A game that haunts you long after you put it down.

Dec 25, 2014 15:43 GMT  ·  By

Next up in our Softpedia Game of the Year 2014 awards is the winner of the Best Indie category, Unrest by Pyrodactyl.

Unrest is a narrative-driven adventure game that is all about taking some pretty hard decisions, accompanied by inquisitive glances cast within you.

The game is far from being the best indie game released this year when it comes to production value and quality/quantity of content, and if I were to include titans such as Divinity: Original Sin, then there would be no other winner of any contest ever.

Unrest gets my vote because it managed to touch me the most. I was thinking about it for a long time after putting it down, and it managed to do this on a shoestring budget, within a very limited time frame. It's not the lavish banquet that Larian's role-playing game offers, but instead a proper indie story, of a group of unknowns convincing other people that they can help create something beautiful via Kickstarter pledges.

The game is delving head-first into racism, greed, poverty, violence, discrimination and other such controversial subjects that we are still struggling with, and instead of casting a veil over your eyes and making you press F to pay your respects, it shows you that the real enemy was inside you all along.

Unrest takes place in a fantasy land based on Indian culture, following the woes of a struggling city-state, fallen from its glory, on the brink of an uprising.

You assume control of ordinary citizens and witness a series of encounters during which you have to make some choices, not necessarily good or bad. The tricky thing is that Pyrodactyl made sure that there would be no easy ones and that there would always be consequence.

An outside power is willing to provide food, if only to improve the condition of its own refugees within the city-state. Several powerful figures have their eyes set on the throne and see this time of turmoil as the best chance to seize it.

All men are created equal

Beyond all the high-profile intrigue, there are also commoners, living in the slums in poverty and hunger, forced to do everything in their power in order to secure their survival. Can a recently orphaned princess survive and mount a counter-offensive from such an unlikely position?

The priests, the favored caste that is able to touch both rich and poor, functions more like an organized crime family, and a priest has to make a tough decision between staying true to his faith and ignoring his scruples and making sure that his family is being taken care of, even if that means breaking his oath.

I distinctly remember an episode where you would assume control of a young girl that can either respect her parents' decision and marry the man they arranged her to, or follow her heart and disobey the rule of law.

Of course, her betrothed had his own motives and ambition, and by choosing the way evangelized by modern romantic comedies, I got the poor girl killed. Because the village administrator had no choice, in a climate of ever growing turmoil, but to punish her disobedience and make her an example.

Nobody is evil and nobody is a saint, everyone has their own motives and you get to see the same event from multiple perspectives, getting to know how each of the involved parties views a certain issue and why they act a certain way.

You basically get a vertical slice of the human plight, rendered in a manner that feels genuine and enthralling. Kind of like how Geralt, the protagonist of The Witcher series of video games (and novels), always seems to find that for every beastly monster that acts out of its own feral nature that he slays, there is another monster, with a human face, acting out of greed, prejudice or fear, that gets to live on.

Sure, Unrest is really rough around the edges, but it has real stories that you can actually relate to, grounded in the gritty struggle of everyday life, rather than on absurd notions of heroism, power fantasy, and not looking at explosions while walking in slow motion.

If you want to learn more, check out our review of Unrest.

Unrest screenshots (6 Images)

Unrest
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