History VideoGame / UnderMine

* SlidingScaleOfIdealismVersusCynicism: ''Heavily'' on the side of Cynicism, to the point of BlackComedy: the kingdom's gold mines have been stopped by a horde of monsters, but the greedy King is too cheap to hire actual heroes, so he sends his own overworked peasants down to die in droves until the problem is fixed. His archmage, Arkanos, oversees the task, and makes no secrets of the fact that he sees the tide of peasants as expendible and essentially-equivalent to dirt. The peasants are outfitted with less-than-bare minimum, getting a rusty pickaxe and some scraps of cloth to start with, but can "lease" marginally-better gear from the Kingdom at [[AdamSmithHatesYourGuts increasibly-exorbitant prices]]. The cutesy MascotMook Pilfers will swipe every valuable the moment you're not looking, will happily rob your corpse blind the moment you die, the "nicest" ones are merely greedy shopkeepers, [[spoiler:and they make for some pretty nasty loan sharks if you happen to abuse the credit mechanic]]. The [=NPCs=] range from a cruel alchemist to a shameless con artist, and absolutely, positively '''no one''' cares when (not if) you die. Hell, most of them fail to even notice!

* AwesomeButImpractical: Many relics sound great on paper, but in actuality are either difficult to maintain or even potentially lethal. Glass Cannon, for example, doubles damage but at the cost of massively reducing maximum HP while Suneater grants huge damage bonuses but requires you to pick up items like Hyperstone or the Queen/Emperor's Crown to compensate for the lack of range and attack speed. On the difficult to maintain side of things, the Master Pickaxe allows you to deal swing damage at range with all relic and blessing improvements intact, but only so long as you're at max HP. This is made much easier by the addition of more sources of armor points in the full release, allowing the player to avoid taking damage when struck in combat. Even so, the Obsidian Knife, which doubles damage, breaks after taking so much as a single point of damage from any source and is thus all but unusable for long unless you have something like Soul Guard.

* DifficultButAwesome: It's hard to get the maximum usage out of some relics or items because of how demanding the conditions are to use them. The Obsidian Knife, for example, doubles your damage but will break the moment you get take any form of damage, even traps or use the Transmute stations. Absolution, meanwhile, will get rid of five curses instantly, but only if you have exactly five curses. Even if you have four or six curses, it won't work.
* DiminishingReturnsForBalance: Fortitude reduces damage taken by 10% per level until you start getting more than about six stacks, at which point it starts giving less reduction and eventually appears to cap out altogether.

** The first major boss, Selt, will spawn eggs at regular intervals and during her burying charge attack. The eggs are defenseless and can generally be taken out with one hit, but if left alone, they'll hatch bugs that are weak but capable of stunning the player at range.

* KillerRabbit: [[BanditMook Pilfers]] are normally annoying but harmless. Bomb Pilfers, however, drop a live bomb upon being driven off, which can seriously harm or kill an inattentive player. [[spoiler:There also exist "Hunter Pilfers", far-more-aggressive Pilfers who ''will'' attack the player for denying them their spoils.]]

** [[spoiler:Hunter Pilfers are jet-black with [[RedEyesTakeWarning dark-red eyes]], and will actually attack the player over their loot, rather than just try to swipe it from them.]]

** The Ursa Major relic sounds great at first, then you realize the max HP gained is only temporary. Then you realize it's actually more overpowered than you thought because the buff duration is refreshed each time you pick up more food. So if you get the right relics early on, it's very easy to snowball into having over 5000 HP by the end of the run, meaning you don't have to worry about defense anymore. It also helps that relics based on max HP do not go by percentage but rather the total amount, meaning once you get to the 5000 HP stage, you're also gaining around 200 damage from something as simple as the Knight Pendant. ''Furthermore'', relics that work off of ''low'' HP like Aigis kick in at percentages, meaning you can have major damage mitigation for over 1000 HP if you do somehow get that low.

** The demon Sho'guul offers some very powerful relics such as the Suneater and Mushroom, but getting them requires the player to take on several curses both minor and major, which can be crippling.

*** Suneater has the highest potential damage of any relic in the game, but this comes at the cost of removing all current blessings and preventing you from acquiring any more. In exchange, you gain a potent 8 damage for each blessing lost or that you would have gained, meaning you can get literally thousands or even tens of thousands of damage from this relic depending on when you acquire it. While the downsides of most lost blessings can easily be compensated for, this doesn't work too well for either HP or damage mitigation: There are only a few relics that boost maximum HP and you probably won't get the best one on a file with Suneater, while there are only two relics that reduce damage taken and they don't work as well as stacking Fortitude, which is considered essential on higher difficult levels.

