Unrest Review

Set in the fictional town of Bhimra, Unrest follows the story of an Indian kingdom trying to survive a few rough years of drought which has led to civil unrest. The game is developed by an Indian studio, Pyrodactyl Games, and is their first title to appear on Steam following a successful Kickstarter.

Story
The overall plot revolves around civil unrest after the events leading to the change of rulership in the kingdom of Bhimra. The slums are in distress following years of drought. The city has uneasy trade relationships with the ‘Naga’ (a snake like race), who are generally hated by the city’s occupants, raising tensions high. The plot touches mature themes like racism, caste system, political power and corruption in a very smart manner. This is difficult to pull off without offending anyone, but Unrest does so with ease and without being forcibly politically correct. When there are a lot of interesting moral dilemmas going on, it is easy to get lost in the deep rich conversation but so much onscreen reading can only go on so long till the fatigue kicks in.

You are not only testing the characters, but yourself too with many moral choices littered throughout the game. They range from deciding to give out your last piece of bread to a dying man or give medicine to the sick or sell it to save your own family. These are tough choices and may have no gameplay impact but stay with you long after the credits have rolled, questioning your own choices wondering what could have been if only you choose differently. All of this is characterised by some really good writing. It’s choices like these that give it a feeling similar to choosing your own adventure or a visual novel, and in fact looking at the game from this view helps to keep you ambivalent with some of the issues the game has.

The characters are complex, their story matters both individually and as a whole on the plot. These various narratives and point of views manage to make sure you look at the same scenario through many different eyes thus making for a very well narrated experience. The dialogue is believable, the motivations are clear, and the plans thoughtful. Throughout the story you get to influence some minor decisions that can have an impact of how the story plays out. The game uses a Friendship, Respect and Fear meters to indicate an NPC’s favourability towards you, but it never really seems to matter in the long run as the conversation tends to play the same way irrespective of your ratings. You can say the same thing for the playable characters traits menu. The only complaint I have is that the ending feels incomplete. Everything happens way too fast in comparison to the overall slow pace of the game. The entire campaign revolves around the inability of solving some of the main issues the slums face and once the credits roll, it is still an issue left pending. I personally was invested in finding the solution and thought playing through to the end would conclude the same, but was left wanting, making for a very unsatisfactory ending and the lack of a stern conclusion.[divider]

Gameplay
Most of the gameplay involves conversations with various NPCs. You listen to their troubles and advice, and replay accordingly. Sometimes your motives are to gather information and sometimes to get them to gather various resources. In fact, this is not only the major mechanic in Unrest, this is the only one. Combat was nowhere to be found in my two playthroughs although the developers did confirm its presence. A couple of concerns technically are with character models being only made using 4 positions (front, back, left, right) making diagonal walking an eyesore. They even get stuck on terrain art sometimes, which can be frustrating as even saving and reloading cannot sometimes get you unstuck. Thankfully the game has a lot of autosaves, especially at the lower difficulty settings. It even features a quicksave which I discovered checking out the keyboard layout screen, but pressing F5 had no visible effect and I thought the feature was broken until I went into the load game to find the quick saves there. So the quick save feature indeed works, but with no onscreen notification it would make for frustrating times when you had to reload a quick save only to find that it’s not there, unless you manually check every quicksave defeating the purpose of having it in the first place. This is one of the many small annoyances you may find when playing uUnrest. The game cannot hide its small budget roots, but that is not the reason you should dismiss it.[divider]

Visuals and Audio
The music is a good fit with use of classical Indian music which is surprisingly upbeat at first, but then you realise after a short duration that it is jarring and loops back. This jolted change is very obvious and once you notice it, it is hard to subsequently ignore. This does significantly reduce the immersion to the point that I found myself turning the music down to the lowest setting and trying hard to ignore it to read the text.

The game uses a watercolour painting style for art and models. There is a clear disconnect between the background art and the character models, which are a bit more saturated or appear brighter. The art style, although unique, is a bit lacking in detail as most buildings look almost the same with no compensation for lightning and other effects. Yet, I found the design to be original, something that games lack these days.[divider]

Conclusion
Unrest gets the basics right. It is disappointing to see that such a wonderful portrayal of ancient India in a fantasy setting is let down by not being complemented with better presentation and polish. The total game time would be 4-5 hours depending on how many non-vital characters you decide to talk to or explore in a playthrough. The game sets out to portray a scenario and does so with an interesting and different approach from what we have seen in most western developments. There is little variety and things to do other than to engage in the main quest, but what it does, it does well. It is definitely worth a try if you like your games to be lore and text heavy.

There is even a novella for those interested which can be found here.
You can check out our interview with the developer of Unrest here.