Free Game Friday: Don Don to the Underground

From Famitsu, a Japanese gaming site provided by Enterbrain, the company responsible for RPG Maker XP and RPG Maker VX, comes this treasure hunting platformer that’s somewhat reminiscent of Spelunky, or the Great Cave Offensive from Kirby Super Star. Don Don to the Underground (which is the translation I get from Google), puts you in the shoes of a tiny white clad archaeologist searching for 40 different treasures underground.

The entire map is visible at all times, which makes for interesting gameplay; when you go through a door, sometimes you have to take a moment to figure out exactly where your guy has gone in the rather expansive cave. You’re armed with bombs which do not seem to be self-harming, and your wits as you progress. Many of the treasures are very easy to get, but some require some switch activation and timed jumping in order to reach the chests before they disappear.

The game works with both keyboard and gamepad, and you can change any controls you’re unhappy with in the menu up in the top left of the window. I found the gamepad controls to be very intuitive and apparent, but the keyboard controls were not so obvious, and I had to read the control scheme from the menu.

Don Don to the Underground is simple yet immersive, with music that changes dynamically as you move from floor to floor, and a menu you can call to show you which treasures you’re missing. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to save your progress, so the game is meant to be run through in one sitting, much like Spelunky but with far less dying.

The game is in a zip file and shouldn’t take you long to download. Nothing inside the zip file is in English, however, but all you have to do is run the application inside the folder, and because the game itself shows you what to do with pictures, the language barrier is negligible.