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Into The Pit review: a gorgeous roguelike shooter that sadly descends into comfortable familiarityA hole lot of problems
A hole lot of problems
Into The Pitis one of those, until it isn’t. You know you’re in trouble when the demonic eldritch hell portal starts feeling too comfortable.
Into the Pit - Reveal TrailerWatch on YouTube
Into the Pit - Reveal Trailer
Now. Look. The other night, as I was reading in bed and just about to go to sleep, I heardsomethingdoingsomethingvery very very close to my ear. I instantly sat up, then rather slowly turned, to see a fuckin’ fuck the fuck off-sized spider, thank you very fuckly. It did then fuck off under a bookcase, where for all I know it remains. Relaying this experience is the best way I can think of to communicate the intensity of the scuttling involved should you venture into the Pit.
Plenty of the Pit’s denizens scuttle, but some of them scuttle worse. Scorpions: oddly wet, yet reassuringly consistent. Demonic hermit crabs: very sudden, very loud. Pulsing blood spiders: subtle, with notes of death. Then you’ve got the emaciated devil lads from a later level who hardly make any sound at all, which is obviously even worse because then you don’t get any warning before you spin around to find they’ve already chewed a chunk out of your jawbone.
The level mix-ups are an interesting idea, and I did get a few kicks out of seeing familiar landscapes twisted together, but the novelty wore off before I’d seen even a handful of the potential combinations. You’re still up against the same monsters - they don’t mutate together into terrifying hybrids, they’re just drawn from the spawning pools of both dungeons. Progress is structured around fetching up to three townfolk from each jaunt into the Pit, with 30 needed to unlock the last rune, which meant there came a point where I knew what I’d be facing for the next couple of hours… and my heart sank.
That’s partly thanks to the way upgrades work, where many of the buffs you can pick both within and outside the Pit feel too much like nakedly correct choices. There are a couple of indispensable healing boosts you can load up on pre-Pit, along with various meta-upgrades that increase the chance of certain upgrade types appearing amongst the choice of three you get between each encounter. Sady, hardly any of those mid-Pit upgrades actually change the way you play. You might inflict poison, bleeding, weakness or curses on your enemies, but I doubt you’ll notice the difference.
Every throbbing game needs to keep you in a very specific and delicate state of mind. There’s a sweet spot where you feel just but only just in control, dancing amidst a tide of enemies that could overwhelm you at any second. There’s this flow state where you find yourself building a mental image of everything around you without fully realising you’re doing it, strafing in a desperate yet calculated way to avoid the claws you know must be immediately behind you. It’s intoxicating, when the challenge feels just right. For too much of my journey into the Pit, it didn’t.
It’s a shame to end on such a sour note, because those earlier moments where the Pit shines are positively radiant. Battles in Into The Pit never get as intricate as a meaty fight in Doom Eternal, nor as suspenseful as the single, exquisitely choreographed encounter you’ll find in Devil Daggers, but I’d say they came close enough to make me giddy if only they came more consistently. Instead, Into The Pit descends into comfortable familiarity, and all the scuttling in the world can’t save the back half from feeling like a slog.
Add an endless survival mode, mind, and I’d be back in a heartbeat.
