Yes, professional studios can do amazing work. But the real heroes, to me, are modders and hobby devs like Kweepa. Kwee-who? He’s the one behind Unity Underground, a hefty Unity Engine remaster of Ultima Underworld. And for that, he gets a virtual hug from me. 😊

While triple-A publishers keep testing how far they can push their 70-dollar price tags, idealistic hobbyists (I call them superheroes) spend years working on something and then put it out for free. Sure, they usually don’t have much choice—we’re talking about people building something new on top of someone else’s IP. Modders and other bedroom creatives, basically, like the hundreds of people behind the brilliant TES Renewal Project.

And it’s often stubborn solo developers who spend years making big fan dreams come true. One of them is Kweepa, the creator of a Unity Engine remaster of Ultima Underworld. Yes, really: since March of this year, there’s finally a modernized version of the legendary dungeon crawler—or, let’s be honest, immersive sim. It’s called Unity Underground, and you can download it for free on itch.io.

You do, of course, need a digital original copy of the first Ultima Underworld—or it won’t run.

12 years late

According to Kweepa, he spent around eleven years working on Unity Underground—but the original is much, much older. Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, as the first game in the series is officially called, came out back in 1992. At the time, I had 18 candles on my birthday cake, and my main toy was a C64, that trusty old 8-bit computer from the ’80s.

The best you could still get for that was Ultima VI: The False Prophet (1988), so I didn’t even know Ultima Underworld existed (memo to self: maybe look at the keyboard while typing. The game is not called "Ultims Unfrteotlf"). My next stop was the good old PlayStation, where you actually could descend into the Stygian Abyss—just not until 1997, and only in Japan. If you’re interested in that version but don’t speak Japanese, there’s an English fan version out there. See? Superheroes. 😉

It actually took until 2004 before I saw The Stygian Abyss for the first time. And what do you think when you’re playing Doom 3 and Far Cry and suddenly stare at a dinosaur like this? I can tell you: "Cool, but an absolute nightmare to play." I still vividly remember my character’s two personalities: when he moved forward, he was an Olympic sprinter, reliably planting his face into every wall; when he turned left or right, however, he became a tortoise with a dash of tank DNA.

Even back then, the controls felt like a workout, and don’t even get me started on the clunky combat. So the Abyss and I never quite worked out, though I still found the thing fascinating. Every now and then, I’d ask a monopolistic search engine for "ultima underworld remake", but before March 2026, there was nothing to find.

No surprise there: you can’t just pour a classic like this into a modern engine and expect it to behave. On the technical side, almost every developer in the ’90s was doing their own weird little thing.

More than just a remaster, really

Officially, Unity Underground isn’t the remake I was looking for, because technically it’s "only" a remaster. But this modernized version changes a whole lot:

• No more 2D cardboard cutouts: all NPCs and enemies are now 3D models
• All inventory and in-game objects are fully modeled
• New sounds and particle effects
• Automatic resolutions up to 4K
• Frame rate capped at 60 FPS

There is one piece of bad news, though: Unity Underground supports neither mouse nor keyboard. So you control it with the power of your mind—no, but you do absolutely need a controller. If a commercial developer made that call, I’d probably take a running start and plant my bare butt right in their face. Here, though, I’m just grateful someone went to the trouble of making Ultima Underworld feel more at home in 2026.

If you’ve got an Xbox controller lying around, you’re definitely good to go. As usual with the Unity Engine, other controllers work too. Out of habit, I hooked my DualShock 4 up to my laptop, and the game controlled perfectly. Yes, laptop. Unity Underground doesn’t automatically keel over on portable hardware, which I honestly wasn’t expecting.

Everything around the actual game—intro, main menu, and the other cutscenes—mostly sticks to the original in the remaster. Only the original font has been replaced with a better one, and the character editor looks sharper now. The once rather chunky UI is a bit smaller, too; you can see examples in the screenshots below.

Thanks to Unity Underground, I’ll finally finish Ultima Underworld

As far as I’m concerned, those eleven years of work on Unity Underground absolutely paid off. Better visuals, punchier combat, massively improved playability: Kweepa’s remaster is basically everything I wanted from a fan remake.

The lack of classic mouse-and-keyboard controls? Okay, that was hard to swallow at first. Controller navigation is less convenient, no question. But the fixed button layout follows familiar standards, and after a reasonable adjustment period, it clicks. You also no longer have to drag inventory items onto objects in the game world. A key, for example, now slides into the keyhole automatically at the press of a button.

After The Stygian Abyss has been hanging around in my life for a solid 22 years, Unity Underground means I’ll finally be able to finish it. I mean, without having a nervous breakdown over constant wall-smooching. 🙂 And I’m ridiculously grateful for that. So grateful, in fact, that I’d happily pay a serious chunk of money for this remaster. To figure out how much, let’s make a few comparisons.

Doom: The Dark Ages costs 70 dollars. Would it be worth that to me? Not a chance—I wouldn’t even pay 30 dollars for it. What about Metal Gear Solid Δ: Snake Eater? 70 bucks for a game whose design has been around for decades? Hard pass. Silent Hill f? Ha, now that’s funny! And I love Silent Hill, just not at that price.

Would I pay 70 dollars for Unity Underground, then? Yes. I would. Even without AAA polish, even without mouse-and-keyboard controls. Because Unity Underground makes a big wish come true for me; and as it turns out, big wishes don’t always need big companies behind them.

Alex Nitschke

I’ve been into video games since 1982, spending 12 of those years in professional games journalism. I’ve also been developing games since the early ’90s, starting with a humble C64. Outside of code and keyboards, I’ve been a musician since 1989. Man, I have no idea how I can still be alive...

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