11/27/2023 0 Comments Unavowed game engine![]() ![]() It's about you: in a mystery, this is an easy shortcut to get us to care a bit more. Unavowed's central mystery has some big things going for it: I've written a bit about why Prey's intro succeeds at this and Mankind Divided's fails. You make about six of these life-altering decisions in the course of an 8-hour game.Ī good mystery has to be more than an unanswered question. But in pure structure terms, Unavowed makes even better use of this pattern: without combat to slow it down, or the genre expections of an 80-hour journey to fulfill, the story powers along at an addictively brisk clip. There's obviously a line to be drawn from here to BioWare's games, which were an explicit inspiration for Unavowed. That has the the knock-on effect that you're now much more engaged with the story in general. So you soak up everything you can about the situation, explore every dialogue option, and truly consider the characters and emotions in play. The climaxes of Unavowed's episodes turn this up to eleven: you're being asked to make massive decisions, with an entire life or eternity in the balance. When they realise they actually have to make a decision, they automatically pay attention. I remember a great game writing tip from interactive fiction writer Emily Short: if you really need the player to read a particular line of dialogue, put a choice on it. ![]() The tension and stakes escalate with your understanding of what happened, building towards a climax where you have all the facts, and you're in a position to decide the fate of the person - or being - at the center of it all. There are a few puzzles that expect you to really think about what's going on - most of which I got stuck on - and the rest are simple, satisfying work.Īll of what makes it work comes from the story: as you learn more about what happened, you're able to confront people with this information, catch them in a lie, pressure them to own up. Mechanically, the way you investigate this is pretty rote: talk to everyone, then talk to everyone again to see if any of those chats unlocked new topics in the other ones. They start with their own mini-mystery: that flash of what your demon-self did, and the question of why. The episodes feel like self-contained adventures because they each have their own arc. That's an addictive balance to strike, and a familiar one: it's how most TV drama works. ![]() Why?Įach cycle of this feels like a self-contained little adventure, with its own emotional climax, but each also reveals a bit more about the central mystery behind them all. That loops repeats six or seven times, and it's extremely compulsive. You go home, talk about what happened, and pick a new lead to investigate next.You end up having to make some excruciatingly tough choice about how to resolve it.You piece together what happened, and who's in trouble because of it.You have flashbacks to the terrible things you did there.You choose which one to go to, and who to take with you.Doing some mystical research back at base gives you leads on a few locations your possessed self visited.Your former, demon-possessed self, whose actions you only remember in brief, involuntary flashbacks. You're saved by a small team of supernatural investigators, whom you promptly join, and together you investigate yourself. I'll avoid spoilers beyond the basic premise. It's a glowing example of how to hook someone who doesn't normally have the patience for the genre, and I want to pick apart how it does that. It has a few mechanical modernisations over other adventure games, but most of what sucked me in was just the story, and the way it's told. But Unavowed gripped me from start to finish. I haven't played those games, and I don't usually like point-and-clicks. Unavowed is a point-and-click adventure from Wadjet Eye, who made the Blackwell series and The Shivah. What Works And Why is a monthly column where Gunpoint and Heat Signature designer Tom Francis digs into the design of a game or mechanic and analyses what makes it good. ![]()
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