Unrest Reviews

A fascinating relic of the mid-2010s narrative indie games. Very ambitious in its structure: you play through a series of vignettes, sometimes as a recurring character, sometimes as a one-time observer. If you care enough to get invested in their stories, you can choose to read the game's journal, which summarizes the lore and NPC, from various perspectives, and you can see the small hints of worldbuilding or character backgrounds stored in the pointless item descriptions they carry in various chapters. It's interesting, for example, how each character has its unique supply of coins, even though you almost never actually use money for anything. But production-wise the game is a failure, standing out even in 2014 Kickstater era. The visuals are underwhelming, the music is unbearable (as if: I turned it off and played other tracks in the background), UI lacks functionality, typos and grammar issues are numerous. You walk around very slowly, surrounded by dozens of identically looking NPCs. The content also struggles. Some systems, like the NPC reactions measured in colorful bars, are more of a noise than anything of noticeable impact. The achievement-tied icons you collect seem to be used for display only, never put to use as a mechanic. The most dramatic chapters can be indeed concluded in a variety of ways and even end up with the death of a specific character... but that's because the same characters are strategically cut away from the following content, only every now and then mentioned in the background. It just feels like Unrest was a bit ahead of the times, trying to invent text-heavy adventure/RPG "pacifist" tools of expression before it was cool, and having little to no games it could use as a reference, it struggled. Justifiably so. It's still worth playing if you're interested in this type of games - it hides some strong bits of writing, and maybe you'll be able to connect it with.