Battle Vision Network pits players in 1-on-1 puzzle battles against other players. The game has players make up teams of characters from across the galaxy, which can be further customised thanks to each unit having their own unique abilities and custom looks.

The title will also be a live game, with new content planned for it over time. Each season of the game will have a narrative arc that will be affected be the actions, choices, and wins and losses of the game’s players.

Before Battle Vision Network, Capybara Games has worked on a host of critically-acclaimed titles, including the aforementioned Grindstone, as well as games like Below, Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery, and Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes.

Originally developed by Capybara Games and released back in 2009, Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes was something of a cult hit. Taking place 40 years before the events of the Might and Magic 5 saga, Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes tells the stories of five different heroes across the regions of Ashan.

The gameplay in Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes revolves around finding the perfect combination of units in fast-paced puzzle battles to take out enemies. Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes – Definitive Edition features the original’s 20+ hours long campaign, as well as online and offline PvP multiplayer.

Capybara Games’ Below is coming to PS4 on April 7th with a new Explore mode (which will also be available for Xbox One and PC players). This serves as a less punishing alternative to Survive mode. PC players can actually try out Explore mode early – it’s currently available in beta form on Steam for PC.

Simply select “Properties” after right-clicking on Below in Steam and navigate to the “Betas” tab. Once you enter the code, select “Public – Explore Public Branch”. The purpose of the beta is to squash any lingering bugs with the player base’s help.

Explore Mode removes Hunger and Thirst mechanics along with one-hit deaths. Any damage incurred is bleed-based allowing for time to stop it and get treated. Players also don’t have to worry about checkpoints and campfires being cleared after use but only one can be active at a time. All in all, these changes should help players enjoy the atmosphere of Below without worrying about constant death.

Capybara Games’ brutal roguelite Below is out on April 7th for PS4 and will retail for $24.99. Perhaps more interesting is that Explore Mode, which offers a less harsh experience, will also be available as a free update. Xbox One and PC players can try it out on the same day as PS4 players.

What does Explore Mode change? First off, Hunger and Thirst are disabled and no longer need to be managed. To that end, you can’t drink from puddles or bottles, though you’ll still need to fill bottles with water to cook soup (which restores your health). Thirst also doesn’t go out until you die.

Players no longer have to deal with one-hit deaths or the iron maid, and all damage is now bleed-based, so you have time to actually halt the bleeding. Checkpoints and campfires also don’t clear after being used, though you still can only have one active at a time. The best part is that if you’re already playing on Survive Mode, then Explore Mode will have its own save slot.

These are all positive changes – we’ll see if it can make Below a more enjoyable experience. For an idea on how the base game played, check out our review here.

Previously a console exclusive for Xbox One, Capybara Games’ Below is coming to PS4 in Spring. It will also receive a new mode across all platforms called “Explore” which allows for more relaxed gameplay. That means no Hunger or Thirst, damage depleting health slowly, no instant kills and checkpoints at bonfires.

Below initially launched in December 2018 after years of delays. It’s a roguelike where the player travels to The Isle and explores its labyrinthine depths. The default mode is “Survive” which challenges players to avoid death, discover treasures and secrets, and venture as far as they can.

The game was praised for its atmosphere and aesthetics. However, it also received its fair share of criticism for design choices (like how suddenly death could find the player). Here’s hoping that Explore mode allows the game to flourish and bring more players in than before. Stay tuned in the coming months for a release date on PS4.

Below is the most recent bit of output by developer Capybara Games, the studio responsible for Superborther: Sword & Sorcery EP and Super Time Force. Below is different from those two games in the fact that it is a procedurally generated top-down dungeon crawler. In this title, you travel deeper and deeper into the depths just for the sake of exploration. You will encounter plenty of enemies and fauna to cut down with your weapons along the way and will find plenty of objects to pick up and craft together. You’ll also die. A lot. Below is a tough game.

This game is a gorgeous exercise in minimalism. The visuals manage to convey incredible depth with very little, with particle effects sparsely coating the foreground and dense fog covering up much of the beautiful pixel-work until you get close enough. Music is sparse in this title but it manages to kick in at the most affecting parts. While you’ll mostly be treated to ambiance, you will find a good tune seep through the atmosphere every so often. The UI is also unobtrusive and helps to keep you immersed in the isolation of the depths.

"Below is an unforgiving game. The mechanics in place are easy to understand and you’re given plenty of time to toy around with them and get a handle on them, but once you mess up, you’re punished for it harshly."

In Below, you aren’t given any text prompts or any guidance. You have to figure everything out and learn the ins and outs of the mechanics all on your own. The game opens up with a boat ride that eventually leads you to a secluded island. Once you’re on the island, you’ll run around a bit, perhaps play around with the crafting system, and then run into a large stone slab that you can’t get by. After fiddling about, you’ll realize by experimentation that the lantern that you picked up is your means of entry. From there, your journey really starts.