You are a peasant, as the Archmage and King constantly remind you. Your task is to find the source of tremors shaking the Undermine - a deep, defunct mine swarming with monsters and traps. They have generously outfitted you with [[WithThisHerring some rags of clothing and a holey sack]]. They will even exchange any gold you find for better equipment - at an [[BlatantLies appropriate]] markup, of course.

Gameplay is a top-down dungeon crawler reminiscent of classic ''Zelda'' (or, more directly, ''VideoGame/TheBindingOfIsaac''). Players take control of one of a series of endlessly-generated, [[TheManyDeathsOfYou endlessly-dying]] peasants sent down into the monster-infested mines to die, scavenge gold, clean out the monsters, die, claim powerful relics, become blessed (and/or cursed!), [[RuleOfThree die]], and eventually, clear out the powerful bosses haunting the place. [[RunningGag Oh, and die. ]] A lot. Did we mention the dying? [[NintendoHard Because you'll be doing a lot of it.]]

Not to worry, though, as there are potent {{Macrogame}} elements in place that let you use some of your hard-earned loot to unlock newer, better items, as well as purchase permanent upgrades and abilities, ensuring that your next peasant has the potential to get marginally-farther than the last...until ''they'' inevitably die too, at least. Eventually, one of them may finally manage to make it to the source, defeat the great evil haunting the mine, and save the kingdom.

* AbilityMixing: Acquiring certain relics at the same time will combine them into something that typically has the effects of both at a possibly higher level plus a bonus on top. The Adventurer's Whip and Hat, for example, combine into the Golden Relic which guarantees the effects of the previous item plus gives an instant 10k gold. This is actually a bad idea with the Masa and Mune relics, however, as the combined Masamune ''doesn't'' have the effects of the previous relics but rather gives a chance for an instant kill against enemies. The raw 33% swing damage bonus from Masa is typically more valuable than a low chance at an instant kill.
* AchievementSystem: There are 95 achievements at present ranging from unavoidable ones like defeating bosses to ones relying on chance like 5 item duplications in a row to obnoxiously difficult ones like defeating bosses with zero upgrades.

* AwesomeButImpractical: Many relics sound great on paper, but in actuality are either difficult to maintain or even potentially lethal. Glass Cannon, for example, doubles damage but at the cost of massively reducing maximum HP while Suneater grants huge damage bonuses but requires you do pick up items like Hyperstone or the Queen/Emperor's Crown to compensate for the lack of range and attack speed. On the difficult to maintain side of things, the Master Pickaxe allows you to deal swing damage at range with all relic and blessing improvements intact, but only so long as you're at max HP. This is made much easier by the addition of more sources of armor points in the full release, allowing the player to avoid taking damage when struck in combat. Even so, the Obsidian Knife, which doubles damage, breaks after taking so much as a single point of damage from any source and is thus all but unusable for long unless you have something like Soul Guard.
* BalanceBuff

** The Master Pickaxe relic was indirectly buffed by adding in ''five'' relics that can prevent you from taking damage: Soul Guard, which reduces maximum HP slightly when hit instead, three pieces of armor and a Legendary relic. This makes it even more viable as an alternative to throw damage. It also goes nicely with the Obsidian Knife, which increases damage so long as you don't get hit.

* BanditMook: The Pilfers, the game's MascotMook, are a race of mysterious slimes that lurk in the dungeons. They'll pop up any time gold is dropped and will try to swipe it and run off, meaning the player needs to react quickly to keep their hard-earned cash. They'll even pop up in the middle of battle snag dropped loot while the player is still focused on surviving, too.
* BodyArmorAsHitPoints

** One of the most difficult achievements in the game to get, Cursebearer, requires the player to complete an Othermine run with the cursed shield relic. Every level you go down causes you to gain another major curse. If you get the wrong curse, the run can become simply impossible, forcing the player to give up and start again. However, should you manage it, the extremely powerful Paladin's Shield relic will be unlocked, which gives a ton of power ups including damage, attack speed and range. But if you're good enough at the game to unlock it, then you don't really ''need'' it anymore.
** Favor of the Queen is a special artifact that causes pilfers to reverse their normal behavior and bring you dropped gold instead of stealing it. You get to keep it until your peasant dies, at which point you have to go get another one. Sounds nice, but to get it you have to spend 100k gold to enter the Contested Bog, defeat the boss, start a new run, spend another 100k, never hit a pilfer on the way to entering the Bog again, do special puzzle rooms and finally meet with the pilfer queen, who will then give you the artifact. Annoyingly roundabout and also so expensive that you obviously don't even need it: If you could afford to get it, you clearly don't care about the tiny amount of gold pilfers will manage to nab from you.
* BreakableWeapons: The Obsidian Knife relic gives a double damage bonus, but breaks if you take damage yourself. If you have armor, Nullstone or Soul Guard, you can delay or prevent this demerit.
* {{Cap}}
** Fortitude grants 10% damge reduction per level and caps out at 75% damage reduction from almost all sources, meaning level eight. Going beyond this is possible but accomplishes nothing. It does stack with Hoodie's Pillow and Gordon's Tunic, however.

