Unexplored should be the poster child for not judging a book, or in this case game, by its cover(art). My first hour or so with it was spent fumbling through ugly menus and wondering who exactly green lit its New-grounds-circa-2002 artsyle. But boy, am I glad I powered through the first few hours. Because behind it’s adobe-flash era art, Unexplored is a solid dungeon crawler that takes an overcrowded genre and turns it on its head in more ways than one.
I’m not normally an aesthetics-forward type gamer, but graphically it was so off-putting It almost stopped me from diving further in. My other immediate hang up was a general lack of tutorial. The inventory and map systems are both a little wonky to use at first and are never really explained in full. It’s all trial and error until your muscle memory kicks in and says “Oh yeah! To see my whole inventory I have to hit R1!”
The procedural generation in Unexplored is something to behold and, honestly, a total game changer. Almost immediately I noticed how natural the dungeons felt. I’m so use to room-by-room branching dungeon design of something like Enter the Gungeon, because that’s the standard. That’s what I expect from any game in the genre. Unexplored uses, what developer Ludomotion calls, cyclic generation. Instead of branching paths that end up forcing you to backtrack over and over again, Unexplored’s dungeons flow in and out of themselves. I never feel like I have to trek back through half the dungeon to go unlock a door or flip a switch. Everything is accessible and laid out in a way that not only makes sense, but also makes the dungeons feel less generated. Parts of it almost feel handcrafted.
That’s part of the beauty of Unexplored. Just how much of it doesn’t feel randomly generated. I can’t count the number of times I walked into a room and honestly had no idea what I was in store for. In one instance I’d spent 5 minutes trying to figure out how to open a secret room on a floor. When I finally did I wasn’t treated with treasure or weapons. You know what was in there?
Bees.
Three hives of them.
Yeah… I died…to bees…in a secret room… that I was trying to get into for 5 minutes. You’d think I’d be mad, but honestly I had a stupid grin on my face the whole time, because you know what I didn’t expect to be in there? You guessed it.
Bees.
Unexplored regularly threw these kinds of scenarios at me. Whether it was cursed armor I couldn’t take off that forced me to eat every 2 minutes or learning that taking a torch into a room full of poison gas will both poison you AND set you on fire. Unexplored seemed to never run out of ways to surprise me. It does a great job of naturally passing knowledge to the player and caused me to take note of my surroundings constantly. I never thought “Ok next time I see this particular room I can attack it like this.” It was more “Poison Gas can be set on fire. Got it.”
It teaches you to be both curious and cautious.
Diving through the floors of the dungeon you’ll pick up a pretty standard assortment of RPG weapons and armor: Bows, Swords, Daggers, Staffs, Rings, Helmets, and the like. Rings and amulets generally have some magical affixes to them from the get-go. Staffs can do all manner of whacky things. Most of these magical items, scrolls and potions included, don’t explicitly tell you what they do up front. It’s up to you to either be the guinea pig or live in ignorance. A magical ring may give you +1 to strength but will also hide a magical property from you till you wear it for five minutes. What will that property be? It could be anything. Staffs work similarly. They may not reveal what they do till you use them. I once picked up a staff having no idea what it did, shot it and realized it just caused a pack of enemy bats to spawn.
Got rid of that one real quick.
None of my runs ever came close the zaniness of something like a Binding of Isaac run. That’s because Unexplored is not a game about attaining godlike strength via a carefully crafted synergistic run. You’re not going to fill the screen with some doomsday laser and annihilate everything in sight. Unexplored has more of a souls-esque quality to it. The AI is designed in a way that forces you to think before you attack. If you point a sword at an enemy with a shield, it will raise it’s shield. If you get too close they will strike. Timing is everything here and it’s pretty refreshing.
I felt like I wasn’t progressing as quickly as I would have liked in the game (it’s harder than you think) but I never felt over-powered. Encounters were always challenging and engaging regardless of the gear I had. You can upgrade weapons and other armor if you’re lucky enough to find a sigil or skill stone and a forge to meld them together. These will give your standard weapon or armor some extra magical properties, but several hours in and I am still struggling to upgrade consistently. There were plenty of times where I actually felt like I was in over my head. Remember the bees? I do.
Despite its surface level flaws I’m glad I braved those first few hours of Unexplored. What I found on my journey downward into the Dungeon of Doom was a Rougelike that spun the genre differently than most I’d played. It’s ability to constantly surprise me and present new, whacky situations is strangely unique. I feel like I’ve only seen the tip of this iceberg and I can’t wait to dig in a bit further, even if it means possibly blowing myself up or more bees.
A review key was provided by Digerati for the Nintendo Switch.
