▷Unknown Fate Review - Don't be afraid of the dark 🥇

Take a night dominated by typical fever nightmares, during which you relive the memories of the past but in a world that has the unreal to the nth degree. Reality has disappeared, there is no living being and nothing makes sense, as you walk a path full of obstacles that leads you into the maze of a dark dimension studded with objects belonging to the real world or absolutely meaningless. We talked about it a few months ago in ours indie column, at the time of the launch for PC, HTC Vive and Oculus Rift: almost six months after its appearance on the videogame scene, unknown fate brings its mysteries to Nintendo Switch in the highly touching and introspective journey developed by 1C Company. The Russian studio re-proposes the dreamlike and absolutely dystopian journey of a man on the laptop, Richard, who has no memories in the world he suddenly ended up in, but lives only a few fragments of his past life, seeing himself as a child as shy as he is lonely.

Abandoned games and children's nightmares

The absurdity of this environment is dictated by weirdest beings that wander through heaven and earth, like killer whales and demons of various sizes, as well as hands that emerge from the ground to clear the path of otherwise insurmountable obstacles. They are like essences that indicate the way or disseminate clues to follow to reach the goal, as well as speaking directly to us in enigmas, trying to explain the situation in which we find ourselves and how to get to the end. All accompanied by the voice of an unknown presence that leads us into this world where the "sacred lights" are not lit, and without light there can be no life. Only Richard may be able to find a solution, being theonly human being in this world, as well as many answers to the questions that still haunt him. To achieve this, however, he will have to face the biggest obstacle in his life: his own emotionality and his memories, in this dark journey that denotes and highlights the difficulty characterizing his difficult past. They will be ruby red stones to take us back in time and making us rediscover these moments apparently disconnected from each other and without any logical connection.

Halfway between a first-person adventure and a puzzle game, the whole story is set up as a clear allegory of how a child sees the world around him, as well as representing Richard's difficult moments with wired power sockets. broken, abandoned wooden games and disused ferris wheels. We have on our hands a game of those in which we do not see the physicality of our person, if not the hands and part of the forearm in some sporadic occasions, lowering us even more directly in this cerebral and emotional experience. It all boils down to a gameplay in which we will not have to do is follow the road, without too much difficulty in guessing the path to follow, being unidirectional, and jumping here and there on wooden boards, operating some mysterious mechanism and running into memories. of the past, represented in an original way with a very special black and white graphics, which distinguishes these game moments from the main narrative line.

We will be i bearers of the light in this world of darkness, which is why our weapon will be a lamp capable of firing shots and casting blinding flashes to stun and kill our enemies, in sporadic and fairly low difficulty combat. But it will be one female figure identified by us as "more human" than the others to give us some more clues: it warns us of the guiding voice, which will fill our heads with lies, convincing us that this world is not real. But like any supporting actor who comes to the aid of the hero, the character will fall victim to hands without identity, swallowed up in the darkness of the nightmare and the unknown. Will we be able to rescue him and be able to find logic in the past memories of our childhood?

The colors of the nightmare

From a technical point of view, we will use practically every feature granted by the platform, where different keys are usable during the game, except for the touch screen, not foreseen in any case. The settings, unfortunately or fortunately, are reduced to the bone, but in a reasoned way: we will be able to adjust the sensitivity of the joystick, set the language of the subtitles, also present in Italian thanks to a total localization with high precision, and increase or decrease the ambient brightness. This last option is really important, since we will often wander in very dark environments, so it is essential to be able to see what surrounds us in order not to fall into precipices or not be able to advance due to visibility problems (quite frequent in this game).

Il graphic work accomplished by the team highlights a certain attention to detail and shapes, especially the design of the characters and their characteristic colors are really interesting, as well as giving precedence to dark colors in shades of black, gray and purple, in stark contrast to the bright elements and becoming a predominant part in the high degree of involvement of this game. We are actually involved in a very natural way, eager to know more about what our protagonist is experiencing, a feeling augmented by first-person participation. The creative sector of the game gains another point in favor also on the musical side, Where soundtrack and audio effects play a fundamental role in recreating an atmosphere of tension and in part disturbing, clarifying very well the style of the game and the narrative genre that we are going to dissect. Every element, from our steps to the movements of insects and fantastic beings, up to any other ambient noise, is recreated in a natural and precise way, without smudging or delays in the synchronization between movements and sounds.

The devil makes the pots, but not the lids

If the imps and demons of the past try to strike terror and relegate us to their world, we will still find several flaws in their plan. The game in fact is not free from points of weakness, like the camera, not always at its peak performance (as far as we can adjust the view with the right joy-con pad) and the tscaling and perspective sometimes result unclear and realistic, as if the physical stature of our hero is reduced in some points of the game and alters the perception we have of the environment around us. A problem that is quite obvious in jumping from one platform to another, but it is not anything that can interrupt the gaming experience: just get carried away (and above all the eye) over these distances.

A rather annoying bug concerns the difficulty in understand the actual distances and the presence of obstacles which prevent the progress of the character, in addition to the frequent defect of as well as sometimes the software struggles inalternation between gameplay and cutscene with some dialogues, taking a few seconds of time during which we cannot move, except to move the camera. Finally, on the screen you can hardly notice a viewfinder placed in the center that should help us when we have to shoot with our luminous device, especially to aim at elements from a distance. The difficulty will lie above all in trying to distinguish the dot, especially in the presence of equally clear colors in the vicinity.

Ultimately it will be precisely these presences and images of interrupted childhood that give a particularly cold and introspective tone to a story that bares a child's imagination and psychology, while at the same time placing an adult who dusts off old wounds by returning to pulsating the scars of a past not completely closed and resolved. A really interesting work that knows how to speak to many of us, touching keys of the soul that we thought were hidden and irrecoverable, to the (re) discovery of ourselves.