The Underside is an exploration based action platformer in the vein of games like Castlevania, Metroid, and Cave Story.
Set on a flat planet, called The World, The Underside begins with the legend of the World’s creation at the hands of a figure known as the Almighty King. When evil overtakes the surface of the world, the Almighty King decides to start anew by flipping the flat World upside down, with the upper side of the World now becoming the neglected Underside, and the blank canvas on the under side of the World now becoming the Overside.
You play a character named Ip, who is thrust from the prosperous world of the Overside into the dark depths the Underside. All the while, the once-benevolent Almighty King is on the verge of destroying his creation. Throughout his adventure, Ip must find his way back to the Overside, and maybe prevent the World from being destroyed while he’s at it.
The game’s world, characters, plot threads, and dialogue are heavily inspired by Earthbound/Mother 2, and are quirky, whimsical, and sometimes a little strange.
The Underside has been under development since early 2005.
November 21st, 2015 at 9:23 pm
I found how to stop the tutorial crash thing. First, right click the startup icon and select properties. Then go to compatibility and switch it to windows 95 and run the game to the first save point. (level loads may take a long time) After that, switch the compatibility back to the latest version you have, and it should run fine afterwards.
November 24th, 2015 at 11:11 pm
I would defenitely be interested in supporting a Kickstarter for this. I hope Arthur Lee still checks these comments. This game blew me away when I played it, a true successor to Cave Story. Can someone get in contact with him?
December 15th, 2015 at 1:58 am
You can try his twitter (https://twitter.com/MrPodunkian), but even there his last post is from August. Sad as it is, I’d reckon this is vaporware now; if you’re a talented dev, you could take the project over and do a fanmake, or attempt to buy the rights and sell them to someone else. If you can track down Arthur yourself, you might have some luck (he lives in California), but otherwise…I wouldn’t get too optimistic. It’s a sad thing, the death of potential
April 19th, 2016 at 6:12 pm
I want to play but have windows 7
June 12th, 2016 at 11:02 pm
welp this project gonna have immense problems if it ever gets released cause of undertale D:
shame because i love basically everything arthur does
April 22nd, 2017 at 2:20 pm
Running the preview again on Win8 cause I miss it.
Probably the second best playformer of all time after WB3 imho. Anyhow, loading time (black screen after you enter a door) is very long. Any way to speed it up? Is there a newer, secreter alpha?
December 22nd, 2017 at 9:32 pm
We really should make a fan animation of this sometime.
June 16th, 2019 at 4:43 pm
Hello! Are you still working on this game? I really want to play it; It looks amazing!
Much love,
Pedro
June 24th, 2019 at 12:33 am
14 years.
Still hype <3
September 30th, 2019 at 9:03 am
I would definitely be interested in supporting a Kickstarter for this game. it is very excited.