Dabbling with… Future Unfolding

The ninth episode of a short series on games I discovered at EGX Rezzed 2017.

OMG I’m cheating again. See, I’ve already been playing around with Future Unfolding (Spaces of Play, 2017) at home. And, well, Future Unfolding keeps its cards close to its chest.

What I mean is that it’s difficult to say exactly what the game is. Not that it offers never-seen-before mechanics or innovation that will carve out new genres for others to follow. Future Unfolding is a top-down adventure game with beautiful presentation.

However, the eventual goal completely eludes me and this sense of exploration of the game as artefact is what keeps me interested. That said, there’s plenty of spatial exploration to be done and the game map slowly fills in as you progress. Still a lot of empty space on my map…

The only down note is something better summed up by Philippa Warr in her Rock Paper Shotgun review:

I got into the habit of exploring an area by skirting the edges of the forest, hugging the rock walls to make sure I hadn’t missed anything there and then exploring within. It’s a very different thing to the earlier mindset of running about and converts the experience from something freeform to something more mired in functionality or completionism. That feels wrong here.

The sense of just exploring for the sheer joy of it slowly gives way to the realisation that Important Things are out there which can only be dug out through brute-force search sweeps.

But that’s the only thing. I’m still looking forward to discovering what makes Future Unfolding tick.

Future Unfolding is currently available for PC and Mac from various portals including itch.io.

Interested in other games I’ve dabbled with? Check out the series index!