Couldn’t be more transparently Hades if it tried - which isn’t really a problem! Like Sable, it’s good to see developers look up to a bigger creator and climb on their shoulders by Outsourcing and Delegating lengthy Requirements-Gathering Sessions to an organisation with more Man-Months and Human Resources in their Capacity Metrics. If something isn’t a Blocked Sev-1, don’t waste your studio’s Squad-Tribe Story Points on Agile Epic-Sprints that Create Redundant Value for The Stakeholders - right, @Everyone? (3 👍 Reacts!)

There isn’t too much to say about the gameplay here otherwise - it is essentially just a kinda slower, chunkier Hades combat/rogue-upgrade system, with the same conversation/mentoring mechanic thrown in there for good measure; pick the character you think is funniest/cutest, do some microquests for them, unlock more dialogue about apps and watch your character numbers go up on the (very well-realised) Fake Microsoft Teams UI. Simple! Throw in a bite-sized take on Breath of the Wild’s weapon comparison/durability system, and you more or less have the depth and breadth of the entire product. It feels bad to reduce games down to the composite parts of other games they were inspired by, but I guess that’s what happens when you use two of the biggest games in recent years as a template and don't much care to hide it. The gameplay is a fittingly disposable vehicle here that's mostly used to drive a sprawling high-level metaphor that the developers wanted to explore. That's cool by me!

In a lot of ways, Going Under is a perfect fit for Xbox Game Pass. I can’t imagine it on the more abstract, leisure-focused interfaces of the Switch and PS4/5. A flat-design dungeon-crawler where you explore failed startups with the help of powerups named after agile workflow concepts is so, so at home on a Microsoft desktop or games console OS that uses a thinly-veiled Windows 10. Even pressing the Home button here won’t let you escape from the pervasive sense that your sortof-9 to sortof-5 job has crept out of its WFH enclosure and forced its way to your living room. Notifications off please!! Primary-coloured tiles, kindergarten loading animations and blank-smiling stickpeople as far as the eye can see; this truly is how it feels to be on the "bad" type of computer.

… Which is ultimately what lead to me putting this down after a few days. I play video games to relax and think about things other than work, and Going Under is a really good recreation of modern desk-work, to Aggro Crab’s credit. I gotta "take it offline", to use the parlance of Slack and Outlook. I’m a software engineer who’s mostly most specced for the Corpo questline rather than the Start-Up one, but one thing this game wisely understands is that there is really only one white-collar monoculture nowadays - with big banks and telcos and B2B specialists permitting Pizza Fridays, Socks With Sandals Sundays and Meditation App Download Code Mondays, they’re really no different than the startups who serve as speculative fishtanks and talent pipelines for corporations to inevitably subsume. I’ve seen it so many times in reality, and I presume this game’s developers have too - such is the light-hearted depth of their observations on the culture.

The characters and dungeons are well-realised, and I'm glad that Aggro Crab mercifully open up almost all of the content right away - it's almost as if they knew that a lot of players wouldn't survive the crushing dread that the game's atmosphere creates early on; those of us who get a migraine from just typing "Linkedin.com" into our browser window just wanna play a few hours to see the jokes and blunt metaphors and it's cool that the game lets you beat up crypto miners and horny ""sex-positive"" Tinder bros almost right from the start. The cryptocurrency dungeon is particularly well-realised, and the gimmick of that world's shopkeeper being a dude with two identities who tries to build a pyramid scheme via the fiat and virtual currency markets simultaneously is nothing short of a genius bit of Video Game Thematics. Unlike Hades, all the main characters are available to chat up right from the start, and they're all genuinely compelling - as a developer who doesn’t truly trust any machine more complex than a typewriter, Kara is easily my favourite person in this, and maybe one of my fave characters of the year - I never imagined Disco Elysium’s Soona would have a rival for the title of “best cynical lead programmer in a video game” this soon, but hey! Here we are! Lotta cynical programmers out there! Maybe I'll come back to this game one day just to see where the Kara character-line goes.

Can you believe Microsoft are promoting this on their subscription service, though? That's crazy! It feels like quite a pointed attack on modern office culture that they helped create. I guess the implication here is that M$ know that we all hate seeing cute little flat "oopsie!!" stickmen when their SaaS platform goes down right before an important meeting, and ultimately don't care because none of us can do anything about it beyond buiding entire video games to gripe about it. Or maybe Microsoft are already planning their next move beyond all this, and wanna start scorching their digital earth? What will the corpos move to once our workplace culture reaches a critical mass of thinkpieces about mono-colour flat visuals and Yasss Qween interface design and they're forced to Shift The Paradigm again? I dread to think what Going Under 2: Initial Public Offering will look like...

(Additional special shoutouts to an OST that deftly toes the line between "non-descript happy-pop for your company's cutesy-cartoon tutorial on the pitfalls of sexual harassment and bribery" and "lo-fi citypop beats for doing spreadsheets". Check out "first date" by feasley! Very cute that you can just sit at a desk and listen to it on a wee Spotify-like interface. Talk about gamefeel!)