Most of the time, balance is a good position to strive for. Sure, sitting on the fence gets a bad rep, but maybe that’s just because people haven’t seen the muck lying about on either side of the fence. If you don’t want to get your shoes messy, ignore the jibes and sit on that fence all you want. Just not on the pointy part.
In that vein, here’s my attempt to restore parity. In my last column, I spoke about the indie game crowdfunding scene being perfect hunting grounds for grifters to ply their trade and get some rubes to part with their rubles. Now let’s talk about some games that were actually released.
Unrest is a game developed by Jaipur-based upstarts Pyrodactyl, headed by 24-year-old Arvind Raja Yadav, with collaborators pitching in from multiple continents. The game’s USP was that it’s an RPG set in ancient India, a premise that certainly could work, considering that RPGs have been mining medieval Europe and its folklore pretty relentlessly for the last few decades as a matter of course. Things could do with some shaking up every once in a while, but a unique setting can only take you so far — let’s see how the rest shapes up.
As the title may suggest, the game puts the player in a setting where the once prosperous nation of Bhimra is on the brink of a precipice — short of food, with an agitated population of refugees and lower class folk pushing up against the palatial walls, and having its hand forced into negotiating trade agreements with the neighbouring Naga kingdom, for whom it doesn’t have much love. All the while, insidious undercurrents run through the scene, hidden hands preparing the push that starts the slide.
Unlike traditional RPGs, the player doesn’t control a singular character that decides the outcome of the story. Instead, you play scenes with eight different characters, from different factions and stations in society, each at a relatively crucial moment in their lives. The amount of influence you have as a single entity is paltry compared to fare like Mass Effect or The Witcher, but after you get used to that insignificance, you appreciate the import that massive events have on minor characters.
One particularly compelling section has you playing as a low-caste village girl whose parents have arranged to marry her to the surly son of a merchant family, which really smacks you with the Indian cultural landscape as few other situations can.
When handling subjects this sensitive, it’d be terrible if the writing was clumsy, but thankfully it’s one of the stronger points, bringing out nuances in various characters effectively. Considering that talking to people is what you’re going to be doing for the vast majority in this game, it would have to be up to scratch. There’s a Mass Effect-influenced dialogue system as well as a clearly labelled score sheet of other characters’ attitude towards you, and how your dialogue choices affect those ratings. However, all that choice ultimately seems to be a little futile, since only a few key decisions affect plot points, and those are usually resolved with short epilogues before moving on to the next character.
That seems to be my major issue with Unrest — the fact that the major work has gone into the setting and story, leaving little for the mechanics. Combat rarely makes an appearance, and when it does, the half-hearted implementation makes you glad for that reprieve. There are RPG features like traits, but they seem more like window dressing than actual gameplay elements. The adventure-game style puzzles never really test your ingenuity the way that their referenced inspirations such as Monkey Island do, and it ends up being more a visual novel than a game, where you get to experience the lives of the characters in this turbulent time and see the story from multiple angles.
As a game, it’d be hard for me to sell Unrest to RPG gamers and expect them to feel at home. But as a statement of intent, it certainly has potential. Now that Pyrodactyl has proved they can create a compelling setting from this world, I’m eager to see what they can do once they hone their craft with the other facets.