Below | DEMO Alpha 0.5

BELOW is a colony management and exploration game set inside a vast underground silo. Build a home among its ruins, keep essential systems running, and lead your people into forgotten depths where survival and discovery go hand in hand.

Inspired by Silo, Fallout Shelter, and Oxygen Not Included, BELOW combines a growing colony simulation with exploration, lost technology, and an unfolding mystery.

A rebellion broke out on the upper levels. Then the staircase was destroyed.

You do not know what happened above you. You do not know who survived, who is still in control, or whether anyone is coming to help. Below, abandoned floors disappear into darkness, and floodwater conceals the deeper parts of the structure.

Your people have elected you to lead what remains of their community. A few inhabited floors, limited supplies, and ageing machinery are all you have to begin with. You must rebuild, provide for a growing population, and decide how much you are willing to risk to discover the truth.

Build a colony that works your way. Place equipment on a grid and shape the surrounding space with walls and doors. Create compact dormitories, sprawling workshops, growing areas, kitchens, clinics, and places to unwind. As you reclaim more of the silo, clear debris and turn abandoned interiors into useful spaces. Your layout matters: residents need to reach their workplaces, collect supplies, carry materials, and move between floors using the central spiral staircase.

Keep power and water flowing. Equipment needs more than an empty spot on the floor. Run cables and pipes through your colony to connect generators, batteries, water storage, and the machines that depend on them. Networks follow their actual connections: an isolated battery cannot support the rest of the colony. Balance production against demand, provide reserves for interruptions, and maintain the equipment keeping everyone alive.

Turn limited resources into a sustainable home. Early supplies buy you time, but they will not last forever. Recover scrap from the ruins and process it into spare parts in your workshop. Restore the mine entrance and assign residents to extract ore, giving you another source of material as salvage becomes harder to find. Every expansion competes for the same resources and the same workers.

Grow, cook, and feed your people. Hydroponics produces raw food that residents can eat when necessary, but relying on it comes at a cost to morale. Build a kitchen to prepare meals, stock meal counters, and give people somewhere to eat together. Cooking uses additional resources and labour, so better food means planning the whole chain—from growing crops to delivering the finished meal. Keeping farms, storage, kitchens, and dining areas close together can save valuable walking time.

Manage people with lives beyond their jobs. Every resident can take on any job. Assign work where it is needed and organise daily routines around work, recreation, and sleep. Watch inhabitants operate machinery, tend crops, carry supplies, rest in beds, and gather to talk or play. An empty workstation may mean its worker is sleeping, eating, travelling, or occupied elsewhere; keeping the colony productive means understanding those needs.

Make room for the next generation. Your population can grow naturally, and children eventually become working adults. More people bring new possibilities, but also more mouths to feed and beds to provide. You can enact birth restrictions, although controlling people’s lives has consequences for morale that grow over time.

Give residents a reason to stay hopeful. Survival alone does not create a content community. Cooked meals, comfortable housing, and recreational spaces help residents recover from daily life underground. Industrial noise makes some locations less suitable for rest. Neglect morale for too long and discontent can develop into strikes, destructive riots, or a direct challenge to your leadership.

Send expeditions beyond the lights. Dispatch a team of four residents to explore an unknown level. Expeditions take time, temporarily remove workers from your colony, and can return with injuries—or fewer people than you sent. Successful exploration reveals new spaces, recoverable supplies, and discoveries that may change your plans. Once a floor is known, organise the salvage work needed to make its ruined interiors usable.

Rediscover knowledge the silo has forgotten. Exploration can uncover artifacts from a more advanced past. Study them at a research bench to understand how they work and unlock new equipment for your colony. Some discoveries serve a more unexpected purpose: fragments of the old world can even bring games back to your computer.

Push back the water. Deep expansion eventually requires restoring the silo’s enormous drainage pump. Supplying it with power can expose submerged areas, but reaching farther demands increasingly greater production. Opening the depths becomes a major construction and engineering project—and an invitation to explore whatever has been hidden beneath the surface.

Between these demands, return to the keeper’s office and access its retro computer. Investigate corrupted records, examine clues, and piece together the history of a place whose original purpose may be less clear than its inhabitants believe. Locked doors and forgotten systems still keep their secrets.

BELOW is currently an early, browser-playable prototype of the demo. Mechanics, balance, visuals, and the tutorial are still evolving, and some things remain rough. Feedback, ideas, and stories from your playthroughs are very welcome.

Got an idea, found a bug, or just want to get in touch? =>belowgame@proton.me