Very often in the comments under the reviews of indie games on our site you can find users complaining about the graphics. “Pixel art already got!”, “This game would have normal graphics!”, “Why couldn’t it be done in 3D?!”. Well, the authors of the roguelike-RPG Sword of the Stars: The Pit listened to such wishes and transferred their project to full 3D, releasing a remake called The Pit: Infinity. But I’m not at all sure that this benefited the fantastic bagel.

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Same, right there. The plot of The Pit: Infinity, like the original Sword of the Stars: The Pit, can be put into a couple of sentences that will be shown to us at the very beginning of the game. Real Old School! Your planet is threatened by a pandemic of a terrible virus, the cure for which can be found somewhere on the lower floors of an abandoned alien base. Go hero, try not to die too often!

As in the original 2D game, you have three heroes at your disposal – an engineer, a soldier and a scout pilot. The first is loaded to capacity with all sorts of useful gadgets that allow you to open electronic locks, hack computers and decrypt messages, repair armor and weapons, sharpen knives and repair broken equipment. The soldier is physically strong, carries with him a good starting arsenal and knows how to handle weapons. Scout is an intermediate class, she is faster than her competitors, better with light weapons and able to restore health.

As in the previous game from Kerberos Productions, heroes gain experience for everything they do, whether it’s breaking into a weapon locker, fixing a food processor, making a sandwich, or killing monsters. By the way, due to the fact that the engineer has a lot of additional activities that are not available to other heroes, he gains experience faster. Like in Sword of the Stars: The Pit, in The Pit: Infinity, the hero needs to be fed from time to time, and if you eat infected or spoiled food, you can get poisoned or catch some kind of alien infection.

As in the previous part, there are many ways to die in The Pit: Infinity, but in this case, monsters will most often cause your death. Unlike the same Sword of the Stars: The Pit, in a dozen runs through the dungeon, my heroes never died of hunger or disease, more and more from the fangs, claws and blasters of the creatures inhabiting the Pit. As a rule, there is an abundance of food and medicines here, but there are always not enough cartridges.

When used, the weapon breaks, and here again, the engineer wins, who, with the help of adhesive tape and such and such a mother, can repair any spacesuit or gun. Playing as a soldier or a scout, you run the risk of being bare-knuckled against very powerful monsters at some point. In such a situation, it is easier to immediately stop the torment than to try to go lower.

Sword of the Stars: The Pit, like all classic roguelikes, was turn-based. When transferred to 3D, the game became a real-time first-person shooter. That’s just … The Pit: Infinity – a very bad shooter. It is simply unpleasant and inconvenient to shoot here. It seems that each shot is a separate move, and somewhere behind the screen, virtual cubes are falling, deciding how much damage the bullet fired by you will cause. Yes, most likely, this is exactly what it is, but it is completely incomprehensible why it was done in such an explicit form, complicating shooting. It would be much easier to leave the turn-based combat mode, just transferring the game to 3D. Now it turns out that there are too many delays and empty animations between the shooting phases, so you die more often not from the fact that you don’t know how to shoot, but from the fact that you are simply not allowed to shoot.

It is clear that the introduction of shooter mechanics and the transfer of the game to 3D was necessary for the implementation of online co-op, in which The Pit: Infinity looks quite funny. But I’m not sure that you can easily find a friend who will choose multiplayer in The Pit: Infinity instead of, say, free Destiny 2 or Apex Legends , which, by the way, are all right with the shooter part.

Another problem with The Pit: Infinity is the very graphics that seem to be the reason for this remake. Unlike the same Legend of Grimrock and Legend of Grimrock 2 , here you will find a very modest picture with plain fills and simple lighting. Boring monotonous corridors; tiny levels with repeating elements; effects of flames, smoke and shots, taken, it seems, from some free library. Amateur mods for DOOM at the end of the last century even looked more stylish.

Yes, we can say that in a good “bagel” graphics are far from the main thing, and this is true … but why then was it necessary to start all this fuss? Some games are better off staying in 2D, and The Pit: Infinity only confirms this thesis. Sword of the Stars: The Pit, with its 16-bit 2D graphics, felt more cohesive than the full 3D sequel. Empty corridors and angular monsters will have time to bore you in the first five levels. This game simply does not provide any incentive to continue downhill.

Il meglio è il nemico del bene – “the best is the enemy of the good.” The Pit: Infinity perfectly confirms this truth, expressed by Giovanni back in 1574.