Below – Capybara go above and beyond

GameCentral plays the latest game from the makers of Super Time Force and talks to its developer about why it’s taken seven years to make…

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Now that so many games only get announced six months or so before their release it’s become rare that we ever speak to the same developer more than once before a game’s launch. Technically, we’ve only spoke to Capybara Games co-founder Nathan Vella about Below once before, but that was four years ago at Gamescom. Below has been in development for much longer than that though and was conceived of almost a decade ago. And yet last week was the first time we ever got to play it.



That’s an extraordinarily long time for any game, particularly an indie title, but as we found out from Vella the delay hasn’t been due to funding problems or a crisis with the design. Instead it’s simply because the team didn’t think the game was good enough yet. Which is just about as encouraging a sign as you can get.

Below is a game inspired by Dark Souls and other From Software titles, as well as more traditional roguelikes. We only got 20 minutes or so to play it at an event for ID@Xbox titles (we’ll have more on the others later in the week, such as the equally-delayed console version of DayZ, Advance Wars clone WarGroove, and Frostpunk – the new game from the makers of This War Of Mine). But 20 minutes is not very long for a game that purposefully doesn’t tell you what it’s about or how to play it. Although given its vaunted difficulty we were quite proud we only died once at the end.


Below begins as your wordless warrior arrives on a storm-rocked island for reasons unknown. The game uses an unusual top-down view, that’s almost but-not-quite isometric, and a camera that is pulled out so far your character appears tiny compared to the ominous-looking mountains and everything else in the game. The visuals are stylised but the atmosphere created is immediately captivating, as wind and rain pummel the island and the grass parts invitingly as you step through it.

There’s a special excitement at playing a new game for the first time, but it’s always magnified if you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing. The mountain before us is covered in stairs carved into its rock face, and has more than one entranceway, but we can’t get into any of them. But a bit more exploration reveals a mysterious crystal-like lantern that lights the way and allows us to enter the dungeon.

Inside it becomes obvious that as well as being influenced by Dark Souls and roguelikes, Below is also a survival game. We realise that the little icons in the top left indicate our hunger, health, and thirst, and that these can be replenished at a nearby campsite that we reignite with a torch. There’s also the implication that fish can be cooked and more complex recipes crafted, but we’re not able to figure that out at first.

Below – the defensive style of combat is very reminiscent of Dark Souls

We do work out the simple mechanics of combat though, with a block and sweeping sword attack, and are able to fend off what seem to be a bunch of rat-like enemies. These drop crystals similar to our lantern, but their exact use isn’t obvious. Although we’re more concerned at the realisation that the entire dungeon is filled with a literal fog of war, and anywhere you haven’t been is covered by a thick mist. Although that’s not the reason we end up being caught in a spear trap, we just naively wander up to it and try to work out what it is.



It was an opportune moment to stop though, and we came away hugely impressed by the atmospheric visuals and equally evocative sound design (by returning Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP collaborator Jim Guthrie). Although we have to admit that our favourite Capybara game is oft-forgotten puzzle classic Might & Magic: Clash Of Heroes. Which is something we were desperate to talk to Vella about in our phone interview but knew we didn’t really have time for.

He did at least confirm that Below is scheduled to release this year though, as well as discussing why you shouldn’t be worried about its randomly-generated content or its difficulty…

Formats: Xbox One and PC

Publisher: Capybara Games

Developer: Capybara Games

Release Date: 2018

GC: So we’ve got about 20 minutes here to… talk about Clash Of Heroes?

NV: [laughs] You would need two hours if you got me started on that!

GC: I guess the more obvious question is what have you been doing since I last saw you in 2014?

NV: [laughs] Well, my life has changed pretty drastically since then, that’s for sure. I feel like an old man now!

GC: I’ve been trying to piece things together online, but my understanding is that around 2016 you realised you needed more time and money so you started doing contract work to keep a roof over your head?

NV: We’ve always been a two, sometimes even three, project studio. We’re 25 people, we’ve been around 20-ish people for quite a long time. Around 2016 we really just needed more time. [laughs] The money side of it wasn’t really the decision maker, because we had released Super Time Force and we were working on some other collaboration stuff. It was more we were looking pretty critically at the game and realised our options are what they always are really: shove it out or take the time you need.


And we’re not really good at shoving anything out, so we knew pretty clearly we needed to take some more time. And rather than give another big long, ‘Here’s exactly when it’s coming out’ promise, and then maybe missing that too, we just kind of said, ‘We’re gonna go dark. We’re gonna take all the time that we need and we’ll come back when we feel good about it.