* ChallengeRun: After beating Seer once you can take optional penalties to make the game harder for yourself, such as applying the Siegfried's curse mechanic from Othermine or stripping all your upgrades.
* ChangingGameplayPriorities
** The thrown pickaxe is very useful early on because it only does slightly less damage than the swung pickaxe but is a lot safer. However, after acquiring more upgrades and unlocking more relics the swung pickaxe will ''far'' outpace it in damage as many of the most powerful relics in the game only affect melee damage and it just straight up gets more benefit from upgrades. It doesn't help that melee attacks can hit multiple enemies, but the thrown pickaxe generally won't unless you have certain relics, and even this has downsides such as delaying the time it takes to get your weapon back.
** Early in the game relics like the Sewing Kit (full gold retention on death) and Golden Popcorn (chance to double gold when it lands) are highly valuable as upgrades get expensive and you always have stuff at the shop to buy. However, after you've gotten some gold upgrades and can reach later levels safely, suddenly they decrease in value while relics like the Simple Chest to increase shop stock become more desirable in their place now that you can easily clear out the shop. Before, you wouldn't have had the money to get it anyway.
** A natural result of the game's diverse selection of Relics and effects, too. As an example, Soul Guard minimizes damage in exchange for converting it all to Max HP damage. This means food becomes worthless, and ways to continually raise Max HP become important - but items that rely on full health, like the above Master Pickaxe, become ''godly.'' Other relics such as the Cosmic Egg lose all value later in the run while relics like the Obsidian Knife become ''more'' valuable because you're more likely to have something like Nullstone, Soul Guard or at least one of the numerous armor granting relics.
* ChestMonster: Some chests are actually mimics in disguise and will try to kill you when you open them. Defeating them releases the normal contents of the chest. Chests that require keys or bombs to open are exempt from this, as are cursed chests. Unlike chests, however, mimics will not drop the bonus items granted by Leftovers or Spare Ordnance. Unlike normal chests with make golden sparkles, mimics will sparkle red, making it a good idea to attack them rather than try opening them. On the plus side, this will also allow you to reach 'chests' that are otherwise meant to be inaccessible: If you can reach the mimic with a ranged attack of some sort, it will jump over to you while crossing any barriers in the way.
* CombatParkour: The gameplay seems difficult to survive until you realize that spamming jump in combat makes it impossible for most enemies to hit you except when you land. This doesn't work as well on certain enemies such as the worms that spew spikes from the ground as they're only vulnerable for a few seconds at a time before moving elsewhere to attack. If you jump randomly, you may not have time to reach them before they move somewhere else and if you dodge in the wrong direction you'll just land on the spikes.
* CursedWithAwesome
** Some curses have situational effects that can actually be very valuable. For example, there are curses that require you to use HP to buy items or open locked doors instead of keys. Not only does this save gold and keys, it also lets you get those items and doors opened ''for free'' if you have something like the Nullstone. In areas like the Contested Bog where prices are sky high, this is the best way to reasonably use the shops without bankrupting yourself: Simple keys and bombs cost nearly a thousand gold apiece, let alone relics. But make sure you have that damage negation: The HP cost in that area will ''also'' be in the thousands range, meaning you ''will'' kill yourself if you buy things without thinking.

* DeliberateInjuryGambit
** Some relics directly ''encourage'' otherwise bad decisions. The Inverter and Kurtz's Stash, for example, have the player rewarded for going out of their way to gather curses. There are also rooms that require a 'sacrifice' ie. walk onto spikes to make treasure appear.

* DidntThinkThisThrough: [[spoiler: Arkanos's EvilPlan is to let the peasants do the job of weakening the god Din, then swoop in to steal Din's power for himself. Problem is, Din is a ''god'', and the peasants can't actually kill him - though they ''do'' impress him in the attempt. When Arkanos then shows up and tries to make demands of him, Din...does not react favorably.]]

