Here’s the YouTube link! Script after the cut!

So I know I had a snarky slide in the credits last time, but this video necessitates an actual legitimate disclosure. Unrest was written by a friend I regularly do a Let’s Play series and podcast with, so take that into account however you will. I also backed the Kickstarter for this game, so I technically appear in the credits. Which makes this the first video since Spec Ops: The Line where I’ve talked about a game I appear in the credits for, but I digress.

When we look at Kickstarter success stories we tend to look at the big success stories. The $3.3m Double Fine’s Adventure Game, for example, or the more modest $2.9m Wasteland 2. And while three million-ish dollars is a huge sum for any individual, for modern game development that number is miniscule. Hence that popular Tim Schafer Twitter exchange that went viral a few weeks ago. But not all projects are even that big. Three million and change gets you ten developers for two years, but what kind of game can you get for, oh, one percent of that budget? What’s a game that costs thirty grand or so look like?

Well, one route is to go hyper minimalist and focus on a functional, formalistic, mechanically driven approach. A small game with small goals done really well. Race the Sun did this - and I love Race the Sun, but that’s another video. The alternative is to scale back resource expenditure while still trying to stay true to a grand vision, giving a super rough cut of of a big idea. Instead of jettisoning scope, you jettison what most would refer to as polish in the parlance of the AAA settings. This is the approach Unrest took, both for good and for ill.

The impacts of the budget limitations are obvious. The music is nice but doesn’t loop, leading to a few seconds of silence every few minutes. Tweening animations attempt to give life to characters on screen but often end up underscoring how static much of the game world is. Despite a crowded city full of NPCs there’s a complete lack of NPC movement AI. And few wholly original sprites for unique characters exist, meaning many major story characters don’t appear all that different from the peasants and nobles that populate the background. And yeah, a lot of these things hurt the experience the way mono audio can hurt the experience of listening to a song or a standard definition TV can make viewing a movie less pleasant. But while the absence of that polish makes the act of experiencing Unrest less pleasurable, it doesn’t rob the game of its value.

And a lot of that value stems from the game’s world and the stories that unfold there. If I had to put Unrest into a genre it’s probably most similar to recent Telltale games - sort of a visual novel meets an adventure game. Unlike Telltale games, though, Unrest has you play five characters from all walks of life in the city of Bhimra. And if the game’s about anything, it’s about the relationship between those characters and society they live in. It lets you role play to explore how each character accepts, rejects, or generally responds to the role they’ve been given to play. Does the hired gun mercenary do the right thing over the objections of his soldiers? Does the priest forced to adopt a new temple’s beliefs sincerely attempt to convert or is he more interested in self preservation? Does a young girl newly betrothed to a boy who hates her suck it up or try to run away? In a sense it’s meta role playing - you’re role playing a character in a game who themselves are choosing how to play their role in society. And the idea the game often reflects is that there are reasons for your societal role and consequences for trying to break from it. In the middle of a famine, with invasion on the horizon and tensions between the underclasses and the nobles that occasionally boil over into violence, the expectations of those societal roles are often the only thing keeping Bhimra together. Unrest is not a game interested in easy answers or in celebrating heroics. It’s a game that pits personal happiness against the needs of everyone around you and recognizes that there’s value in both, even when only one can be chosen.

Taking the aggregate adventures of all five characters into account, you’re not really creating a story, per se. You’re really exploring a situation, and that situation is the geopolitics of Bhimra. In the way that Gone Home was about digging apart the dynamics of the Greenbriars and how their relationships intertwined, Unrest is about piecing together the puzzle of the city, of seeing it from all angles to learn why there are no good or easy ways to fix its ailments. This is why characters like Tanya, Chitra, and Baghwan are important, even if their choices impact the path of the city less than the other two. They give us insight into the farmlands, the naga, and the racist religious organization Ranveer is organizing. By the end of the game you don’t so much have a story with an arc but a web of interests and factions. You see how each piece of the puzzle is linked inexorably to the others, and why changing the fate of one person is hard but changing the fate of a society is much, much harder.

So does this approach to kickstarters work? Yes and no. I know there are a lot of people who really need that level of polish to engage with a game; they need games that accept them with open arms and makes them feel comfortable. And that’s totally cool! Because in Unrest you kind of have to work for it to engage you. It’s a literary game, by which I mean it functions much like a book. You read a lot and frankly Bihmra exists more in your head than it does on the screen. It doesn’t present you with a world the way The Elder Scrolls and Mass Effect do, so much as it asks you to imagine the world it implies. And that’s the real limitation of working with a budget that, by Tim Schafer’s numbers, would last 1 San Francisco developer just 3.5 months. But if you can get into a headspace that’s less ‘game’ and more ‘novella’, look past the technical limitations, and lose yourself in that world you’ll find a beautiful, doomed city realized not by polygons and pixel shaders but by religious factions and racial tensions and class warfare and political intrigue.

Much like Unrest itself, I don’t know how to put a pretty bow on this and wrap everything up neatly. There’s no denying that a bigger budget would have allowed the vision of the developers to shine even brighter. But a bigger budget is also all but impossible; the game exists at all only because the developers scrounged up $36k in donations. So is it fair to ask the game achieve things it never could have given the resources available? Should we celebrate the game that’s here, warts and all? When an indie dev’s choices are a rough hewn game or no game at all, what alternative is there? Are some visions simply too grand to be made on a budget, or should we strive to create with what we have? These are tough questions that have tough answers. And honestly? I don’t know if Unrest would have it any other way.