Everyone's talking about Queen's Domain right now, but as someone who tried Queen's Domain and did not care for it, allow me to direct your attention to an alternative old-school dungeon crawler: Underkeep, which launched on Steam on November 5 and has been absolutely phenomenal through the roughly four hours I've put into it so far.

Like Queen's Domain, Underkeep is firmly rooted in the 1990s, but I'm talkin' the early '90s, and even before that: Classic grid-based RPGs like The Bard's Tale, Dungeon Master, Wizardry, and Eye of the Beholder. In fact, as someone who loves Eye of the Beholder (specifically the second one, The Legend of Darkmoon), I noticed a lot of nearly direct lifts from that series: primarily visual, but also a few audio cues, that I swear I've heard before.

But my concerns that Underkeep might be a low-effort knockoff evaporated pretty quickly. After four hours of play I feel like I've barely scratched the game's surface: I still haven't found the titular village of Underkeep, where I assume the real action will begin, but I've crashed (literally, in a few cases) through multiple dungeons, all interconnected horizontally or vertically, and explored an overworld that's a whole lot bigger than I expected. At the very least, Underkeep looks beefy.

Underkeep's gameplay preserves the vibe of those old-time RPGs while eliminating most of their more objectionable nonsense. ), and tools are used automatically without needing to be equipped.

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