Undernauts: Labyrinth of Yomi

A labyrinth with something to say

Twenty years before Undernauts opens, a vast structure called Yomi rose out of the ground where a ward of Tokyo used to be, bringing with it a labyrinth full of hostile creatures the game calls Yomians and a new energy resource, argen, valuable enough to justify the risk of going down after it. The player's party works for the Cassandra Company, one of the outfits sending expedition teams into Yomi to extract that resource and find the people who've gone missing looking for it. It's a premise that could easily have stayed pure set-dressing for another turn-based dungeon crawl, and in a lot of the genre it would have. Undernauts instead builds a story around it that's been singled out by several reviewers as an unusually direct piece of commentary on corporate exploitation — a company sending disposable expedition teams into a death-trap for profit is not subtext here, it's the plot.

That's a real point of difference in a genre where the framing device is usually the least interesting part of the package. It doesn't make Undernauts a narrative-first game — you're still spending the overwhelming majority of your time managing a party through turn-based encounters — but it gives the grind somewhere to point, and it's part of why the game's Mostly Positive reception on Steam skews toward genre fans specifically calling out the writing rather than just the mechanics.

A gentler crawl

Undernauts' most consequential design decision is how much of the genre's traditional punishment it removes without removing the genre. Losing a fight doesn't end your run or force a reload; your party wakes back up at camp, at the cost of some argen to revive anyone who fell. Every corridor you walk gets mapped automatically, full-size and selectable, so you can fast-travel back through ground you've already covered instead of re-treading it turn by turn. Neither change touches the actual combat difficulty or the need to plan a careful route through a hostile floor — it just removes the parts of the classic dungeon-crawler formula that exist purely to punish a wrong turn rather than to test a decision. For a genre that has historically treated its own difficulty as a badge of honour, that's a legitimately welcoming redesign, and it's the main reason several reviewers point to Undernauts as a reasonable first dungeon crawler for someone who's bounced off the genre's harsher entries before.

The party-building side holds up its end too. Eight base jobs — including a tank-oriented Bulwark, a spellcasting Sorcerer and a stealth-leaning Ninja — can each be promoted with an item into either a specialised advanced version or a hybrid that borrows a skill from a different job entirely. It's enough to build a genuinely varied party rather than the four-or-five obvious archetype slots some crawlers settle for, though more than one review still asks for a bigger roster, which suggests the system's ceiling is a little lower than its floor is generous.

The control problem

Here's where the review turns from "well worth a look" to "worth a specific warning." A meaningful and consistent thread running through Undernauts' Steam review corpus — independent negative reviews, written months apart, describing the same specific problem — is that the PC control scheme is badly implemented. Key rebinding isn't available at all. The button used to back out of a menu is hardcoded to Backspace regardless of what you use to open that menu, which in a menu-driven genre where submenus are the primary interface is a genuinely disruptive default. Multiple reviewers separately report PlayStation controllers not registering input reliably, or not working at all, despite controller support being listed on the store page. This isn't a one-off complaint from a single frustrated player — it's the same specific set of issues recurring across reviews that otherwise range from lukewarm to genuinely positive about everything else the game does.

That matters more here than it would in a genre with lighter menu demands, because a dungeon crawler puts you in inventory, formation and skill menus constantly. A handful of Steam Deck users report the game working acceptably there, which suggests the underlying input handling isn't uniformly broken so much as poorly mapped for a mouse-and-keyboard setup specifically — cold comfort if that's how you're planning to play it. It's the kind of problem a patch could plausibly fix, and there's no sign in the review history that Aksys or Experience ever shipped one, which is its own quiet indictment of how much post-launch support a licensed niche crawler gets versus a bigger release with the same complaint.

Presentation

Undernauts doesn't try to compete on spectacle, and it's honest about that. Combat plays out in first person against static or lightly-animated Yomian portraits, with the party represented as a row of character art along the bottom of the screen rather than fully modelled bodies on either side of the frame — a presentation choice the genre has used for decades because it's cheap to produce and easy to read at a glance, not because it's impressive. Where the art direction earns its keep is in the Yomian designs themselves and in Yomi's environments, which lean into the setting's body-horror-adjacent, industrial-decay atmosphere rather than defaulting to generic fantasy dungeon dressing. It won't be a reason to buy the game on its own, but it doesn't undercut the writing the way flat, forgettable monster art would have.

Value

At its USD $59.99 Western launch price — NZ$76.49 at full price on Steam as checked today, with no discount currently active — Undernauts is priced like a mid-tier full release, and a number of Steam reviews, including ones that recommend the game, say plainly that it isn't worth that asking price. The game does eventually go on deep discount, and the value case gets considerably easier at that point: a genuinely long, forgiving dungeon crawler with a story worth paying attention to, for a fraction of its launch cost. There's no ongoing monetisation to weigh against the purchase either way — it's a single up-front price with no store, no currency and no add-on content sitting behind it, which at least means the value question begins and ends with the box price rather than compounding afterward.