* EarlyGameHell: The early parts of the game are definitely the hardest as you have only one potion slot, no altars or upgrades, minimal shops and little in the way of gold or thorium. You also don't know yet what relics are good, enemy attack patterns, how to dodge or how to time your attacks. So new players might die multiple times over before even facing the first boss, but after defeating her then proceed on through the next two or three without too much struggle. The difficulty does jump in the shimmering caverns and molten core, but resource acquisition also jumps dramatically and players have the basic beats down by this point.
* EnemySummoner
** The first major boss, Selt, will spawn eggs at regular intervals and during her burying charge attack. The eggs are defenseless and can generally be taken out with one hit, but if left alone they'll hatch bugs that are weak but capable of stunning the player at range.
** Ponzu's main ability is to shed its scales and turn them into insect monsters, which is what the player fights throughout the Shimmering Caverns. It continues doing so during the actual boss fight, but only as one of its normal attacks along with ice breath, bombs and green wave attacks to push away melee attackers.
* EvenEvilHasStandards: Even though Arcanos is clearly an ass who doesn't care if the peasants live or die, he still reprimands Lilyth for disrespecting their deaths by saying they deserve ''some'' respect for the work they're doing.

* HelpfulMook: Some enemies are pretty convenient to have around. Bobos, Bombadiers, Lurkers and Throwbos can all break walls and rocks for you, helping you save bombs, and are easily manipulated into doing so. Tickers, Bomb Pilfers, Loaded Rats and Engineers technically can as well, but are harder to position. However, even these will at least reveal breakable walls. Glimmerweeds are a bit of a middle case because while they can be trigger to attack as you please, they move very slowly and are hard to position in a helpful manner. Generally, you just have to hope that whatever they happen to break has a secret for you.
* JerkWithAHeartOfGold: Toadvine constantly insults both the peasant and Bathcat, but despite this, [[spoiler:he willingly takes a fatal attack to save the latter.]]
* JunkRare

** The demon Sho'guul will grant you legendary relics in exchange for accepting curses. The can't be acquired in any other way. However, some of them are unfortunately more dangerous than they're worth like the Karmic Scales or Doom Blade. Some such as Tsar Bomba aren't valuable for normal gameplay, but can be situationally very useful for things like bomb runs.

* KillerRabbit: [[BanditMook Pilfers]] are normally annoying but harmless. Bomb Pilfers, however, drop a live bomb upon being driven off, which can seriously harm or kill an inattentive player. [[spoiler: There also exist "Hunter Pilfers", far-more-aggressive Pilfers who WILL attack the player for denying them their spoils.]]

** [[spoiler: Hunter Pilfers are jet-black with [[RedEyesTakeWarning dark-red eyes]], and will actually attack the player over their loot, rather than just try to swipe it from them.]]
* {{Macrogame}}: Most everything is dropped on death, but you keep a (variable based on several factors) amount of your gold, as well as secondary resource called Thorium, which can both be spent on new items and relics (which can then be found in future runs), permanent upgrades to base stats like damage and health, supplemental gameplay powers (like a sprint while out of combat, or the ability to see enemy health bars), and upgrading the shops found in runs.
* MagikarpPower
** The Ursa Major relic sounds great at first, then you realize the max HP gained is only temporary. Then you realize it's actually more overpowered than you thought because the buff duration is refreshed each time you pick up more food. So if you get the right relics early on, it's very easy to snowball into have over 5000 HP by the end of the run, meaning you don't have to worry about defense anymore. It also helps that relics based on max HP do not go by percentage but rather the total amount, meaning once you get to the 5000 HP stage you're also gaining around 200 damage from something as simple as the Knight Pendant. ''Furthermore'' relics that work off of ''low'' HP like Aigis kick in at percentages, meaning you can have major damage mitigation for over 1000 HP if you do somehow get that low.

* MookMaker: There are several enemy types that don't actually try to hurt you directly but instead can either create enemies directly or set down traps. Drudes are one of the earliest example as they can each have a maximum of two Vilepots at a time, which will hop at you and spit poison in an area.
* MutuallyExclusivePowerUps
** There are unique Swing, Throw and Bomb relics that can only be used one at a time per slot. For example, you can't have both Guidance and Chakram at the same time for your thrown weapon, nor Golden Powder and Bishop's Bomb. However, unlike throw relics, there are actually several bombs that combine with other bombs, such as Golden Powder and Lightning Bomb combining into M.E.G.A Bomb, which can turn enemies into gold. However, at the moment, there is actually only one unique Swing relic, the Vorpal Blade.

