Underhero by Paper Castle Games is a 2D side-scrolling game with RPG and platforming elements. You play as a nameless, masked minion to the kind of cartoony overlord boss most video games ask you to defeat. Underhero plays with and bucks familiar ideas of heroism and villainy, filtered through quirky dialogue, self-aware humor and adorably nostalgic pixel graphics.

That is the primary word I’d use for this game: it’s adorable. It’s cute. Our playable character is cute. The NPCs are cute. The landscapes are cute while being easily navigable, varied, and interesting. Underhero offers a visually fun, low-threshold game that’s easy to jump into, while also providing an engaging learning curve and a variety of tasks and challenges.

As I’ve said before and I’m sure you’ve gathered by now, I’m often drawn to a lot of darker media. I watch, read, play, and listen to a lot of content from the horror and thriller genres. Cuteness, isn’t something I come across a lot in my gaming repertoire, so I’ll often forget how much I like it. Underhero was a well-timed, well-placed reminder that I do (in fact) like things to be cute, quirky, and fun. When I say cute, though, I don’t use that to mean the game feels childish. As described on itch.io and Steam, Underhero follows a nameless, masked minion of the game’s main villain being sent on a villainous quest after the world’s hero has failed. Or does it?

Unbeknownst to the villain (Mr. Stitches) the Masked Kid you play as is an accidental overachiever who ends up secretly undermining Mr. Stitches’ villainous goals. He does this with the help of Elizabeth IV, the talking, magical sword hilt left behind by the Underhero world’s fallen hero. In the process, it jokes about corporate culture, silent protagonists, video game characters who are evil “just because they are” that exist solely to be killed by the hero, and more.

True enough, the jokes written into Underhero might not always land perfectly. Quirky humor can be an exercise in trial and error, and can more than anything be a demonstration that humor isn’t one-size-fits-all. That’s not a true fault of the game in my eyes, but I can see that some of the jokes that were funny to me might not be to other gamers and vice versa. In any case, though, even the comedy beats that didn’t immediately stick the landing grew on me as I progressed through the game.

Let’s move forward to the game mechanics. The platforming in Underhero is fairly standard and easy to get the hang of, offering smooth, fluid gameplay as you navigate a range of environments well-balanced between combat, puzzles, and exploration. The early tutorial segments of the game might feel a little cheesy or contrived. However, I would prefer this over being tossed in the deep end with few (or no) pointers about mastering the controls. Not least because of the learning curve when it comes to the combat mechanic of the game, which is neither wholly real-time, nor turn-based, but, as the game developer describes it, timing-based.

You are given opportunities to learn each of the aspects of combat, especially where it concerns reflexes, different weapons, and learning the patterns of the various enemies you will face. They give you these opportunities without the consequences of learning and failure being unduly punishing. I think this was absolutely the right choice on Underhero’s development end. These opportunities to scale the learning curve make it especially rewarding once you do get the hang of the mechanics. It becomes so rewarding because the checkpoints and save locations in the game are quite sparsely scattered.

This encourages thorough exploration to search for secrets. It also requires you to have a solid understanding of the combat systems, and requires that you make clever choices about which attributes to improve when you level up. All of these things are important so you can take full advantage of all that the game has to offer, without being sent back to a checkpoint rather far from where your playable character died.

The only real critique I have of this game is very small. In fact, it is set against how much I like this game, and all the positives it has to offer. Indeed, this issue only stumped me a small handful of times as I was playing, and the gameplay is overall very fluid. I ran into a little trouble in just a few places where the controls would get the tiniest bit buggy, usually when trying to look at certain maps of a given level that I had entered. However, the maps aren’t that important, as you can uncover the same information through thorough exploration, which the game encourages anyway.

In short: Underhero is fun. It’s cute. It’s low-threshold, self-aware, creative, visually and mechanically enjoyable. Although it may hit a few small bugs or snags, these don’t outweigh the positives by any means. I can confidently recommend giving it a shot.

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Underhero

14.99

8.5

Score

8.5/10

Pros

• Cute visual style
• Overall smooth gameplay
• Fun, rewarding combat mechanisms
• Engaging story

Cons

• Controls are sometimes a tiny bit buggy