GC: Do you feel you made a mistake at any point, that’s caused this lengthy development? Or was it always going to take this long?

NV: I think there’s two types of games you make, there’s a game that you know that you’re making and there’s the game that you think you know you’re making. We just kind of came to the realisation that we are making a bigger, more challenging game than we had anticipated and did whatever we could to kind of react to that.

I mean, I agree it’s been a long time and nobody feels that kind of length of time more than the people at our studio that have been working on it all that time. [laughs]

GC: I’m sure. But then, from the audience’s point of view the delay doesn’t really matter – it just hopefully means it’s going to be worth it in the end. But for you guys…

NV: Definitely. It has been the most challenging project we’ve ever worked on at the studio. And not just because of how long it’s taken but because the game has a whole bunch of different systems that all need to work together. It’s a game that needs the game itself to generate the levels, for the most part. It’s a game that is just as much about aesthetic and feel as it is about core combat being punchy and feeling right. And balancing all of those pieces is definitely a pretty supreme challenge. I would think for any studio, but for us it was especially so because it’s definitely the largest and most complicated game that we’ve ever set out to make.


[laughs] You asked did we make any mistakes? I think every project is basically the product of all of its mistakes. I think we’ve just been able to acknowledge that, and the solutions, or the kind of salve for the mistakes we’ve made, just took longer on this project because of the way that the game is laid out. Because of how intertwined the feeling and emotion of the game is with the literal systems that build it.

[laughs] I’ll say it a million times but it’s the hardest game we’ve ever made by far!

Below – prepare to die

GC: I read a couple of interviews from a few years back and you kept talking about there being an aspect of the game that hasn’t been revealed yet. Do we still not know what that is?

NV: I don’t wanna…

GC: I don’t want you to spoil anything, but I’m just not sure whether I’ve got the wrong end of the stick with what you were saying back then.

NV: It’s not just a single… there’s a bunch of, kind of, significant portions of the game that we’ve never shown, and probably won’t show, that are there for players to discover. Or if we do show them it will be right when the game’s coming out. Just because there are big ideas in the game, whether it’s the overall aesthetic with a tiny character in a big world or having to survive through exploration and having your discoveries being the things that help you survive.

But then there’s also a whole bunch of stuff that’s, like, bigger picture items – whether they’re thematic or gameplay or art – that we’ve been working on for a long time and they’re gonna stay in our back pocket… probably until the game’s out.

GC: Okay, fair enough. So it’s not like a hidden driving mini-game or something?

NV: [laughs] No, although that would be pretty postmodern. But there is more to the game than you know, I can say that.

GC: Oh, is it something to do with multiplayer? That was something you were teasing previously.

NV: No. This is a single-player experience. We had originally planned to do some multiplayer stuff but it definitely didn’t make the cut, largely because it made us break all of the design that we were trying to go for. So it’s not multiplayer. Although that was a really good guess. [laughs]

GC: Maybe we should go back a few steps here. When the project first started what exactly were you aiming for? I remember you citing Demon’s Souls as an influence. Had you played those games and wanted to do something similar? Or were they just one influence amongst many?

NV: One of the things for me personally, not speaking for the team… but one of the things I’m most proud of about the project is that there was an additional idea that Kris [Piotrowski], our creative director, pitched and that’s still the main focus. We haven’t really moved away from that. And that was, ‘What if, instead of everything being super close what if we used your television as a level. What if you’re this tiny character in this massive dungeon?’

When Kris pitched it he even pitched the tilt shift, the lack of UI, and lack of dialogue. It was a very cohesive idea that we drove from, maybe, 10 years ago to today. And what he pitched is still, at its core, the central driving force of the game’s design. And that’s really cool, for me, to see us just stick with that and really believe in it. He was originally just trying to think about how to make roguelikes less inaccessible. Like, there’s a wall in front of them and some people can break that right down but other people, like myself… all I saw was that wall in front of me and I never got into them at all.

And so, as we were working on the original idea, before we even started developing it in any way, seeing some other games come with that idea too, Demon’s Souls is a perfect example but there are now a whole bunch of ideas circling around that sphere. And from the very beginning the things we always said about our game – I’m air-quoting and you can’t see it! – is it’s ‘inspired’ by rougelikes, it’s not meant to be a pure roguelike in any way.

But it was nice to see a bunch of other games do it well and do it successfully, because it gives you an extra bit of strength to know that there are players that really like this type of game. And it’s good because it proves that there are different paths to finding an audience than following the mainstream.

