Dwarves and Roguelikes Are a Pretty Great Combo
What happens to indie games that fail to meet their Kickstarter goals? Well, it depends on the game, but Below the Stone–an indie roguelike focused on dwarves venturing into a resource-rich but deadly underground world–has bounced back from this loss even stronger by partnering with Apogee Entertainment. Very fitting for a roguelike title.
In Below the Stone, players take on the role of an apprentice dwarf yearning to make a mark on dwarven history through the time-honored tradition of going down into an inhospitable underground environment and gathering shiny things. You’ll discover a hidden world filled with more than 50 different biomes, each of which contains unique procedural generation and a ton of resources to gather and monsters to fight.
Below the Stone features hand-drawn pixel art, top-down combat, and fully destructible grid-based environments filled with all sorts of resources to collect. Gathering up these resources will help you craft items, complete quests, and upgrade all of your fancy weapons and tools, but be careful–if you die, all your stuff will be lost forever.
As you dig deeper and deeper, you’ll discover more valuable resources to mine and more dangerous monsters, both dwarf-sized and absolutely enormous, to battle, but you’ll also face down environmental hazards and tidbits of lore. Exploring the subterranean world will give you an opportunity to piece together the story of a mysterious place never explored by man. The game’s site doesn’t say whether other dwarves have reached down there before, though.
Below the Stone is a slick, retro-style roguelike featuring hundreds of items, a ton of unique biomes, procedural generation, and possibly the best base premise for a game about dwarves ever. And it’s coming back to Kickstarter soon with high hopes of a 2022 release. Sounds like a good time to us.
Below the Stone will be available for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC in 2022.
What’s your favorite game about dwarves? Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter and Facebook.