Hey there and welcome back to another enormous map for Indie Explormer of the Week to uncover one traversal upgrade at a time. Our non-linear search action selection this time is Supraland: Six Inches Under, a standalone expansion for the inestimable Supraland (covered back in IGotW #297). As with its predecessor, it follows a civilization of sapient plasticine people in some kid's backyard as they deal with one disaster after another. Usually, some chump is ordained as the hero that will save everyone, and when the earth collapses trapping everyone underground that person turns out to be you: a blue-tinted plumber (as opposed to a red-tinted one, as that's already been done). Humorously, the hero from the previous game is still wandering around but is immediately sidelined with other pressing business despite already having all the upgrades needed to quickly resolve everything. The rest of the story is fairly slight: there's an underground settlement called Cagetown (it's built out of an old hamster cage) that's led by the Baron, who has been sucking up the fortunes of his permanently poor citizenry. Since his strata-based town system is currently standing in the way of the exit back to the surface you're required to visit various areas—a mine, a factory, a bank, a wealthy resort—for the upgrades needed to ascend through Cagetown.

If you're unfamiliar with Supraland, it has an exceptional grasp on how to do the explormer game format well in 3D and while Supraland: Six Inches Under ("SSIU" from here on out) mostly revisits the same upgrades from the previous game they find many more tweaks and puzzles to bring out new sides to those tools and abilities. A typical power-up for Supraland might include a tool that produces a purple beam that you can use to hook onto anything wooden (and, later, anything golden) and hookshot your way up to it; however, you can also use it to create a solid beam between two wooden surfaces and then walk across it to reach new areas, or conduct electricity through it to power nearby devices. It's endlessly inventive when it comes to applications for its power-ups, giving you some relatively tough environmental puzzles to solve before you can acquire the next upgrade and make further progress. The type of upgrades Supraland sends your way include many I've never even seen in other explormers: oddly enough, the most common explormer power-up—the double-jump—was one I only found in the post-game.

Just as appealing as the many exploration and traversal options is the game's aesthetic and sense of humor. Despite being simple Play-Doh people there's a lot of personality given to random NPCs in your path, largely through their dialogue which tends towards the humorously meta or referential and some amusing set-up/punchline situational comedy. An example of the latter comes after a long trek through the innards of a bank vault and its copious laser security systems where you eventually reach a room with a chest that you could see from outside the bank via a glass window. There's an NPC by that window that points out the chest to you on your first visit, but upon coming back to him with the chest's item he sympathetically tells you that he wished there could've been a better and easier way to get on the other side of the glass, gently tapping on it for emphasis only for it to immediately shatter. While the meta commentary might wear a bit thin after a while, the developers keenly understand their audience: there's a massive amount of post-game content built for completionist types, and the "beat the game" achievement even has written in its description "you're probably only around 50% done, right?" (I was, for the record, and I'd been pretty meticulous too). The aesthetic meanwhile is pure Honey, I Shrunk the Kids micro-sized goodness, turning LEGO bricks and other toys and yard detritus into enormous platforms to climb and obstacles to overcome. There's a surprising amount of matches lying around for some fire-based puzzles too, suggesting the human child (whom no-one acknowledges save through whispered legend, despite often being clearly visible and taking up a huge chunk of the horizon—a recurring joke from the first game) that owns everything down here maybe isn't being as closely supervised as they should.

If Supraland and this expansion have a weak link it's the combat, which isn't particularly exciting even when you gain more than just a pickaxe to fight with. There's a limited number of enemy types and most melees can be resolved by mashing attacks and keeping enemies stunlocked until their HP bar drains, not too dissimilar to the lackluster melee of the Elder Scrolls series. Some flying enemies first require that you bat their attacks back to them like Agahnim Tennis but you'll soon acquire an electricity gun that stuns them, dropping them out of the air for an easy kill, and the means of throwing the pickaxe like a boomerang which does the trick also. Some of the arena-like multi-monster melees can be tough but still not particularly compelling. SSIU was smart enough to change things up so that the combat is very limited and often relegated to optional rooms where there's some inessential reward up for grabs. Enemies also don't endlessly respawn in certain thoroughfare areas like they did in the first game, so now having to throw down is infrequent enough to be more of a welcome novelty than an ubiquitous irritation to deal with when you're trying to focus on solving a puzzle or finding a nearby secret cache.

I still adore this series and even if SSIU was really just more of the same in a slightly new environment with new puzzle variations I'm entirely fine with that. Between the novel upgrades and the smart ways the game builds its puzzles around them, along with its Levelord aesthetic and genial (if occasionally trolly, in an affectionate way) sense of humor, it's a series that immediately charmed me when I first played it late in 2022 and I've been looking for a reason ever since to get my upgrade-grabbin' mitts on this expansion. It's even proven to be fairly beefy at 10+ hours and that's just to finish the story; there's so much left to discover that I discovered that there were actually more chests left to unlock than had already been opened, reiterating again that I'm normally a really thorough completionist type when it comes to explormers (or... at least I thought... I was). With no more final boss fight to power up for and nothing left in the stores to buy, I'm not sure I absolutely need to raid all these chests for their now-useless contents, but... it's just that they gave me a checklist and a means of detecting whenever one is close by. I'm only human, goshdarnit. If you don't hear from me for a few days, well...

Rating: 5 out of 5.