The Impact Factor

Distilled Descent

Review

Downwell, moppin_ (iOS)

Abstact: Downwell is a precise, fun, and compact experience. Each run is a balancing act: a chaotic dance of dodges, jumps, and monsters. Tight controls shape a wonderful and brutally challenging game. Downwell provides some of the best 2 to 3 minute play sessions you can find for smartphone. Though touch controls aren’t ideal and the game never hooked me in the way other similar titles have, Downwell is still spectacular and well-worth playing.

In a year where games got bigger, denser and more complex than ever, Downwell went the exact opposite direction. Downwell is about as distilled an experience as you can get. It must be a scary prospect for a game developer when I think about it. When you limit your game to a few simple systems and ideas, every single thing present in the final game must be perfect. It’s just like cooking—a simple dish demands perfection. Downwell is a very tasty dish.

Coming from a small indie development team out of Japan, Downwell’s premise can be boiled down (cooking pun un-intended) to one short sentence. You’re falling down a well. Yep. Of course there’s a bit more to it. A bevy of enemies lurk below, standing between you and your quite rapid descent. Each hit you take reduces your health by one. Given your severely limited health pool (4-6) you die early and often. Luckily for the player, you’re given the perfect defense: gun boots. Some enemies can be destroyed by landing on top of them. Others, marked in red, cannot. But for all enemies, you can use your gun boots. As you fall, tapping on the game’s one action button will cause your character to shoot projectiles out of its feet. Each monster killed drops gems, which act as both a scoring mechanic as well as currency (more on that later).

The quiet before the storm.

As you fall towards the bottom & exit of each level, you’re tasked with performing a few tasks. First and foremost is not dying, which is done by killing enemies before they kill you. This requires a very delicate balancing act, though. You fall fast in Downwell making it difficult to follow a set trajectory, often leading to you colliding with and taking damage from enemies. Firing your gun boots is the one and only way to slow down your fall midair. Sound easy enough? Maybe. But your gun boots only have a limited amount of ammo. Once depleted, the only thing stopping your fall is finding that safe platform in the unseen below. Landing on the ground or stomping on an enemy’s head replenishes your ammo. This results in making each and every descent a chaotic dance, balancing ammo with health with momentum.

And what a dance it is.

Along your fall you can find small rooms in the sides of the level, which contain a power-up. Each power-up transforms the projectiles your gun boots fire, changing the ammo consumption, damage and spread. Like the shotgun or laser, that is great for killing enemies but very poor at controlling your fall. Or noppy, which is the exact opposite. Each power-up you collect also does one of two other things: it increases your ammo capacity by one or restores one health. At the end of each level you’re given an option to choose a perk that strengthens your character. Like gaining the ability to suck in nearby gems, a small explosion around you when you jump, or small chance at health restoration when you land on bodies of dead monsters. Further, from the second level onward, you can visit shops. At shops you can buy items that restore health or increase ammo capacity. As you can imagine, how you use power-ups is another one of Downwell’s great balancing acts. Is it worth restoring that one point of health, even if it means replacing your burst fire with the shotgun? Should you spend your gems on a +1 health item now or hope to save up more for a +2 health item later? Each time you play Downwell you’re faced with a macrocosm of important decisions confined within a fiendish microcosm of platforming and monsters. It’s so satisfying when everything goes well.

Rooms offer a small respite. This laser health
power-up is a pretty good find.

Downwell is a Roguelike, When you die all of your power-ups are removed and you’re sent back to the beginning of the game. The only in-game progress is achieved through your collected gems, which accumulate to unlock color swaps for the game or slightly different player characters (called ‘styles’). That means each time you play Downwell everything is for that run and that run only. Each run is short, only a couple minutes long before you beat the game (haha) or die trying. Your runs usually follow the same sort of progression: avoid taking damage early, try to find the gun boot powerup you like, and restore health whenever you can. It’s also about making the right build, i.e. obtaining the power-ups and perks that suit your personal playstyle. For example, I loved using burst fire boots with the drone perk. Starting up Downwell is consistently exciting: will this be your next, great run? Or will it be an exercise in frustration as you’re overwhelmed by bats on 1-2?

Downwell nails the perfect Roguelike feeling. You never want to give up on a run because things aren’t going your way. You always feel like you are one lucky break away from this run being your best yet. Losses are never too demoralizing. No run lasts more than a few minutes, so you don’t feel like you’ve lost too much when you die. Everything in Downwell feels fair, too. I’ve played the game between 10-20 hours at this point and never once have I felt like my death wasn’t my fault. Downwell can be extremely punishing (like most Roguelikes), but you always know where and when you messed up. What makes this feeling even better is how supremely tight the controls feel. The game is impressively responsive. With enough practice you gain full mastery of all aspects of your movement. Everything is so perfectly precise. You won’t get a much better 2-3 minute gaming experience anywhere, especially not on your iPhone. Downwell distills the Roguelike platformer to its base essence and makes it work so well it stands up to its more complex counterparts.

Fast, frantic, and fun. Downwell nails
that perfect Roguelike feeling.

Design excellence aside, Downwell is simply fun to play. For 3 minutes or 30, Downwell is worth the time. For a game so simplified and perfected as Downwell it’s hard to find faults, but there are some to be found. Perhaps more a fault of my own rather than the game’s itself, the touch controls on iPhone are not ideal. I appreciated the option to hide the left, right and action buttons (the only three buttons in the game), but having your fingers on the screen still cut off crucial visual information. That, and no matter how much I tried I would still occasionally press the wrong button by mistake. For a game like Downwell, going the opposite way you’d like to, even for a second, can mean the difference between death and victory. Additionally, but unrelated to my first complaint, the supremely simplified design of Downwell does have some downsides. Namely, longevity. I’m still playing Downwell every other day or so, but I never felt hooked by the game. I want to do better and get better, but I don’t feel the urge to play for hours on end. I’ve become obsessed with a couple Roguelikes in my time. I play them constantly and when I’m not playing I’m thinking about my next run. That never happened for Downwell. I’ve only made it to the Aquifer (world 3) and I’m ok with that. I could not put Spelunky down until I beat Hell and I played Nuclear Throne non-stop over the winter break until I looped my run. I want to feel that kind of obsession and journey of self-improvement while playing a Roguelike and it just didn’t happen with Downwell.

I just wish there was a bit more to hook me.
A bit more to make me say 'just one more run.'

Still, it’s hard to argue that Downwell isn’t spectacular. It was easily some of my favorite iOS gaming in 2015 and will be a mainstay on my phone for the long run. Downwell is one succulent dish, simple or not. Go indulge a bit and give it a try.

Downwell

4/5