Beneath puts you in the shoes (Or rather the suit) of a deep sea diver on an expedition to find a lost German submarine, only to have his crew — including his daughter — attacked by waterborne creatures while he is under the waves. You follow the journey of Noah Quinn as he attempts to save his daughter and unravel the mystery of the deep sea stations.
From the opening I didn’t really know what to expect from Beneath, within your first few encounters you’re being shot at by a military helicopter while blasting zombies and attempting to escape your overrun boat. It was definitely an action-packed opening, albeit with a few stiff models making it look a tad goofy.
After the events of your boat you awake in a mysterious facility with no idea where you are or what happened to your daughter you venture in to find answers. The facility in Beneath is actually quite creepy at first, with no weapons and a lot of locked doors you’re led down an odd set of paths to progress from finding security passes to crawling through vents; There are no easy, obvious options for progression.
After about thirty minutes you can clear the top floor, get a brief moment to check on our daughter — who is also in the station — and then the descent begins. I noticed on the second floor that it was very similar to the floor above with similar stations, doors, layout etc. It didn’t really matter too much because it was still quite early and this was actually a surprisingly linear experience with little exploration or side objectives outside of the odd safe or voice notes.
After I’d eventually found a pistol and some equipment the game really started to open up, albeit with a lot more vents and a lot more locked doors. Soldiers were introduced as enemies pretty fast which, in my opinion of similar games, felt a bit odd. Normally in these facilities everyone has died and you’re left combing through the debris and horrors of what remains, while in Beneath there is still an entire functioning security team packed with guns and numbers.
As you mow down the various security team members they drop a few more guns to add to your arsenal, submachine guns, shotguns, assault rifles, so much so that you’re pretty much ready to take on anything at an incredibly early stage. Further into the facility you can even find workbenches to further customise and change parts and skins on every weapon available — a nice addition.
The only caveat with having so many people alive in a facility and it still being very functional is that the horror aspects in those early moments became less scary and more ‘Garry’s Mod custom horror map’ vibes. With furniture randomly being flung about, corpses being dropped on you from nowhere, ghosts and enemies running from right to left in corridors just out of sight, it had all the tropes that you would see to the point where I ended up just pushing through these events when they happened.
There are a few features that do get added as you get deeper and deeper including a sanity effect that appears when facing certain lovecraftian horrors and can affect you in a few different ways which makes them much more of a priority to take out if you can. Eventually you do start to see some more horror-themed enemies but by the time you do, you can mostly breeze through them with your half upgraded MP5 and shotgun leaving no real threat.
Beneath suffers from being terminally connected within its levels, it feels as if I am spending most of my time getting from room to room in the strangest ways possible and I have never had to crawl through so many vents, open as many locked doors or find as many key codes for mainstream progression in any other game that I’ve played. It really breaks a lot of the tension and build up between spaces and combat.
There was one point where I needed to retrieve an item from a locked room, the answer was of course to go to a nearby room and crawl slowly through a very long vent. When arriving in the room I assumed the door would just open and I could go back into the hallway but no, unfortunately it’s back into the vent to loop back into the room I was just next to making a simple puzzle ridiculously long winded.
I think Beneath has some great ideas and the setting beneath the ocean is perfect for its mystical Cthulhu horror setting, however this is marred by having a lot of reused assets such as the doors. However, even some of the locations and simple puzzles feel repetitive, and as soon as any game (let alone an action one) has that feeling, something is wrong.
If you’d like to take a look at a similar game with less horror and more tech set above the waves rather than below it, then be sure to check out The Last Caretaker where you also venture from facility to facility but instead to help rebuild humanity.
Beneath is available now for PC.
