Below

Why Capy’s long-awaited adventure is going dark for a while longer.

As president of Capybara Games, Nathan Vella has had his share of minor crises to manage. In February of this year, one hit rather closer to home. “My basement got destroyed in a flood,” he explains, matter of factly; several months on, it’s yet to be fixed. “We started peeling back the layers of how bad it was, and it got worse.” He seems remarkably calm about it, but then he currently has another delicate situation to deal with. “We always knew it was going to take us a while; we were just really poor at estimating how long it would take to get what we wanted done.” This time he’s talking about renovations of a different kind. Capy’s subterranean adventure Below had already suffered several delays when Vella confirmed at E3 that development was almost over, and the game was set for a late-summer launch. That’s no longer the case; we speak to him, finding ourselves in the unusual position of having played a build that has the poise and focus of a game nearing release, knowing that its creator is about to postpone it again.

Vella is, quite understandably, even more reluctant now to set a date and possibly miss another deadline. There is quite a lengthy explanation for why Below won’t be coming out for a little while yet, but it can be summed up fairly succinctly. “The whole reason why we’re delaying things is because…” Vella begins and then sighs. “We see what the game can be, and we don’t feel yet that it’s that.”