Imagine this scenario: You’re at a friend’s house, casually playing board games, when the need to use the washroom strikes. While going about your business, you suddenly realize that you’re in a mysterious castle, and shortly after that, a malevolent spirit possesses you. You have no idea where you are, why you’re there, or what you’re supposed to be doing, so you decide to explore, hoping to find a reason for this strange series of events. This is the start of Unepic, a game originally released for PC in 2011, but one that has recently found its way to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita.
Unepic plays as a 2D platformer with heavy RPG elements, focusing largely on combat and exploration over specific quests. When you first start the game, you’re given the choice of four difficulties, which have a variety of changes from autosave and regenerating health to manual saves and monsters being able to see you from afar. Higher difficulties are rewarded with extra skill points upon leveling up, which are actually handled quite well. Skills are unable to be leveled higher than your current character level, so for example, if your character is currently at level five, your skills with a bow or a sword are unable to increase above level five too. It’s a good way of ensuring that your skill points are spread out at least a little bit, and that you don’t just pour all your points into one super-powered ability.
Alongside Constitution, Armor and Potions, you are able to dedicate skill points to particular weapons classes, of which there are quite a few. Different weapons are better used for different purposes, so if you want to attack something living, you’re better off using a sword, while an axe or mace is better if you’re looking to bash through barrels and find loot. Weapon switching is aided by the fact that there are a generous number of button shortcuts, an element that takes up a fair portion of the extensive HUD. Alongside the button shortcuts are summaries of what you’ve picked up, your health and energy, and the details of any quests that you happen to be on. Though the HUD is large, it never feels as if it encroaches on the playable space of Unepic, but instead serves to complement the experience, making inventory management and checking the progression of quests much easier.
Unepic is also aided by an incredibly useful map, which does a great job of indicating where you have and haven’t been, as well as any rooms of interest that you may need to find your way to. There’s also a clever system of lighting lamps an braziers to record your progress, almost like a trail of breadcrumbs, which allows you to make sense of where you’ve already been and where you’ve yet to go. The map itself it quite large, with a number of different areas to explore, and there’s a shortcut system using gated doors which makes getting around the castle to places you’ve already been reasonably painless. This is particularly useful as you’ll likely die a lot through the course of Unepic.
Early in the game you’re given the use of a Halo, which transports you to what is essentially the main hub of the castle, where you can heal yourself and save your game, but you’ll still see the death of your character more than you’d like. One of the major annoyances of Unepic is not the fact that you’ll die so often, as it fits the theme of the experience, but rather that you have to listen to the same mocking, drawn-out guitar riff each time it happens, which quickly becomes grating.
One thing that softens the blow of dying every few minutes is that Unepic contains a good sense of humour, with pop culture references including Metal Gear Solid and Futurama, amongst others, and a generally light-hearted approach to the scenario our protagonist finds himself in. Unfortunately, this light-heartedness can sometimes veer a little too far into the negative aspects of stereotypical geek/gamer culture, including objectification of women, and the protagonist himself is the kind of know-it-all nerd that you would hate to be in the company of.
If you can overlook the annoyingness of the main character and the questionability of some of the scenarios presented to him, you’ll find that there’s quite a lot to enjoy in Unepic. Exploration is a lot of fun, and it gets a lot of its platforming right. Combat sometime feels a little too much down to luck rather than any sort of skill, but the requirement to use particular weapons against particular enemies is a nice touch and adds a little more strategy to what could otherwise have merely been a case of finding the strongest weapon and bashing enemies with it.
Unepic is a game of decent length, and not just because you’ll die a lot. Exploring the castle is a lot of fun, and the large number of rooms and additional side quests gives you plenty to do alongside the main quest of figuring out why you’re even in the castle in the first place. It’s not an entirely perfect experience, but Unepic is a fine example of how a 2D RPG can be done, and fans of the genre should at least give it a look.
