattern so that you can move through a blocked area. This can be quite complex, because majority of the time you will be solving these puzzles under stress while you try to also juggle hiding from the monsters without being seen. You can also use your lantern to see better, by raising it up or down so that you can see a shelf clearly or find an item you may have overlooked. Which now brings us to the visual appearance of UnderDread.

Graphics, Special Effects and Sound
Graphically, for a mobile title I think this game would have blew a lot of people’s minds. For PC, the graphics reminds me a bit of The Elder Scrolls Oblivion. The lighting effects is one of the main elements of UnderDread, you will use your lantern not only to light your way through the various dark tunnels and corridors, but to look around as well to get a better closer look at your surroundings to find items or clues to help you on your quest.

The lighting effects aren’t perfect, but it does stretch and distort the shadows based on the location of the light source, which can create some really interesting shadows on the walls and environment. There were a few times I spooked myself by casting a large shadow on the wall, only to realize it was the stretched out shadow of a plate of bread. Most of the monsters in game have some type of supernatural light that radiates from them, so you can use the bending shadows and stretching rays of light as reference to determine how close a threat is as it lurks through the dark halls.

As for sound effects, I like the music and it helps set the horror tone for the game. Majority of the monsters make some type of noise to alert you to their presence. At the beginning of the game the developers recommend playing with headphones for the best experience, and I admit that it does help using the Stereo sound to determine the location of nearby threats, but the audio doesn’t appear to be high quality surround sound, so it is sometimes a bit difficult to gauge how close an enemy is. The Wailing Undead skeleton sounds like some type of strange horn trumpet creature, which started off sounding scary, but eventually just became annoying.

(Lighting and texture glitch. I believe this problem was recently patched)

Problems With UnderDread
The first problem is the jump scares. My goodness does this game have a lot of cheap jump scare moments just to try and spook you. You’ll open a cupboard and sometimes a thing will pop out to scare you, or there will be a random floating eye watching you as you turn around to look behind you. There is also a jump scare cue sound that plays when it happens to reinforce the scary-factor. I can imagine certain YouTubers loving this and playing this game on their channel and gaining a few subscribers from it, but I personally don’t like games that rely on jump scares to… well, scare you.

UnderDread also has a few glitches. As Barnaby examined the treasure chest to look for his daughter, he opened the lid. The chest briskly touched his toes as it swung upwards towards the caverns ceiling, lightly lifting him up off of his feet with it. Barnaby was soon startled as he was launched into the air, and then fell through the caverns floor without warning; falling into an endless dark abyss, for all of time.

This actually happened to me several times, and the only way to fix the problem is to quit the stage and restart from your last checkpoint. This can be very frustrating if you are running through a tunnel a few feet away from your next checkpoint, but you stop to search that pile of nearby treasure chests, only to be launched out of the stage by opening a box.

The last and most frustrating problem with UnderDread is actually a core gameplay mechanic, which also makes this the biggest problem with the game. The backtracking. My goodness is this annoying. See that unique looking potion there? Well, you can’t take it now because it isn’t important to the story, so even though your instincts are telling you to take it, you’ll have to leave it behind. So, you move on and solve the current puzzle. But wait! Just a few steps forward and you are now blocked by another puzzle.

Remember those items you left behind? Well, you have to go and collect them all now. So you solve that puzzle and move on to the next one. But wait, again! There is another puzzle blocking your path that you need to solve, and you know those items even farther back than the last ones? You have to go get them too!

The constant backtracking made playing UnderDread extremely tedious, especially with the monsters lurking around, because if you happen to die, you will have to restart the puzzles all over again. Majority of the gameplay sessions I watched online got stuck on a certain Acid potion puzzle, and almost all of the playthroughs stopped at the halfway point in the game out of frustration.

Overall Thoughts
Does it feel like a mobile game? Actually, not really. After you get into the game and make it passed the tutorial and really start playing, it doesn’t feel like a mobile title at all. UnderDread’s story is really what carries the game. If you find the journal entries to be interesting then you will more than likely become obsessed with finding them all to learn what is going on, and I thought the story was brilliant because that is literally what drove one of the characters mad attempting to do the same thing.

I, however, did not collect all of the story notes so I don’t know how it ends, and I also wasn’t able to finish the game. Not because I gave up and I found the game to be frustrating or boring, but because I came across yet another puzzle-or perhaps a glitch, that I simply could not solve near the end of the game, and so, Barnaby was left trapped in a tiny room with dead bodies and no food, with no way to get out, because I had no way of solving the puzzle. Even the button to get a clue did not help, and appeared to be glitched as it told me to move to an area that I couldn’t access.

Overall, I am confused as to what to think about UnderDread. On one hand, the game does have quite a few genuine scary moments where my heart was beating and my breathing increased as panic began to set in. I love the story and the way that it was written; it felt like they were real people writing in their journal. I also liked how a few of the puzzles were talked about in the journal, but the writer found another way around, or left a new clue behind to help someone  else to solve it (meaning, you).

But on the other hand, UnderDread can be a tedious, frustrating, glitchy mess that will drive you to the brink of insanity with its bugs and frequent backtracking. And the Jump scares start off as being scary but quickly become an annoyance as you began to progress to the middle and end part of the game.

So if I had to rate UnderDread, I would put it at a generous 6 out of 10. If they make another sequel and have you progress forward more than backwards, have a few less jump scares, and fix the bugs (they did release a recent patch to address a few bugs), then I think the game would be a lot better. If you are a fan of horror games and you want to play it because you truly enjoy them, purchase UnderDread at your own risk. Otherwise, I think majority of people that play this will find it to be a bit tedious.

UPDATE 3/17/16: Just posting an update to say that the developers have been reading through the forums and have been fixing a lot of the bugs mentioned above and talking with the community about the current state of the game to correct those errors. So for that, I applaud them for their efforts.

For further information you can visit the official website, as well as the Steam Store page for additional details. UnderDread can be purchased for $9.99 from the Steam store.