Especially as at the time Dark Souls came out everyone else was moving towards, ‘How do we make an hour long tutorial that walks you through every aspect of the game, makes sure you can’t fail, ensures you’re six hours in before the challenge ramps too high…’ That was main the main path of development at the time. We’ve made games that follow that path while we’re making Below [laughs] which ignores all of that and doesn’t tell you a single thing, ever!

GC: There are two aspects that worry me though, and one was the odd, almost isometric, viewpoint. It looks great but the bit of the demo I was most stuck on was when I didn’t realise a part of the level was actually accessible and just connected by some stairs, even though I was looking right at it…

NV: All of that stuff is up to us to try to solve, through visuals and through breadcrumbs, as much as we can. And at the end of the day, we’re much more confident about creating a game that has a unique aesthetic that some people might bump up against than making it more generic and hoping that everyone loves it.

GC: That’s good to hear. But the other thing that concerns me is my more general distrust of procedurally-generated content. Everything always ends up looking more or less the same and they have a tendency to seem very clinical…

NV: Agreed.

GC: I’m sure that’s something you’ve considered, but how have you overcome the problem?

NV: There’s two big things. One is that’s definitely one of the reasons why the game has taken as long as it has. One of many, obviously. But we spent a lot of time just iterating on how procedural generation works, to make it as un-clinical as possible. And one of the ways that we do it is by not making it purely random.

The original idea of random generation is that you make the game generate everything, totally randomly – you give it as many options as possible. But that usually makes it feel both less fun, but also less random… it just looks messy. Or it looks clinical. So what we’ve done is go in the opposite direction and pull back some of that randomness and add in parts that are designed by an artist or a level designer.

So you might walk into a level and it might be entirely procedurally generated, or the level might generate a piece that has actually been designed and then generate the rest of it around it. And we find that that not only looks better but it feels more procedurally generated to the player, because now they have landmarks. There’s a whole bunch of the game that is designed by us, and the procedurally-generated levels are kind of the pass through to these set pieces that we have designed. And there are a lot of those in the game as well.

The way we describe it is that you’re standing at the edge of a fast-flowing river and looking down. And all of the water’s always moving, and that makes up the bulk of it. And that’s kind of the procedurally-generated piece of the game. But out of the river comes these little islands, or rocks, and they never move. Those are the hand-crafted pieces and they’re always in the same place in the game, so you can always find them where you need to find them.

Below – due out this year, hopefully

GC: Going back to Dark Souls, and the general level of difficulty and what you lose when you die, it seems that you can go back and pick up the inventory of the previous character?

NV: Yeah, but there’s also a feature that we’ve not focused on before where you can actually choose to store stuff from life to life. You can choose whether you carry stuff with you or store them, and then if you die you can come back to them. But really, what we’re trying to do is make a game where you’re building upon the successes, and learning from the failures, of your past lives.

So if you go five levels down and unlock a bunch of doors, grab a bunch of stuff and put it in storage, and then die all of that stuff stays as it was. And maybe you unlock a shortcut that means that you can actually skip to the part that you have just completed but died in. The whole game is meant to be about building on the success of your past lives, it’s this group effort from character to character.

GC: It must be a very odd thing to sit and wonder whether your game is hard enough. You’re basically deciding how much of a misery you want to make players’ lives.

NV: [laughs] Dude, welcome to the argument that we have every day.

Both: [laughs]

NV: It is a constant struggle. And usually what it is is we’ll play the latest version and one person will worry it’s too easy and then we make it super hard, and then it swings back the other way. And It’s been happening for years! Easy, hard; easy hard. But hopefully it’ll come to rest right at that nice and hard level but not frustratingly pull-out-your-eyeballs hard.

But you’re right… you hit the nail on the head. It is a really hard thing to do be like, ‘How hard is too hard? How hard is good hard?’

GC: You’re working away and you know you’re potentially ruining someone’s day, or breaking their joypad.

NV: [laughs] Yeah! And the flipside is when people say, ‘What? I thought this was supposed to be hard!’

GC: I hate those people. The ones that end up beating it with a Guitar Hero controller or something.

NV: [laughs]

GC: I think we’re out of time now, so I better finish up with the most obvious question of all… do you have a release date?

NV: This year. This year.

GC: Great. And so presumably after that you’re going to start on Clash Of Heroes 2?

NV: [laughs] Nothing would make me happier, my friend! I’m not even lying, I would love to do that at some point. I’ve just gotta get Ubi[soft, the original publisher – GC] on board.

GC: Well, best of luck with that! But I’ll settle for a finished version of Below first.

NV: [laughs] Yeah.

GC: OK, before the PR guy comes back on, let’s end it there. Thanks a lot for your time.

NV: Great talking to you again, man.

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