Screes to kill, barrels to smash, chests to open, and power-ups to grab. Just another day in the salt mines.

All the news on TV is bad, the economy stinks, and it seems like it’s getting harder and harder to find a low-cost evening of entertainment. Might we suggest some pleasant hack-and-slashery to unwind after a hard day at the office? Kivi’s Underworld is a single-player RPG that its developers call casual, but with 30 levels and more than 20 playable characters, there’s a lot of game here for your $20—enough to keep you happily slaying monsters, rescuing prisoners, and unraveling the story for days.

The linear plot follows Kivi, a lumen warrior who’s trying to defeat the malevolent dark elves, who were unleashed after some kind of mining mishap. Along the way, more characters join the cause, but you don’t play with a party as in other RPGs. This is pure hack-and-slash combat: You’re controlling one character through each level, trudging through a dungeon killing everything in sight while hunting for the level’s ultimate goal (a set of hidden items, a hostage needing rescue, and so on).

Each character class has different attributes and fights with a regular and special attack, but the game doesn’t require you to level them up separately. Instead, at the end of each stage you get skill points that you use to level up all the characters at once. It’s a great blend of variety and simplicity.

The levels feature tons of monsters to kill, plus dozens of power-ups, traps, hidden rooms, and locked doors. Finding the hidden rooms can be a frustrating matter of clicking every stretch of wall you walk by before tripping the trap doors, but hunting them all down pays off when you win more skill points at the end of a stage.

The controls couldn’t be easier—all you need is a mouse, although there are optional keyboard shortcuts too. And the old-school graphics look great, with resolutions from 800x600 to 1920x1200. Our only gripe with the presentation is the lame, repetitive music, but that’s easy to turn off.