clickbliss

Unexplored is a rougelike with a focus on telling stories

by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Unexplored
  
• Developer- Ludomotion
  
• Publisher- Ludomotion
  
• Switch, PC
  

Before you start Unexplored the first thing you’ll see is a few words from a man at a pub. He’ll tell you a story about the dungeon you’re about to enter, and for a few drinks he’ll tell you a few more. This is Unexplored being upfront with its  intentions.

Most roguelikes are obsessed with the player story. They make their on the ever golden promise of emergent play–the idea that by jamming enough systems and variables into play they’ll eventually combine into a endless set of unique situations.

Unexplored is built in this same foundation, but proceeds with narrative as its first concern. More than the usual sets of enemies and situations, Unexplored is concerned with creating a history to each dungeon. It adds an archaeological aspect, connecting floors and laying out clues in writing.

There’s a more organic flow to its layouts. Dungeons are more than sets of rectangular rooms. They’re often connected by natural areas–caves, small forests or bodies of water. Each floor has its own set of switches and gates, asking you to return to areas and parse the relationship between them. At times you’ll even find clues that lead from one floor to the other.

This isn’t Gunpoint or Prison Architect–the connections between each area aren’t that complicated. But they form enough small connective tissue to give intention to each space. Areas can give off the feeling of a mechanism designed to protect the artifacts you’re searching for. Or maybe you’ll stumble across a library full of writing and records of the area.

There’s even a few storytelling touches wrapped into places like the character creation screen. By default starting a new game kept the same name as my previous character, by with “the second” or “the third” and so on added onto it, giving the suggestions of generations of a family continuing to attempt what their parents failed at.

This storytelling focus helps Unexplored build a sense of identity, since it’s otherwise very familiar. Combat plays in real time and uses a lock on and weapon cooldown system that gives it and interesting play of timing and positioning, but other aspects operate on all the familiar rogue-like rules. Potions are unidentified until you find more information on them or consume them, there’s an emphasis on traps and managing danger, and you’ll definitely be pushed into risky behavior. It adds some layers to exploration and allows a few surprises, but nothing beyond what other entries in the genre bring.

It’s PC origins are also felt in the interface of the Switch version. Unexplored, in a problem not uncommon to Switch ports, feels more or less like a direct translation without any proper concessions made to the more limited hardware. As far as load times and other aspects it’s passable, but control suffers a lot without a mouse. Combat and exploration are fine, but the moment the inventory comes into play it becomes and awkward mess.

Inventory can be brought up with several. buttons, one which stops time and one which doesn’t, and time resumes when you move or do particular actions, though it’s not always clear when. Moving objects, dropping them and other functions are mapped to certain buttons when the inventory is open. The buttons are shown near the bottom of the screen when available, but the amount of combinations made it difficult to remember and quickly perform basic inventory tasks. It meant a lot of awkward fumbling, sometimes during battle, which resultd in a lot of accidental weapon changes or dropping crucial items while being attacked.

It doesn’t help that the text is almost unreadable in portable mode. The font is clearly formatted for the big screen and there’s no option to change it. This would be a problem in any regular rogue-like, but especially so in Unexplored, which focuses so heavily on narrative.

These technical issues don’t keep Unexplored from being enjoyable, only less than ideal. Its snappy pace lends itself well to portable adventures, and being able to pick up and return at any time helps as well. There’s a certain appeal to the way it uses the tools of the genre to formulate a slightly more cerebral dungeon crawl. Unexplored is almost like a light fantasy novel in that way–something you take to disappear into another world while waiting. That makes the Switch version the hardcover you carry around because the paperback hasn’t been released.