** 108 Beads used to heal 50 HP every time you prayed or underwent penance. With Sylph, Devotion and Holy Guacamole, this would add up to 600 HP for every floor that naturally spawned an altar and 300 for anything like an altar in a bottle or a secret room that contained just one. This was dropped down to a more reasonable 35.
** The Plunder King was nerfed in the first major patch after his release: His attack box was reduced, the number of minions was reduced and the poison duration was lowered. Before this, he was significantly harder than any other boss in the game.
** Ursa Major, instead of allowing for infinite HP, now caps at 400 and only last 100s instead of 120s.
* NerfArm

** Sometimes at the start of a floor you can find a special orb with a number on it. Picking it up sets your HP to one until you've entered a certain number of new rooms without dying, at which point your health recovers back to normal. If you can clear all those rooms without taking any damage, you get a reward. Fail, and you obviously die and have to start your run over. Making things more difficult is that these challenge orbs mostly seem to appear in the dungeons, which have enemies that damage you if you strike them at the wrong time, making it difficult to use certain relics such as the Phantasmal Axe.
** After defeating the final boss, a new familiar unlocks that causes almost entirely negative effects towards the player, such as healing enemies, poking spider eggs to release more enemies and annoying Bobos, an enemy in the first dungeon that only attacks the player after being attacked first. It also cannot be used alongside other familiars.

* NoodleImplements: Some relics are of... questionable design. Behold, the mighty Lunchbox, [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin allowing the wielder to carry food along with them]]. And yet, strange as they are, some of these weird relics are also really useful. The petrified rock, for example, massively increases the rate at which you find items from blowing up rocks. If you have it when you find one of the rooms that's filled to the brim with rocks, you can easily find ''dozens'' of bombs, keys, talismans and even a few potions. If you've got a Popcorn potion or two? You can go from zero keys/bombs to the cap of 99.

* NoSell
** Certain niche relics don't have much use in just moving around, gathering treasure or killing bosses, but they ''do'' allow you to negate certain hazards or completely shut down certain enemies. Wayland's Boots, for example, are pretty useless except that they make you immune to the spikes of one of the more annoying recurring enemies. Galoshes remove the mild risk posed by oil slimes by stopping them from slowing you down. Grimhilde's Mirror allows you to reflect ranged attacks instead of having to dodge them, allowing you to deal damage and spend more time on the ground fighting rather than dodging.
** The Doll blocks the next few curses from hitting you. Ara applies a single use curse block each time you pray at an altar. For the latter, this buff is removed the next time you pray as you use it to block the minor curse praying gets you, but can also be used elsewhere to block a major curse from cursed chest/lanterns before heading back to pray again.
* NotCompletelyUseless

** Some of the bomb based relics look pretty useless at a glance, which may cause the player to overlook them. However, once a number have been unlocked, you can get combinations like having an immunity to friendly bombs, increased bomb damage per kill, increased damage per number of bombs and then stuff like having temporary bonus bombs or regaining bombs after killing an enemy. Then, you get a unique bomb relic and have effects like massive range or healing every kill. This makes a bomb based run a perfectly viable strategy if you can get the right relics, even letting you oneshot bosses like Mortar.
** Wet Blanket is a fairly situational item which is typically better off transmuted unless you're a careless player, but it's very helpful against Seer as it's very difficult to avoid all the fire damage in that room.
* NotTheIntendedUse: Many players note that they use the Cursed Altar Room not to store a relic for a later run or to create the Masamune but rather simply drop a horrible relic like Seer's Blood so that it doesn't take the place of something more useful.
* ObviouslyEvil: Lilyth, appears to be a horned demon found in a prison talking about her dark god, is about as obviously evil as you get. [[spoiler:But she does pull a HeelFaceTurn.]]
* ObviousRulePatch: The bonus area, Contested Bog, is absolutely filled with enemies that cannot be effectively fought in melee, at least without ''very'' high levels of Cleave. Melee typically has more support relics and better damage scaling, so as players get more familiar with enemy attack patterns and the game in general they often use throws less and less often. But in the bog, there are enemies that become invulnerable when you get anywhere ''near'' melee range, enemies that cause a short ranged explosion of spikes when struck, enemies that the leave long lasting poison trails in their paths and so on to force the player to at fight at range at least a ''little.'' The boss of the area also hits like a truck, but notably near exclusively attacks by simply jumping at you, making it much safer to hit him from afar and give yourself more time to dodge.
* OneStatToRuleThemAll: In higher summoning levels the most important stat is damage reduction, meaning you need to stack up Fortitude whenever you can as well as make sure to grab the two relics that halve elemental and physical damage respectively.

