• News

It Lurks Below from Diablo creator David Brevik hits PC today

Diablo creator David Brevik's first solo project, It Lurks Below, has exited Steam Early Access and is out on PC today.

Ozzie Mejia

May 29, 2019 10:25 AM

1

It's been a couple of years since Diablo creator David Brevik made the decision to exit Gazillion Games and get back into the world of game development. While the idea was to put a small indie team together, Brevik's vision eventually saw him undertake his next project on his own. After months on Steam Early Access, Brevik's newest game has reached its official release date, as It Lurks Below reached 1.0 on Wednesday morning.

For an idea of what It Lurks Below is about, let's travel back in time to GDC 2018 and hear a description from Brevik himself from our exclusive interview:

"I've played an absurd amount of Minecraft. I played a lot of this game called Starbound that I really liked. And I played a little bit of Terraria, but I had problems with the UI and I could just never get into it, but I've watched many people stream it for hours and hours. I really enjoy watching other people play it, but I just don't like to play it myself. And all of these games lack something, the depth that I was looking for. I love the world, the randomization, I love all of these things, but they just felt kind of shallow and goal-less. They're kinda sandbox-y games without much point.

For me, I wanted to put a structure on top of it, tell a little bit of a story, make it an RPG, give the thing depth, have character classes. So the idea of just taking that kind of Minecraft kind of gameplay and crossing it with Diablo, where I have random levels, random monsters, random loot, I just wanted to play that game. So that's where the idea came from, playing these games and looking for something a bit more RPG-ish."

Players will have eight classes to choose from when they first start their game. They are:

• The Bard: A musical minstrel who defeats enemies with his sword, shield, and songs!
• The Cleric: A ranged fighter who wards off enemies with a mace and can heal with a wand.
• The Enchanter: Stun enemies and then light them up with the power of lightning!
• The Necromancer: Pick up the skulls of fallen minions and use them to combat foes. Make your life easier by dousing them with poison.
• The Paladin: A virtuous fighter who uses two-handed weapons, while causing area-of-effect damage along consecrated ground.
• The Rogue: Uses stealth to sneak by enemies before striking at their weak point.
• The Warrior: A defensive tank who can absorb many hits while bashing enemies with powerful weapons.
• The Wizard: Uses the elements to take on legions of enemies, while using teleport to escape bad situations.

It Lurks Below can be played as a purely creative endeavor or it can be played as an action-RPG roguelike. Both the Survival mode and the Descent mode, the latter of which doesn't focus on survival elements like hunger, have a hardcore option that sprinkles in permadeath. More updates to the game are coming straight from Brevik himself, with multiplayer still on the table for a future update.

It Lurks Below is available now on Steam.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?