The Land Beneath Us

Fun game, simple to pick up but hard to master. Great aesthetic with a very cool branching story. Mechanics are clean and simple.
Only major downsides at the moment are the inability to save mid run, given they are fairly short so not a huge deal but very annoying, and that tracking your ascension style difficulty is tough as there is no real indicator for what moon levels you have completed.
(And possibly the inability to see multiple endings without starting a complete new save file? Not sure about that one as there is still some end game content for me to go through.)

Seems once you farm enough of moon to get a single extra boss soul than you can face Arwyn / see the branching stories without making a new save. Rather un-intutive, but at least its there. (Facing him randomly in moon quests will NOT complete the quests)
Great game, needs some QOL adjustments to address the above issues, but otherwise highly recommend.

I really like the *idea* of this game, but unfortunately I have a hard time recommending it because I feel like too much of its design is in conflict with itself. It's comprised of several different conceptually interesting directional/positioning systems, but at least in my opinion, they don't work in concert the way a good, high-intentionality design ought to.
Too often you're making choices, where you might, say, pick a weapon with a knockback or teleport effect, thinking "this will buy me out of a pinch", but then you're thrust into a situation where it's the correct context in every way except the direction you're after. The teleport is a nice pressure release valve, though I think it would be better if it was tied to a certain amount of kills rather than a cooldown. Between that and contriving the correct contexts to use your weapons in ways that are beneficial, you spend a lot of this game moving around and jockeying for positioning in a way that, unfortunately, feels degenerate, but also isn't at all disincentivized by the design. Restart scumming for a good initial item selection also isn't disincentivized by the design, but the player also isn't given a "quick restart" button, leaving the game caught between two designs it doesn't want to commit to either of.
Chips are unfortunately what broke me. The above would be a tolerable, if-slightly-messy combination of factors, but chips, while a fundamentally conceptually interesting idea, all require too much commitment and too specific a context to meaningfully use unless you're wasting a bunch of time to contrive a use for them, and in that time you could have just been positioning to win the fight in a contemporary way instead, and likely gotten along much quicker too.
Basically, between the fact that weapons are locked to a direction that more often than not sticks you in contexts where the proper use of your items can't be brought to bear as well as the chip system totaling out to something you'll likely only ever use accidentally (doubly annoying because the game pauses for about 2 seconds when it happens, throwing off your flow), this ultimately feels like a game where, in spite of technically having design intentionality (e.g. you could sit down and math out your paths), doing so involves sliding-car-puzzling several factors that are all at odds with each other, and are ultimately too intellectually-fatiguing to want to do, which forces you to think degenerately and in generalities. Despite its pieces being designed with intentional play in mind, it leads to an almost abstract kind of randomness - not true RNG, but the same to the player in de facto terms, where you're never using your tools purposefully, because doing so is neither intuitive nor straightforward in its planning.
Further, any game that has upgrades or abilities that say "using this will change the plot/ending" forces anyone with any kind of completionist tendency to immediately swear off entire swaths of the game, basically being forced to choose between having more fun versus seeing more of the game. It's very sour to have things I want to use dangled in front of me, but when I reach for them, a finger wags at me and says "tut tut tut, having fun is a fail state!" It wasn't enjoyable in Dishonored, Deus Ex, or MGS. When a game makes you feel punished for engaging with more of it in a more complex way, I believe everyone loses.
There *is* a version of this design that works somewhere, somehow, and I encourage the developers to keep trying to find it, this thing has bones.
Also, I hate being mean, but I'm sorry, I just don't care for the dialogue, it's just a little *too* post-ironic. Main PC is just a slightly-more evil Grok, it speaks trendily and has a slightly-inverted moral compass, and even though I think I understand what they're going for and "get it", that doesn't mean I enjoy it. Sven is okay, though.
EDIT: I want to thank the developers for their incredibly professional and kind response, and explanation about the features I hadn't yet seen. I like most of it, though regarding chip lock - I did see that, but as far as I can tell, I don't really *gain* anything by locking a chip, so even only occasionally using it in the correct way by accident is still better than not using it at all.
Nevertheless, I'm changing this review to positive for the time being, at least until I get a chance to fairly reappraise the game in light of the developer feedback. It really goes to show how tough design is, though, because while there is sincere value in inconvenience due to the catharsis brought about by mitigating it, everyone has their own bouncing off point. I don't know what the solution to that might be, but nevertheless, I hope you guys can end up where you want to be with it.

Just wrapped up my 30+ hour journey with The Land Beneath Us, and what a ride it has been!
The core mechanic is deceptively simple, but it forces you into deep-thinking sessions that are incredibly rewarding. The weapon variety is a standout feature—switching between melee and ranged options keeps every run fresh and exciting.
For the completionists out there, the achievements are very straightforward and satisfying to collect. If you’re looking for a challenge, the level modifiers (especially the 'Blood Moon' highest ascension) will absolutely test your limits. Ironically, I found the journey through the 'mobs' much more grueling than the final boss—perhaps I ended up a bit too OP by the end! haha.
The audiovisual experience is top-notch. The SFX and VFX for elemental effects like explosions, lightning, and burn are immensely satisfying. Huge thanks to the dev team for crafting such a polished experience!

UPDATE 2/9/2026: I stepped away from this game for a time, and came back on a whim to find this response from you guys as well as an update that significantly decreased the required amount of counters for achievements, as well as overall making some of the more grindy achievements less grindy and more fun. Suffice to say I am blown away by the devs' attention to their game, and have updated my review to match. Fantastic game that has resolved the only gripe I had with it.

I found this to be a very refreshing variation of the rougelike genre. I feel like most games are about kiting and quick decisions, whereas this allows for more well thought out strategies and slower pacing to play exactly how you intend. Because of the grid system there were really cool weapon abilities. The chip system was a nice addition to reward well thought out movements. I do feel like the power creep came a little too fast and the game became fairly trivial pretty fast with the exception of 1 or 2 levels. Though I didn't feel like the levels were hard, rather the mechanics required certain builds that relied heavily on RNG, which wasn't my favorite part. Overall, I thought it was a great game and have recommended to folks IRL.

I really wish there was "maybe" option for recommendations. If you're looking for ~10 hours of a neat twist on the tactical roguelite formula, this is a good pick. If you're looking for layers of depth, look somewhere else.
I think the devs found a very cool premise -- tying each movement direction to a specific weapon -- and created 90% of a good game. Exploring the mechanics was fun initially, but it definitely got grindy and I have no desire to finish out the story line or come back to the game for casual runs.
Strengths:
- combat tied to movement is a cool gimmick, with important ramifications for planning
- weapon variety is strong
- adding the chip system (think spells based on movement pattern) alleviates some RNG from weapons
- boss mechanics are varied and make for some good puzzles
Weaknesses:
- the upgrade system being linked to finding duplicate weapons means that unlocking new weapons is actively bad for run progression
- in general, there's just too much meta-progression for my taste. After 30 hours, there were entire sections of upgrades that I hadn't even had the chance to progress and the game had already been grindy for 10 hours before I stopped playing.
- the chip system is not well balanced against weapon use. In later runs, I was basically able to ignore my weapons once I got a relic or two.
- the relic pool is very limited

super fun! not really a roguelike player, this is one of my first roguelikes, just saw the game years ago at a game convention and finally got it :) do give this game a try