** One achievement is only available during the tutorial and involves taking a bomb the game gives you while explaining mechanics, heading back to the entrance and using it to destroy a wall with a hidden entrance in it. The game hasn't actually told you that hidden rooms exist at this point, nor that there is anything special about this wall. It's only once you've gotten inside that you learn about this feature of the game. If you've already completed the tutorial floor? Too bad, you can never return to that version of Goldmine 1. Fortunately, once you know about this achievement it's very easy to simply start a new file, blow up the wall, and grab the 'treasure' inside, which isn't anything valuable, useful or unique.
** Unexpectedly averted at one point. When you first unlock Lilyth, she drops three blessing recipes you can pick up and they'll immediately be added to altars from then on. You don't actually have to do so, however, and may not ''want'' to given that there's a limit to how many blessings can show up on an altar at one point. So you could choose to pick up none, one or two if you don't like one of them, but the blessing can actually show up as a normal recipe when proceeding through the game, at which point it will once again be automatically added into the altar.
* PowerAtAPrice

*** Duplicator, for example, causes two relics to spawn instead of just one, but once you pick one up the other is destroyed. If one room contains, say, Holy Guacamole and Inverter, you may have a difficult choice on your hands.

*** Suneater has the highest potential damage of any relic in the game, but this comes at the cost of removing all current blessings and preventing you from acquiring any more. In exchange, you gain a potent 8 damage for each blessing lost or that you would have gained, meaning you can get literally thousands or even tens of thousands of damage from this relic depending on when you acquire it. While the downsides of most lost blessings can easily be compensated for, this doesn't work too well for either HP or damage mitigation: There are only a few relics that boost maximum HP and you probably won't get the best one on a file with Suneater while there are only two relics that reduce damage taken and they don't work as well as stacking Fortitude, which is considered essential on higher difficult levels.

* PowerUpLetdown
** There are many relics available from the start, more than can be unlocked over time and also secondary effects like blessings. However, many of these actually kind of suck and may even be more dangerous to the player than the enemy, meaning they're better off ignored or transformed into something else if possible. As the game continues you may realize that unlocking a certain relic or blessing was actually a bad idea because it makes it harder to find something more valuable. The large ember, for example, only does a tiny amount of passive damage around the player when you really want to be killing things in only one or two hits and the glaive makes your thrown pickaxe slightly larger, but won't actually hit harder or strike more enemies.

* ResurrectiveImmortality: The Ancients, some of whom aren't actually ancient at all, have their existence tied to summoning stones. As soon as they are all defeated, once someone lifts the summoning stone they all come back to life. It's unclear what purpose they serve, but apparently they are meant to be regularly defeated and revived.

* SchizophrenicDifficulty: You're going to die a few times on your first clear of the Undermine. The bosses grow slowly in difficulty until you reach the hardest boss, Seer, who is difficult to even hit safely, has wide ranging attacks and inflicts burns to keep hurting the player. Once he's beaten though, suddenly the game is much easier while you stack up new relics, familiars, blessings and upgrades. Eventually, however, the game gets loopy with difficulty and the first boss will become likely the most difficult because you won't have the exponentially powerful bonuses you'll have later on when you get to Selt.

** One of the best relics in the game has no big fancy effects, nor does it improve damage. Nope. All the Mushroom does is increase your maximum HP by one per enemy killed while healing an equal amount at the same time, an effect carried by another very powerful relic, Hungry Ghost. Given that an average floor has dozens of enemies, this means if it's acquired early then it can easily result in the player having thousands of HP.
** Spare Ordnance, a completely ordinary common relic, has no direct combat use. All it does is let you find a bomb inside every chest you open, even trapped chests. Given that it's not at all weird to find several chests per level, this means you also get several free bombs per level on top of whatever treasure was already there. It also means that it is always worth using a bomb to reach or open any chest you see as you will at least break even. Even locked chests will allow you to at least break even on number of total items gained. Further, the bomb inside the chest can actually be a bomb bag, meaning three bombs instead of just one. With this in mind, acquiring it early allows you to never really have to worry about whether you should use a bomb or not.
* SkippableBoss: At the moment, every boss apart from the Rock Mimic and Seer can be skipped, at least temporarily. Selt can be skipped by defeating Bathcat and Toadvine instead, Mortar by receiving a staggering number of major curses, Noori by surviving an early attack from Ponzu and Ponzu himself by simply paying to enter the current final dungeon. The Rock Mimic, however, has to be defeated to progress in the game and there is no way to skip past Seer. This isn't necessarily easier, however: The Scaled Invasion is actually a harder fight than Noori and the curses gained from skipping Mortar are likely to put an end to your run quite quickly. And you'll still have to do them ''eventually.''
* SlidingScaleOfIdealismVersusCynicism: ''Heavily'' on the side of Cynicism, to the point of BlackComedy: the kingdom's gold mines have been stopped by a horde of monsters, but the greedy King is too cheap to hire actual heroes, so he sends his own overworked peasants down to die in droves until the problem is fixed. His archmage, Arkanos, oversees the task, and makes no secrets of the fact that he sees the tide of peasants as expendible and essentially-equivalent to dirt. The peasants are outfitted with less-than-bare minimum, getting a rusty pickaxe and some scraps of cloth to start with, but can "lease" marginally-better gear from the Kingdom at [[AdamSmithHatesYourGuts increasibly-exorbitant prices.]] The cutesy MascotMook Pilfers will swipe every valuable the moment you're not looking, will happily rob your corpse blind the moment you die, the "nicest" ones are merely greedy shopkeepers, [[spoiler: and they make for some pretty nasty loan sharks if you happen to abuse the credit mechanic.]] The NPC's range from a cruel alchemist to a shameless con artist, and absolutely, positively '''no one''' cares when (not if) you die. Hell, most of them fail to even notice!

