A Place for the Unwilling Review

Aug 3

Aug 3 A Place for the Unwilling Review

The most important thing to me in a video game is the story. Games can have innovative mechanics or incredible graphics or even a psychologist-perfected Skinner Box rewards system, but none of that will cause a game to stick in my brain like a good story. So last week when I found A Place for the Unwilling among the new releases, I was intrigued. The game’s store page on Steam even says “All Story. No Puzzles. No Combat.” They may as well have named the game “Hey Russell, Come Check This Out.” Well, check it out I did and I’m so glad I made that decision.

In A Place for the Unwilling, players are a new arrival in “the city.” The only thing that is explained about either the protagonist or the city is the one thing the two have in common: Henry Allen. Henry is a childhood friend and resident of the city who has sadly taken his own life. In his final letter, he left his house and shipping business to the player, imploring them to look after his loved ones and learn the mysteries of the city before it dies in 21 days. Thrust into a strange and dangerous environment, the player has to decide how best to look after themselves and their interests as doom approaches.

The most impressive thing about A Place for the Unwilling is its central mechanic: choice. In the city, there is nothing the player absolutely must do. Often at the beginning of a day, players will receive one or more suggestions for daily activities in the form of letters from fellow citizens, but these can all be ignored. Players are free to go where they please, talk with whoever they please, and do business as they please. There’s even the option to leave town if the stress ever gets to be too much, though in a far less permanent way than Henry left. The only limit to players is time, because once midnight rolls around, players are forced home, but a fascinating layer of strategy is applied to this system, because players can choose to go to bed earlier to get up earlier in the morning. This means if a player knows they have a big day of business tomorrow, they can hit the hay early, or can choose to stay out late exploring the town after dark if they know tomorrow doesn’t have much going on. Because the player has so many choices, the story can go in a lot of different directions. If I’m interpreting the Endings menu correctly, there’s 10 different endings, which is an incredible feat for any game, let alone a $15 indie made by six developers.

The second best thing about this game, and let me be clear it’s a very close second, is the story, and when I say “story” I mean both the over-arching plot as well as the small side-quests and conversations. The main plot is the city and its approaching death. The game doesn’t explain how a city can die until the last couple of days, and I suspect the way it dies is changed by the player’s choices, but in the meantime players follow the trail of a shadowy cabal controlling the future of the city and Lovecraftian monsters from beyond the stars. If there’s one problem I have with the game’s story it’s that they felt they had to lean on Lovecraftian lore. I get that Cthulhu and The King in Yellow are reliable cultural touchstones, but the lore created for this game of colors and power was fascinating and I would have liked to have seen more of it. As for the smaller stories, I was really impressed with how well game gives depth and realism to the other citizens of the city through small conversations. When you stop and chat, you can learn about a character’s family or past and these conversations are written fantastically.

Unfortunately, I don’t have only positive things to say about A Place for the Unwilling, but I do think most of the flaws can be attributed to one of two things: the developers’ relative inexperience in the game development field and the fact that this game wasn’t originally in English. There were more than a handful of times where, in a conversation with another character, I would see the other character’s dialogue come from my character or bit of code that was supposed to have put a character’s name in bold, but a part was forgotten so I saw the name surrounded by incomplete coding jargon. Other times, I was given conversation choices or had choices attributed to me that I hadn’t earned or done. Reading the developer’s website, I think it’s safe to say that none of them have worked on a project of this size before so it’s easy for me to forgive these little slip ups. The game also features an odd control scheme when playing with a keyboard. It definitely feels like the developers had an idea how the game would be controlled with a controller or gamepad and then forced that onto a keyboard as well. With the arrow keys controlling the player, WASD serves as an awkward replication of controller face buttons with S serving as the “confirm” key and D as the “cancel/deny” button. It’s not a huge problem, but it’s awkward and for some reason can’t be changed. This feels like an idea a seasoned game developer would know wouldn’t work very well, but the inexperienced team behind A Place for the Unwilling hasn’t been around long enough to see the flaws in it.

There were also several times where a pronouns or verb tenses were mixed up as well as some missing words or misspellings. Like the other mistakes, these things were probably overlooked by the two translators who almost certainly did this in their free time for very little pay, so I’m not too upset about it. Like I’ve said before, I don’t know much about making video games, but I know enough to know it’s hard work. And honestly the rest of the game is so good I can overlook these flaws.

A Place for the Unwilling is not a perfect game. There a lot of amateur mistakes that might push some people away initially, but I have to insist that you play this game and stick with it because of how good it is at telling its story and how powerfully it affected my emotions. We have all played $60 big studio games that had the emotional appeal of a wet napkin, so for $15 I implore you to experience this wonderful game.