Underworld Ascendant Pre-Alpha Gameplay Footage

As promised in the development update from a few days ago, the Adventurer and above-tier backers of Otherside Entertainment’s dungeon crawler Underworld Ascendant are now able to try out a Pre-Alpha build that lets them play through The Challenge of Ishtass, an early area in the game. And if you weren’t among those backers but still would like to know how the game looks like at this point, we have a couple of first impressions videos for you:

And now that you’ve had the chance to see the game in action, the backer FAQ talks about the purpose of this build:

The Pre-Alpha Build is meant to highlight:

• The game’s visual bar and core tenets of combat, stealth, and magic.
• The world as an interactive toybox full of interesting opportunities for the player to experiment with and areas that provide unique opportunities and challenges.
• Interactive elements that the player can combine with skills, spells, and each other, such as:
  • Physics-based traps that can be manipulated and exploited.
  • Spreading fire that can be weaponized.
  • Caches of useful items.
  • “Glue bulbs” that can stick to objects.
• An initial implementation of rewarding the player for creativity.

The Pre-Alpha Build is not representative of the final product.

• The implementation of skills, combat, stealth, and spells is all still preliminary work. We will be refining and honing how they work, adding functionality, and polishing usability.
• You may encounter bugs and it lacks the full range of weapons, skills, magic, and meta elements such as quest selection and player growth.

A few things to note:

• The implementation of skills, combat, stealth, and spells is all still preliminary work. We will be refining and honing how they work, adding functionality, and polishing usability.
• The method of acquiring skills in the Skill Shrine is not how player growth will function in the game. The current implementation acts as a shortcut for demo purposes, so players can quickly experiment with different skills and abilities. Spellcasting is similarly streamlined here and not indicative of how it will work in the game.
• Creature animations are not representative of the game’s visual target. This is an important area we feel deserving of concentrated effort and are focusing on it currently. Also, time spent on vfx and rendering optimization has been very limited.
• While the game supports both keyboard and controllers, some UI issues remain for the latter. Similarly, some loading screens may lag. Crashes may also occur.
• Deeper, darker sepulchral areas and fearsome dungeon creatures will be seen soon in upcoming updates.