* UselessUsefulSpell

** Two of the worst relics in the game, the Large Ember and Galoshes, had a buff to allow the former to light torches and cook food and the latter to make you invulnerable to electrified water. This makes the Large Ember functionally equivalent to the Salamander Tail. Other relics were buffed at the same time, such as allowing Mirror Shield to retain the projectile deflection of Grimhilde's Mirror, which was generally considered superior to a passive projectile defense.

* CombatParkour: The gameplay seems difficult to survive until you realize that spamming jump in combat makes it impossible for most enemies to hit you except when you land. This doesn't work as well on certain enemies such as the worms that spew spikes from the ground as they're only vulnerable for a few seconds at a time before moving elsewhere to attack.

* MagikarpPower: The Ursa Major relic sounds great at first, then you realize the max HP gained is only temporary. Then you realize it's actually more overpowered than you thought because the buff duration is refreshed each time you pick up more food. So if you get the right relics early on, it's very easy to snowball into have over 5000 HP by the end of the run, meaning you don't have to worry about defense anymore. It also helps that relics based on max HP do not go by percentage but rather the total amount, meaning once you get to the 5000 HP stage you're also gaining around 200 damage from something as simple as the Knight Pendant. ''Furthermore'' relics that work off of ''low'' HP like Aigis kick in at percentages, meaning you can have major damage mitigation for over 1000 HP if you do somehow get that low.

** Two of the worst relics in the game, the torch and galoshes, had a buff to allow the former to light torches and the latter to make you invulnerable to electrified water.

* BodyArmorAsHitPoints: When you start the game, the tunic, which serves as your HP, starts at 200. Subsequent upgrades give 20 HP each time, with the price going up more and more. The final total is 500 max HP and 165,350 gold needed to fully upgrade it.

* BodyArmorAsHitPoints:

* AntiFrustrationFeature: There's an achievement for defeating bosses with no upgrades acquired, which would be LostForever on your file if you happened to pick up any, including the one that the game strongly urges but does not force you to pick up during a cutscene. It's also lost if you pick up an upgrade that doesn't actually affect combat such as increasing shop stock, a bomb upgrade to destroy special blue blocks or even getting boots to let you walk faster out of combat! This achievement is made accessible once again in the full release of the game by choosing to take a special [[NerfArm hex]] to remove all important upgrades. Not all upgrades, mind you, meaning it's apparently fine to pick up upgrades that simply make things easier but don't improve combat ability like the Glasses, which allow you to see enemy health bars.

* LivingShadow: The boss monster Noori looks like little more than a purple-edged cloud of darkness. With teeth.

* LostForever
** There's an achievement for skipping bosses by going through certain events or special battles, but these are only actually available during your first run because the events no longer trigger after that. If you simply defeat each boss before heading onward, you're locked out of these achievements permanently. This issue was [[AntiFrustrationFeature fixed]] in the full game release.
** One achievement is only available during the tutorial and involves taking a bomb the game gives you while explaining mechanics, heading back to the entrance and using it to destroy a wall with a hidden entrance in it. The game hasn't actually told you that hidden rooms exist at this point, nor that there is anything special about this wall. It's only once you've gotten inside that you learn about this feature of the game. If you've already completed the tutorial floor? Too bad, you can never return to that version of Goldmine 1. Fortunately, once you know about this achievement it's very easy to simply start a new file, blow up the wall, and grab the 'treasure' inside, which isn't anything valuable, useful or unique.
** Unexpectedly averted at one point. When you first unlock Lilyth, she drops three blessing recipes you can pick up and they'll immediately be added to altars from then on. You don't actually have to do so, however, and may not ''want'' to given that there's a limit to how many blessings can show up on an altar at one point. So you could choose to pick up none, one or two if you don't like one of them, but the blessing can actually show up as a normal recipe when proceeding through the game, at which point it will once again be automatically added into the altar.

