Under The Island – PS5 Review

Under The Island from four-man dev team Slime King Games and publisher Top Hat Games is a fun pixel art island-based romp where you play as  Mia, the daughter of a family on vacation. The island in question is peppered with caves and ancient ruins, the mystery of which aren’t entirely clear to start with. Best described as a modern take on Link To The Past combined with Link’s Awakening, the debt to Nintendo’s superlative Legend of Zelda games on SNES and Game Boy is obvious. This is also similar to Kiwi game Reverie, that we weren’t able to review at the time due to not having access to a working Vita at the time.

Slime King Games appears to be something of a family affair with Hamburg-based lead programmer Johannes Grünewald and Schmoe Draws aka Simone Grünewald producing art, alongside @soundforest1 on sound duties and @esoundsignal doing a great job with music. The fact that this is, in effect, a four person development team is quite something. We guess Under The Island has been in development a fair time as it’s very well crafted. There’s a surfeit of secrets hidden throughout and while you might tear through the storyline in double quick time, you’ll barely have scratched the surface.

Upon exploring Koala Village you’ll happen upon a shrine that you’re specifically told not to touch. Of course, you touch it and find yourself falling into a subterranean grotto. After a little plot exposition, you’re tasked with finding four ancient cogs that will stop the island sinking beneath the waves.

In the grand tradition of the Zelda games, you’re left to search for them in a quest that covers multiple areas across the island. It’s all very well done and in a nice departure from the tropes of the genre, not all the cogs are found in a straight dungeon encounter. We’ll spare you the details lest we spoil the surprise.

You’ll be limited to the initial areas by your toolset as is the norm in games of this sort or any number of Metroidvanias, the initial barrier being bombable cave entrances and giant rocks, that you guessed it, are soon accessible once you’ve retrieved the means to do so. Subsequent barriers are tackled in a similar manner with a dripfeed of new items that open up new areas accordingly.

It’s predictable but well done. The music, as mentioned is very evocative of the genre,  not quite up to the level of say, Chicory in terms of memorability, but it’s still good. Graphically everything is on point too, with everything depicted in the classic Nintendo SNES era style beloved by many, ourselves included. We see why many devs opt for the classic 16 bit look rather than the early Playstation era look, as barring the likes of Wipeout 2097, most of that era looks awful now.

Gameplay is responsive, but taxing this isn’t. The only real roadblocks you’ll generally face are those of navigation and the occasional brainteaser. The occasional dungeon bosses are generally straightforward and if you have to retry, even then it’s not massively hard going. The final endgame boss makes for slightly tougher sledding, but once you’re as tooled up as we were at the end, you’ll probably be OK. The main issue we had was working out the attack patterns and how to exploit the obvious weak spots. A handy extra weapon we got also made light work of an otherwise troublesome first phase.

There’s secrets aplenty as well as collectibles. Just like its inspiration, you can increase your health by finding heart fragments. Four gives you an extra heart container and handily there’s a surplus of them so you’ll likely find more than you need to max out your health meter. There’s also plenty of other collectibles and tasks to carry out besides the main storyline and there’ll be sure to keep you well occupied.

One thing that did strike us as odd, was that one task has you build a museum, a little like that you might find in the Animal Crossing series, but one is for completing the story. Only upon completion, you’re bumped back to the menu at the last save before you faced the boss. We suspect that some collectibles are gated and a bug is affecting completion of everything that Under The Island has to offer. Hopefully a patch is forthcoming anyway.

As well as collectibles in the conventional sense, you can also pick up items that let you upgrade your hockey stick aka your primary weapon. It starts out with basic functionality that barely deals with enemies but once you’re fully upgraded, all but the biggest enemies will be dispatched with ease. You can also fish with a rather unconventional method, but we’ll spare you the details.

We could ramble on even longer about Under The Island, but it’s best left for you, the player, discover. Get to it and enjoy it as much as we did. There’s a lot to do and with crossbuy on PS4/PS5 you can even double dip if you so wish. Yes, the platinum might take a while to get, but when the game is fun like this, you’ll not bemoan it. The only chore we foresee is the 8-bit style snowboarding minigame that you have to beat inside a tight time limit with iffy controls.

In conclusion, Under The Island is a canny Zelda-a-like with a nice batch of collectibles and only a few issues that we hope will be worked out by a forthcoming patch. The crossbuy is a bonus and the gently challenging gameplay is also a plus. The world is well realised and the occasional pathfinding issues are only minor quibbles. The collectibles are a little tougher to unearth, but they’ll no doubt be mapped by the usual YouTube guides before you know it. You’ll still enjoy it as we did, despite the few issues.