This is a simple title. You’re trying to find the many shards of light that are hidden away deep within the depths. You have a sword and a shield as your main means of attack. You also have a bow along with arrows that you keep in your inventory. You’ll find more weaponry and armor as you delve deeper. You can find objects scattered about and craft them into supplies like arrows, bandages, or higher quality crafting items. You also have a food, water, and warmth gauge to keep an eye on. These gauges aren’t too obtrusive and they’re easy enough to keep full as long as you’re prepared. Sources of water are spread out everywhere in the early game and you won’t even have to worry about the warmth unless you go into an area like the ice depths. The need to really keep an eye on these gauges is ushered in slowly so as to not overwhelm the player. And that’s good because as well-paced as this game is, it’s brutal.

Below is an unforgiving game. The mechanics in place are easy to understand and you’re given plenty of time to toy around with them and get a handle on them, but once you mess up, you’re punished for it harshly. Although you’ll probably die plenty from enemies, combat is not especially a focus of the game. More often than not, you’ll find yourself dying to a well-placed spike trap or from getting lost and starving to death. Your most valuable tool is your lantern. It helps you progress and move obstacles in your path. It helps illuminate your surroundings and spot traps easily. But once you die and lose it, you’d better hope that you’re prepared for the trek back to retrieve it.

"Choosing whether or not to go back to a previous campfire to bank your valuables or to continue pushing forward into the depths creates an interesting tension and helps add purpose to your journey."

In this title, your belongings are all dropped where you die and stay there until you come back to retrieve it. But if you should end up dying again before collecting it, your belongings are lost to the elements and now your most recent death is the only one with supplies on it. Except for your lantern. That’s always going to remain where you initially dropped it until you manage to get back to it and pick it up. There is a means of teleportation between campfires but it’s only a one-time use and you have to preemptively set it up using pieces of light before you die. So in a worst case scenario, you could be looking at a trek that has you going through most of the depths in order to grab your supplies before heading off in a whole new direction to grab your lantern, a process that could take upwards of fifteen minutes. And that’s only if you actually manage to make it through the areas and reach your gear safely. Otherwise, you could end up in a loop of failed loot runs that can stretch for a good chunk of playtime.

You are given a system where you can store items away though. When you rest at campfires, you’re taken away to a dream state where you can store crafting items, bits of light, armor, among other things. This dream state can be accessed at every campfire and it is the game’s only way of making sure your possessions are safe. This is a great addition and does a lot to cut down the monotony of gathering materials every time you have to go back out.

Choosing whether or not to go back to a previous campfire to bank your valuables or to continue pushing forward into the depths creates an interesting tension and helps add purpose to your journey.
The environments in Below all have a sense of identity that’s unique to each level. The rooms in Below are all procedurally generated, but the general layout of the levels stays the same. This is definitely a good thing since it’s possible to find your old body without searching the entire level. The levels bring about their own issues to worry about, whether it be freezing cold, a greater emphasis on traps, or more dense fog. You have to tread carefully; these are levels that you never really feel comfortable running through. The levels are also populated with enemies, many of which drop bits of light that you can use to power your lantern. This actually ends up helping you and when the game later starts to take these enemies away, it actually makes survival harder. The variety and pace of the levels helps keep the game from feeling stale.

"While Below is a beautiful title and it offers players a unique and isolated experience, this is still a very divisive title."

There’s also a few things in this package that will reward diligent players. If you invest into finding or unlocking them. There’s plenty of environmental puzzles, like using your bow to hit a switch far off, that offer rewards like additional supplies. There are also hidden shops that you can spend bits of light at in order to get armor and keys. Shortcuts are spaced out through the depths as well and provide a more reliable way to make it back to previous areas than the campfires allow. All this comes together to really emphasis what this game is all about: the exploration. After everything is said and done, this game is moreso about the simple act of seeing new environments more than anything else. To see how far you can go, how deep you can make it, what new sights you can see; this is the true goal of Below.

While Below is a beautiful title and it offers players a unique and isolated experience, this is still a very divisive title. Aside from the aforementioned difficulty, there is also the issue of repetition baked into the game’s mechanics. Going back to retrieve your gear over and over and wandering through the same sights over and over is not going to be for every player out there. This is a dungeon crawler at its core and it shows. For every person who can buy into the atmosphere and get sucked into the oppressive tone, there will be another person who will just be bored and wanting to get to the next new piece of the game. Below requires patience from its players just as much as it requires a methodical approach to its world. But if that all sounds like a game that you can get behind, then this will give you an experience that few other games get close to.

This game was reviewed on the PC.

Capybara Games have announced that after a protracted development cycle, their atmospheric action-RPG Below, which was first announced way back in 2013, will finally be launching for PC and Xbox One on December 14, in just a day over a week from now. The wait is finally over (almost) for those who’ve been looking forward to the title- of which there have been quite a few.

The developer has put out a launch trailer for the game as well, which shows plenty of footage from the game itself, with the new release date coming at the very end of the video. Take a look below.

