You begin Going Under at the very bottom of the business ladder. As new intern Jackie, you arrive at Fizzle and are immediately tasked with the most entry-level of tasks: scouring the decayed offices of failed tech startups and defeating their monstrous inhabitants. Without any sort of budget for your task, you must make use of whatever you can find around the office. This translates into an incredibly satisfying Breath of the Wild-style combat system, where you’ll be constantly replacing your weapons as they break. Playing around with different combat styles depending on what appears during a given run is great fun. 

You can weaponize anything – computer monitors, tablet styluses, or even the anime body pillows you find in the ruins of a disastrous dating app startup. The combat itself is fast and fluid. It’s supported by a robust physics system and supplemented by numerous on-brand unlockable abilities. You find skills that you can eventually “endorse” in order to equip them at will, and you can complete quests for your coworkers to gain their “mentor” bonuses. I particularly enjoyed finding “apps”, which are limited use abilities with diverse effects: a coupon app will give you a temporary discount in dungeon shops, while a camera app will flash to stun enemies.

I should disclose that I’m currently researching digital business transformation as part of my studies, so the liberal use of nonsensical ‘agile’ jargon in Going Under’s corporate hellscape stabbed me in my core and twisted the knife. Scenes in between dungeon-crawling sessions have the entire floor of workers gathering for mandatory standup meetings where the relentlessly positive Project Manager adds to their workload, crushes their dreams, and makes them chant corporate slogans. The story unfolds gradually between runs and lets you get to know Jackie’s long-suffering coworkers.

Dungeons themselves are all based on failed startups, such as a temp service (where the workers are now monsters called “Joblins”) and a literal cryptocurrency (a crypt where skeletal workers mine for “Styxcoin”). It’s delightful, painful satire, and the way poor Jackie just puts up with it all while hoping for her marketing internship to finally begin is all too real. Going Under comes from a universe of innovative lunacy. Aggro Crab’s founders state that the title is “inspired by their college years living in a madhouse of startup bros” and this influence is skin-crawlingly omnipresent. I love hating it. It’s all presented in a colourful and simplistic artstyle that mimics the slick minimalism of modern tech design, with lashings of cartoonish charm.