Review: What Lies Beneath

Disclaimer: I was provided a review copy of the game. Also, some of the links below are affiliate links (meaning I get a small percentage of the sale without extra cost to you or the publisher).

Written by Chris Scaffidi and published in 2023 by Fervent Workshop, What Lies Beneath is described as "a solo dungeon-crawler of dice, decisions and death" that is "structured as a branching narrative". We all know what this really means: it's a gamebook!

In case it needs explanation, a gamebook is a form of interactive fiction delivered in book format. The text is arranged into numbered paragraphs (or sections) that you don't read linearly. Instead, at the end of each section you are given a number of choices that direct you to different paragraphs, leading to different outcomes in the story. Some gamebooks are literally just this (like the Choose Your Own Adventure series), while others also have detailed game mechanics.

While a lot of modern gamebooks strive to be epic in scale (often having a thousand or more sections), WLB is relatively short even compared to the classics (241 sections vs. the standard 400 of Fighting Fantasy). What it may lack in size, it makes up for in depth and mechanics.

Let's start at the beginning. There's no detailed backstory; you are thrown right into the game. You wake up in a dungeon with no memories or equipment and an apparently infected arm. Then the game describes how you are supposed to use the book, and you get to make your character (just a few stats, really).

The next few sections introduce the various game mechanics by example (e.g. you are taught how Hit tests work by having you encounter a giant rat). This sort of tutorial and teaching only what's relevant at a time reminded me of Metal Heroes and the Fate of Rock — and I loved it there as well.

I found it really interesting how WLB handles testing the three stats differently:

• Hit tests are the most straightforward. You roll as many dice as your Hit stat, and you need at least one of them to meet or beat the target number.
• Wit tests are about dice manipulation. You roll a number of dice equal to the difficulty then try to arrange them into a sequence (or run). For each point of Wit you have, you can either re-roll a die, flip it, or increase/decrease its value by one.
• Testing Dex involves physical dexterity. You place two dice on each other to form a tower. You need to flick a third die at the tower from a distance in inches equal to the difficulty so that it touches the tower without knocking it over. (There is an alternative system provided in an Appendix in case you don't have room for or don't want to flick dice around.)
  

On the one hand, these mechanics often got me out of immersion. It's hard to retain the gritty atmosphere built up by the text when you have to handle dice to such a degree. However, engaging the mechanics has never been this much fun for me with a gamebook (not even The Sword of the Bastard Elf with its simple but elegant resource management or DestinyQuest and its gazillion combat abilities). Or perhaps I just like dexterity games.

Let's talk about the atmosphere. This is gritty fantasy through and through. You wake up behind enemy lines, and your only concern (at least at the beginning) is survival. You must balance risk and reward, because the game doesn't pull its punches (but you're never thrown into more trouble than you really ask for either). Descriptive texts are brief and evocative. Illustrations are plenty, but they're fairly small.

Getting out of the dungeon also works as a checkpoint in the game. You get to save your current stats and also spend your XP to improve your character a bit. When you die, you don't have to start over from the beginning (although you might still want to). From then on, the game focusses on overland exploration — this is where the low number of sections is felt the most. Since you can go in any cardinal direction, you essentially have four different stories, and not all of them felt particularly satisfying.

For gamebooks, I like to use a different scoring method largely based on the Lindenbaum Prize judging criteria (it just makes more sense for these games). Note that I don't weigh all the categories equally, and I score on a 1 to 10 scale:

• Literary Ability (20%) Well-written and evocative with good grammar and spelling. The narrative is minimal (it's mostly concerned with survival and getting back your memories), but it's not an issue. A solid 7 out of 10.
  
• Game System (30%) The mechanics are simple but varied. Beyond the three main test types described above, there are a handful of unique situations with even more dice manipulation or different dexterity-based challenges. It's all reasonably difficult. There is an interesting connection between Wit and dice manipulation, and in turn Dex and flicking dice, even if the mechanics can disrupt immersion at times. Never boring, though. And it's all explained succinctly and unambiguously (apart from how the distance is measured for Dex tests). Equipment tags and story keywords are also competently used. I'm giving it 9 out of 10.
  
• Story (30%): The narrative you experience is overall satisfying, but it's mostly to do with overcoming challenges. WLB is very much limited in scope, for better or for worse. Getting your memories back can be interesting. There are many different endings, and the consequences of your choices are meaningful. 5 out of 10.
  
• Technical Ability (10%) The section links never lead to a dead end. Everything is hyperlinked in the PDF. There is no ambiguity when it comes to resolving the mechanics (although measuring from the middle point of dice is annoying), and all outcomes are accounted for in the text. 9 out of 10.
  
• Miscellaneous (10%) WLB weaves a lot interesting concepts together into a coherent whole: tags and keywords, checkpoints, varied dice mechanics, dexterity-based tests, etc. None of them are unique to WLB in the realm of gamebooks (except maybe for the dexterity stuff), but the way they all work together makes it great. The layout is clear and easy on the eyes, and the illustrations are charming. 8 out of 10.
  

This comes out to a respectable total of 73 (it would've been 76 if all categories weighed the same). Although a fairly short affair, WLB is a fun romp with lots of replayability packed into its small package.

What Lies Beneath is available on Amazon, itch, and DriveThruRPG. You can also check out a preview on itch or DriveThru. You can also check out the preview of an upcoming prequel, Dwarfdom (again, on itch or DriveThru) — it looks just as interesting mechanically without being a repeat of WLB.