Unrest

This is a story of a city plagued with drought and poverty. You have a series of characters, introduced with a few paragraphs of text and a list of Traits, who can play a small role in the development of the fate of the city. This is an RPG in the sense that you are asked to make choices, but you can influence stats indirectly by emphasizing parts of their personality as you play. Gameplay consists of exploring the environment, talking to the people nearby, and making a decision about what to do. You play each of the characters as a life-altering decision comes up. As you finish each character's section, their choices influence the city and what happens to later characters. The music is full of pounding drums, with a great beat that matches the characters' walk cycles. Graphics are simple but pleasant, with a bold palette but a washed-out look appropriate for a drought. Gameplay consists of a lot of text reading. Your dialog choices include a tone descriptor, and the NPC has three stats that indicate their opinion of you. These change during the conversation. I estimate this game to be about 2 hours, with room for replayability to see how you can have the fate of the city and individual characters ultimately come out differently. For what it is...an innovative, low-budget indie RPG, it is really cool, and gets everything right. I backed the kickstarter and got what I wanted...lots of choice and consequences, good writing, interesting characters.

I completed this game in roughly 3 hours. While I understand it will have a different outcome if I play it differently (2 of my characters died), I have little desire to do so. While it is reasonably nice to look at graphically and the sound is nice too, there are a few bugs, some NPCs seem to wobble on the spot rapidly, there is often about 1-2cm of the right hand of my screen blurry and the clicking on a person can often be hard as the cursor doesn't recognise you have selected a person. The idea behind the game is good but the choices you make can often leave you with no option. I said to a merchant I would do something later and the option to speak to him further was removed. Often times you ahve no idea what the consequence of your decision is, at one point the game backed me into a corner of marrying someone or death, there was no option to get away from my parents when they said I would be headed to see someone, I just appeared there. Combat is terrible, I ended up in combat at one point. I tried to block, I tried to turn and I tried to attack but the controls were unresponsive and my character was it twice and there was no indication if that was it. To sum up, Nice to look at, interesting concept. Riddled with bugs which make the game unplayable at certain points. Not clear what is going in in the decision making process. Too short for the price. Perhaps if this game was about £5 then I would rate it more highly, but for the price this is over priced tat.

An excellent story, interactive, but somewhat linear and short in comparison to most. I'd still recommend it to anyone who likes story-based fantasy adventures (And make no mistake, this is, in essence, a point and click adventure)

I can't think of a better example of a game using multiple protagonists to tell a story. First off, the setting's great and you're discovering it from a lot of different angles and with very different amounts of information and of power to interact with the world. Information is conveyed beautifully through character traits, items, dialogue and background history and the limitations of your characters feel deeply reasonable and make you feel like a desperate urchin, or a priest balancing his personal life, integrity and serving his boss, or a professional with a job to do. The game never didactically tells you what the right choice is but gives you a sense of having made choices. I love the music and the artwork, I love the setting and most of all I love the way the story's conveyed. Three criticisms: 1. for one key choice, the game didn't tell me how to do the thing I wanted to do. 2. the ending is somewhat abrupt relative to the amount of time you invest in the setting and the characters. I'd really have liked some thing with your character traits on it. 3. the 2D ingame map which serves as your main guide to finding NPCs and completing quests is really underdeveloped compared to the rest of the game. But it's a game with real choice, good writing and a good setting and given how few games have even tried to tell a story properly with multiple protagonists (and almost none succeeded), it is very much worth your time and money. I expect to return to it and hope Pyrodactyl Games get the opportunity to expand on and refine this idea.