Into the Unwell is a cooperative hack n’ slash roguelite where your characters – cartoonish yet barely upright lost souls, one and all – draw fighting prowess from their vices. My vice, it turns out, is booting sentient pizza slices off cliff edges. It certainly makes me feel better.
This game, the first from Swedish devs She Was Such a Good Horse, initially appears to have won a life peerage to the House of Edgelords, ironically pairing the wide-eyed visual style and bouncy ‘rubber hose’ movements of 1930s animation with grimly decaying battle arenas and a cast of substance abusers. Deep down, though, Into the Unwell’s desire for you to have a have a good time – specifically, a satisfying action romp through hordes of rampaging food – appears sincere, at least from the session I played in July.
Runs play out in mostly typical roguelite fashion, where after selecting your weapon – the swift strikes of the lollipop are fine, but I prefer the crushing blows of the giant ice cream – you batter your way through a series of arenas, earning upgrades along the way, before probably dying to a spongey boss. Power-ups aren’t delivered with Hades’ flair, but they’re generally quite meaty, and encourage playing around with an extensive status system based around afflictions and mood. Get yourself drunk, for instance, and your build might grant you bonuses to your anger and sadness stats, boosting damage and your energy for special attacks respectively.
Even the early, pre-boon fights can be a laugh, mind. For all the floppiness of the animation style, melee swings connect with hefty, weighty force, and you’re fast enough on your feet that dashing and dodging through crowds of enemy toothpaste tubes and hot dog cowboys can raise a smile by itself. Best of all is the kick, an energy-reliant but immensely gratifying shoe thwack that punts foes backwards and, if you get the angle right, out of the arena entirely. Building around getting sloshed? No sir, I am all about the kick. Give me more kicks. Lower cooldowns, energy efficiency, knockback distance, all of it. Give me the “Bicycle Kick” upgrade that literally chains a bicycle to my foot, for the joke as much as anything. Eventually I was fighting not to survive, but to hoof, tailoring my entire movement and fighting styles to maximise off-the-ledge opportunities.
In my defence, falling off things is as classic a cartoon demise as you can get, and it’s not the only animation convention that Into the Unwell has mined for giggles. Banana skins and bear traps often appear on the ground mid-fight, behaving exactly as you’d expect they would in a cartoon. And the sound effects could been yanked from the tape vaults of Walt Disney himself, all whomps, whistles, and the occasional shriek of kazoo. It’s not always ha-ha funny – not as much as the Bicycle Kick gag, anyway. But it is impressive how far She Was Such a Good Horse have gone with the early animation flavour, well beyond simply copying the wobbliness of the limbs.
It also deviates from the ‘room by room’ roguelite formula by sprinkling in brief platforming challenges, usually rewarding you with pills: Into the Unwell’s permanent upgrades, which can be arranged into a box back at the main hub for persistent health or mood buffs. These are usually hidden beneath or off to the side of arenas, easily missed if you’re merely charging through looking for pizza to kick. Finding and beating them therefore feels like uncovering a real secret – a smart use of the 3D space, and an opportunity missed by roguewhatevers that only employ their locations as backdrops to the combat.
In terms of its hitting, booting, and jumping, then, Into the Unwell is shaping up nicely, with a keen and genuine sense of merrymaking to balance the desolation. On that note, though, I would like to see the same amount of thought given to how Into the Unwell grapples with its darker themes. So far, what I’ve seen is neither reverent nor demeaning towards mental health issues: pills-as-powerups sounds crass out of context, but medication use is never demonised or discouraged, and I personally interpreted your obviously Satanic guide Dr Bubz as the kind of asshole who’d appear with a couch and clipboard because he’s an asshole, rather than as a criticism of actual therapists. It’s more that I’ve yet to see the game engage with the subject beyond surface-level thematic and visual inspiration.
I’d be happy to be proven wrong on this. I did only play for 45 minutes, and there’s no reason why a game can’t balance black comedy with well-crafted action while still having something to actually say about the blackness. No release date yet, but Into the Unwell already has a good short at the first two. Hopefully it can manage the third.
