A Place for the Unwilling

A Place for the Unwilling on PC is the work of AlPixel Games. This is not their debut project - the developer has produced a variety of smaller games. The title has had a successful campaign on Kickstarter, where the creators organized a collection of money needed to complete the production process and introduce the final touches.

Plot

We play as one of the citizens of a town. This town was once a small but today, thanks to the development of industry, it is now full of anonymous, lonely people in the crowd. In order to survive, the hero has to earn money - fortunately, as one of the few lucky ones, he is not sentenced to work in the factory. The protagonist is a trader, which forces him to travel between clients' homes. With time he finds himself traced back to the mystery hidden by the city - nothing here is as it seems at first glance, and some kind of force watches over the city. What kind of force? Solving this puzzle becomes the goal of both the protagonist and the player.

The multithreaded plot is conveyed both in the form of conversations with encountered characters, as well as through various notes or newspaper articles. It should be noted that eighteen NPCs can be found here. This number does not make a great impression, but each of the characters has been designed in detail - they have their own character and a unique, sometimes surprising, history.

Mechanics

A Place for the Unwilling is an adventure game with survival elements, inspired by such games as Sunless Sea and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. The game, presented in an isometric projection, focuses on visiting a small town with an open structure, and the independent figures met along the way are ready to talk or trade with the hero - we have to make sure that we have enough money to meet the needs of our protagonist. We visit the streets and interiors of houses and other buildings, tracing more and more surprising conspiracies, riddles and secrets. Although the city is not one of the largest, it has been designed with attention to the smallest details. The player can, therefore, look into every nook and cranny (which sometimes requires us to think) in search of fragments of the pieces of the plot.

The place acts like a living organism, and each person and object encountered has their own place in it. The hero's path is often confronted with so-called shadows - characters that have become part of an anonymous crowd. The "curse" over them can be broken, which sometimes takes place through the simplest actions, such as hearing the name of a particular person. The dialogues carried out with them open up the secret, bringing the protagonist closer to solving the puzzle.

Technical aspects

A Place for the Unwilling on a PC uses 2D hand-drawn graphics, and the fog covering the entire area adds to the overall atmosphere. The game also uses an original soundtrack.

Last updated on 19 March 2022