The Descent engine turned out to be unsuited for a role-playing game, leading to ballooning budgets and protracted delays.

Blackstaff informs the player that people have been disappearing mysteriously, and some return from Undermountain with frightening tales.

Descent to Undermountain was developed by Chris Avellone, Scott Bennie, John Deiley, Robert Holloway, and Steve Perrin.

"[3] The game was initially designed to include a networkable four-player mode,[3] but there was no time left to implement it.

[4] The decision to use the Descent graphics engine was cited as a design issue, as it required heavy rewrites to the code in order to support an RPG setting such as Undermountain.

Ultimately the "quick change" to Descent's rendering engine proved to be extremely challenging which exceeded the technical understanding of the corporate leadership who were resolved to predetermined delivery dates.

"[7] Julian Schoffel, in the Australian PCWorld, called the game "woeful", with the hope that the following release, Baldur's Gate, might "redeem" Interplay as a company.

[10] Next Generation rated it one star out of five, citing outdated visuals and a poorly designed player interface, though they said the character creation system is the best recreation of the Forgotten Realms universe in a video game to date.

[11] According to GameSpy, "Descent to Undermountain had only one virtue - it made everybody forget about Gorgon's Alliance and the entire previous two years of atrocious Dungeons & Dragons games.

"[12] Interplay acknowledged this poor reception with an easter egg in the computer role-playing game Fallout 2, released a year after Undermountain.