The Pitch
Every layer buys time.
That's the tagline, and it's also the honest one-line summary: Underroot is an idle survival game about digging deep to keep a village alive one more day than it had any right to.
The short version
You're the lone digger of a village at the edge of the world, and something called the Maw is coming to eat it. You dig for the materials to wall it out, keep the people above ground fed, and when you die, the next digger picks up your shovel. It runs in your browser or on your PC, it keeps going while you're away, and it's free.
The longer version
The Maw advances from the right and eats the world one wall at a time. You can't kill it. All you can do is slow it down — dig, craft, stack walls, reinforce them, and buy the village another day. And there are real people up top who need feeding and sheltering. They're the reason you're down in the dark to begin with.
The longer a run goes, the hungrier the Maw gets. So this isn't a game you win by growing a number forever; it's one you lose eventually, and the whole point is how long you hold and what it costs you. When your digger finally falls, that isn't the end screen. Your lineage takes over, and someone keeps digging, on past the graves of the ones who came before.
What you actually do
- Dig to live. Mining isn't a side task. Every wall, every tool, every meal starts with what you haul out of the ground.
- Wall out the Maw. Build, stack, reinforce. It never stops getting stronger, so you can't either.
- Keep the village alive. Feed them, shelter them, grow their number. They pull their weight in return.
- Die forward. A death hands the shovel to the next generation — graveyard and all.
- Play around your life. It runs while you're gone. Drop in for an hour or for two minutes.
- Pay nothing, or pay what you want. Free in the browser or on PC (Windows and Linux), name-your-own-price.
Who made it
Underroot is a game by Swavvy AB. Play it free at underroot.se.