* {{Cap}}: Fortitude caps out with eight blessings, netting you a 75% damage reduction from almost all sources. Going beyond this is possible but accomplishes nothing.

* BraggingRightsReward: One of the most difficult achievements in the game to get, Cursebearer, requires the player to complete an Othermine run with the cursed shield relic. Every level you go down causes you to gain another major curse. If you get the wrong curse, the run can become simply impossible, forcing the player to give up and start again. However, should you manage it, the extremely powerful Paladin's Shield relic will be unlocked, which gives a ton of power ups including damage, attack speed and range. But if you're good enough at the game to unlock it, then you don't really ''need'' it anymore.
* BreakableWeapons: The Obsidian Knife relic gives a 100 damage bonus to your attacks, but breaks if you take damage. If you have armor, Nullstone or Soul Guard, you can delay or prevent this demerit.

* SimpleYetAwesome: One of the best relics in the game has no big fancy effects, nor does it improve damage. Nope. All the Mushroom does is increase your maximum HP by one per enemy killed while healing an equal amount at the same time, an effect carried by another very powerful relic, Hungry Ghost. Given that an average floor has dozens of enemies, this means if it's acquired early then it can easily result in the player having thousands of HP.

** Some very rare potions and relics are basically worthless or even dangerous, such as the Witch's Brew. Don't even bother picking it up unless you're bored and want to play with the Inverter.

** A natural result of the game's diverse selection of Relics and effects, too. As an example, Soul Guard minimizes damage in exchange for converting it all to Max HP damage. This means food becomes worthless, and ways to continually raise Max HP become important - but items that rely on full health, like the above Master Pickaxe, become ''godly.''

* {{Cap}}: After a certain point, many blessings no longer provide any benefit no matter how much you continue raising them. After eight stacks of Fortitude, for example, there's no point to grabbing more.

** There are unique Swing, Throw and Bomb relics that can only be used one at a time per slot. For example, you can't have both Guidance and Chakram at the same time for your thrown weapon, nor can your bombs heal you ''and'' drop fire on the floor.

** The very powerful Transmutation Bomb was made into a legendary relic in the middle of development. Having access to as many transmutes as you want was kind of game breaking, so it had to at least become much harder to get.

* NoodleImplements: Some relics are of... questionable design. Behold, the mighty Lunchbox, allowing the wielder to gather ancient food sitting in the bottom of chests. And yet, strange as they are, some of these weird relics are also really useful. The petrified rock, for example, massively increases the rate at which you find items from blowing up rocks. If you have it when you find one of the rooms that's filled to the brim with rocks, you can easily find ''dozens'' of bombs, keys, talismans and even a few potions. If you've got a Popcorn potion or two? You can go from zero keys/bombs to the cap of 99.

* DishingOutDirt: Selt, (the) Lord of Sand, occasionally traps the player in a ring of raised rocks. It's too high to walk out of, but ''jumping'' is quite another thing.

* AwesomeButImpractical: Many relics sound great on paper, but in actuality are either difficult to maintain or even potentially lethal. Glass Cannon, for example, doubles damage but at the cost of massively reducing maximum HP while Suneater grants huge damage bonuses but requires you do pick up items like Hyperstone or the Queen/Emperor's Crown to compensate for the lack of range and attack speed. On the difficult to maintain side of things, the Master Pickaxe allows you to deal swing damage at range with all relic and blessing improvements intact, but only so long as you're at max HP. This is made much easier by the addition of more sources of armor points in the full release, allowing the player to avoid taking damage when struck in combat.

* {{Nerf}}: The very powerful Transmutation Bomb was made into a legendary relic in the middle of development. Having access to as many transmutes as you want was kind of game breaking, so it had to at least become much harder to get.

You are a peasant, as the Archmage and King constantly remind you. Your task is to find the source of tremors shaking the Undermine- a deep, defunct mine swarming with monsters and traps. They have generously outfitted you with some rags of clothing and a holey sack. They will even exchange any gold you find for better equipment- at an [[BlatantLies appropriate]] markup, of course.

Gameplay is a top-down dungeon crawler reminiscent of classic Zelda (or, more directly, TheBindingOfIsaac.) Players take control of one of a series of endlessly-generated, [[TheManyDeathsOfYou endlessly-dying]] peasants sent down into the monster-infested mines to die, scavenge gold, clean out the monsters, die, claim powerful relics, become blessed (and/or cursed!), [[RuleOfThree die]], and eventually, clear out the powerful bosses haunting the place. [[RunningGag Oh, and die. ]] A lot. Did we mention the dying? [[NintendoHard Because you'll be doing a lot of it.]]