As mentioned, Below was initially announced in 2013, but over the years, it got hit with delays time and time again, with the developers openly admitting to having announced the game too early, which caused them to face issues during development- although cancellation never crossed their minds.

Earlier this year, Capybara Games confirmed that Below would indeed be launching in 2018, so it’s good to see them finally deliver the game. From the looks of it, it’s looking excellent- we’ll find out for ourselves either way, with just eight days to go until the game launches at last.

Below has been a long time coming. The game was originally announced during Xbox One’s E3 2013 show, and we haven’t gotten to its launch to this day, more than five years later. It was a case of it being announced too early, but the developers, Capybara Games, have continued to chip away at it all this time. And this year, they plan on finally launching it.

Capybara co-founder Nathan Vella said as much in an interview with Engadget, noting that not only does the studio intend to ship Below this year, but also plans on making two new game announcements. “I’m just starting to come to the realization of what’s left in 2018,” Vella says. “We’re only halfway through and I’m like, ‘Aww, I’ve gotta fit everything into the last half?'”

As for what those two new games are, they will be announced some time during August- and they may not necessarily be Xbox One exclusive like Below is, either.

“We’re super interested in getting on all kinds of platforms, like we’ve always been really big into doing stuff on everywhere. So, some of the new stuff is not necessarily the same platforms that we’ve been working on in the recent past, which is really fun for the team,” Vella said.

Whatever they are, I hope they look as great as Below has so far- speaking of which, I also hope Below does end up launching this year, and that when it does, it is worth the years-long wait (much like Cuphead, another indie game with a protracted development cycle that launched last year at last, and turned out to be great in the end).

Below was actually one of the very first games shown off for the Xbox One, all the way back in 2013- and now, here we are in 2018, and the game is still not out. That said, we have finally started to hear from its developers again, and it seems like the game is nearing completion. Much like Cuphead, another indie game for the Xbox One, took so long to come out but was ultimately worth the wait, so too do we hope will Below be the same.

So what went wrong with the game? Why did it end up taking so long? In a candid interview withgames™ magazine (issue 200), Capybara Creative Director Kris Piotrowski discussed the struggles and tribulations faced by the development team, admitting that development on the game had been harder than they had anticipated- but the notion of cancelling the game had not been one that they had ever entertained.

“Well, we made a classic mistake, which I guess everybody has to do once before they really learn it,” Piotrowski said. “Back in 2013, we had parts of the game in place – core elements of its design and the art style – and we were super excited about what we had. Microsoft asked us if we wanted to show it at this giant event. We were just like, ‘Fuck yeah! There’s no way this could go wrong!’

“Yeah. So, we did it; We got our demo together, we put together our trailer, showed it at this big event, and then went home and it was like, ‘Right, time to make the game. This will be a piece of cake’. It turns out that the game was very difficult to make.

“It’s a classic case of announcing your game too early. I think we could have easily just kept Below to ourselves for at least a couple of years and then announced it. And, in hindsight, that’s what we would’ve done. But you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube once it’s out.”

“Throughout this whole thing we’ve never talked about [cancellation] being a possibility. We’ve always, from the beginning, treated it as a project that we wanted to release when it was done. We’ve never really had an opportunity, as a studio, to do that before. But this time around we were actually in that position, and I felt like we had something kind of unique and interesting on our hands. The whole studio got behind the idea of holding it back until it was done.”

It’s good to see that they stuck by the game and their vision for it, in spite of all the struggles, and they learned something from the experience of announcing it too early. Below looks to be coming along well, ad hopefully, it lives up to the hype when it launches exclusively for Xbox One and PC later this year.

You might have caught a glimpse of Capybara Games’ Below back when it was announced at E3 2013. The top-down roguelike title was first slated to release for Xbox One before being confirmed for Steam. While there have been numerous delays, the developer has promised that Below will indeed be releasing in 2018.

Would it receive a physical release though? Speaking to God is a Geek, director Kris Pitriowski said he was unsure about the same. That’s despite having fun with custom boxes and “things that players can hold onto.”

“As far as the physical release, I’m not sure about that,” said Pitriowski. “I’d love to release a game that comes in a little box. We’ve been talking to some distributors about doing some special editions, but that’s just something we’ve been thinking about, none of that’s been finalised. Ideally it comes out in a way that isn’t just digital, I like putting together little custom boxes and stuff like that! Like things that players can hold onto, and help them be fans.”

However, he was also asked whether Below was still exclusive to the Xbox One and Steam. Pitriowski responded that, “When it comes to other platforms, right now we’re just announcing Xbox and Steam. Beyond that, I can’t say, right now.”

Given the amount of time put into the current version, it’s obvious that a PS4 or Nintendo Switch version won’t be coming right away. However, that’s also if the team deems it worthwhile to release Below on those platforms to begin with. Never say never, but don’t get your hopes up in the process either.