What's Good About Into The Pit
I like Roguelikes. I like First Person Shooters. Mix the two? As with Roboquest, I just go “say no more, fam” because it’s a flavour combination that goes together for me like peanut butter and chocolate. And with this week’s entry, Into the Pit, I think it might be a combination that I might just never get tired of.
The basic setup for Into the Pit is that you are a member of a family of lore hunters and mystics. After your correspondence with your cousin, Luridia stops under mysterious circumstances, you journey to a seemingly abandoned village to discover that they and the rest of the village’s population were taken into Hell via a portal that’s heavily guarded by demons. So it’s up to you to go in, rescue the town's inhabitants and get to the bottom of whatever the hell is going on. Its setup is a bit on the leaner side, but Into The Pit fleshes out its world with a combination of lore pages found throughout the various pit levels and conversations with the few remaining townsfolk who have boarded themselves inside for their own safety. It slowly but surely builds itself up to something that can only be described as delightfully eldritch”. Seriously, there’s some fucked up shit in here; from the enemy designs to even the way your hands look when casting magic. It’s gnarly stuff.
The game is structured through the same means as other roguelikes. You go through town talking to the townsfolk, buy upgrades from them that are needed to your overall progression, go into the pit itself, kill demons with magic, rescue villagers and die and repeat. It’s all very much of a particular rhythm at this point, especially if you played the standouts of the genre like Hades. But where Into the Pit sets itself apart is through the main gameplay. It’s a fast-paced arena-based first-person shooter where a lot of the powers you get are the standard spread of FPS weapons. Three shot bursts, rapid-fire, shotgun blasts, sniper shots, and more are all recontextualized in the form of the magic spells that you fire out of your left and right hands.
You can mix and match these powers at the start of each run or you could use two of the same. From there, you go through a selection of four out of eight randomized chambers in order to get to the lower levels. These then reward you with augments to your magic and give you currencies to spend on upgrades and so on and so forth. While the enemies are nice and varied, the act of shooting them always feels the same because of the way the weapons and the augments for them work, I just sort of felt like I was shooting the same dudes over and over again as a result. But it's still fun because you move at a million miles an hour and can even pull off sick, 360 headshots as if you were death on figure skates.
The main thing that interests me with all of this is the eventual rituals done to get to the later paths. As you progress further, you find newer ritual stones that change the biomes you are in. This gives you access to new weapons and modifiers, but also gives you new passives to slot in before the start that changes the way you play. My personal favourite of these is the second wind that lets you cheat death at least once. It’s a fun power and I enjoy it.
Into The Pit is good, but a bit underwhelming at the end of the day. I like a lot of what it does, but at the same time, I’ve had my brain occupied with other games that are either coming out or just came out. It's a good game Pass game, but I don't recommend it further than that, to be honest.
