The player controls the adventurer Sabreman as he jumps between platforms in a castle and its caverns to find an escape past the exit guardians.

Underwurlde is the second game in the series, between Sabre Wulf and Knight Lore, and released shortly before the latter for the ZX Spectrum in late 1984.

While the Commodore 64 version was similar to the original, reviews were mixed—one critic thought the title had aged poorly in the year between releases.

The player controls Sabreman, a pith-helmeted adventurer, as he jumps between platforms in a castle and its caverns to find a way to escape past the exit guardians.

[2] While Sabreman begins in a castle adorned with clocks, birds, and baskets, the character must also descend down into caverns through several successive vertical screens.

While Retro Gamer wrote that the sequel, Underwurlde, resolved this criticism by instead using a side view as a platform game,[2] The Stamper brothers claimed to have finished their third Sabreman title, the epochal Knight Lore, in advance of both of its predecessors,[2] although more recent analysis of the code used in the games has suggested this may have been an exaggeration as the routines found in Knight Lore are far more optimised.

Each of the magazine's three reviewers appreciated different features of Sabreman's navigation within the game, but mainly liked riding volcanic bubbles and being carried by birds.

Another reviewer compared Sabreman's jump to that of Bugaboo (The Flea) and added that the game's single difficulty level was adequately balanced.

[1] Another ZX Spectrum reviewer, Chris Bourne (Sinclair User), said that the game was fast, colourful, and akin to a "vertical Atic Atac".

Jaz Rignall said it was among the best arcade adventures on the Commodore 64 since it had the right balance of frustration and addiction to keep him playing the ZX Spectrum version for weeks.

Gary Liddon thought that the Commodore 64 version appeared "crude" compared to other releases for the platform, though perhaps par for the ZX Spectrum.

[5] The Computer and Video Games review of the Commodore 64 release judged otherwise: that the version was up to the developer's standards and worth the yearlong wait.

[18] "By today's standards," began New Zealand newspaper The Nelson Mail, "the likes of ... Underwurlde are so clunky and archaic that they are almost laughably impenetrable; strange relics from a bygone era that serve only to illustrate how far the industry has progressed.