A Troubled, Confusing Small-Scale RPG Experience - Unknown: Evolution First Impressions
Video games are still a relatively young medium in the grand scheme of humanity’s creative history, but if I’m allowed to make a generalized statement about gaming as a whole, it would be that the arc of the medium’s evolution appears to bend toward ever-increasing ease of creation. This isn’t a shock either; after all, most creative mediums follow a similar through line.
For example, writing was once a realm exclusive to the richest scholars of ancient cultures. The evolution of public education and invention of the printing press made it easier for more books to get into the hands of more readers, and these days any of the billions of humans with internet access can self-publish an e-book or start up a blog. The same direction can be seen with filmmaking, which shifted from expensive equipment and releases from big Hollywood studios to having the ability to shoot a movie on your phone and upload it to YouTube later that day.
In the world of gaming, we’ve seen user-created content move to the forefront with titles like Roblox, Fortnite, and Rec Room—sometimes with shockingly great results. We’ve also seen the democratization of game development, with engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine 5 being offered for free to amateur devs and introducing increasingly accessible tools for those without tons of coding or game design experience. The latest of these is Sparkle Creative Editor (or SCE), a game development toolkit designed to help new devs get their mobile game ideas off the ground without a ton of struggle.
An early example of what’s possible with this new tool set comes by way of Unknown: Evolution, one of the first games made fully within SCE now available in early access. Unfortunately, in addition to showcasing the depth of what can be created with SCE, this project also shows off how even the most flexible set of creation tools cannot account for the absence of some of the key tenets of game design.
The first and biggest problem is simply that Unknown: Evolution doesn’t really teach its players how to play. Upon loading the game up, players are presented with two options: Single Player and Team Mode. There are some settings, as well as “Equipment” and “Talent” screens that can also be accessed, but if you’re looking for a tutorial of any sort, you’re out of luck. The poorly translated description text for Single Player reads “It’’s you agaisnt the world,” but I didn’t realize just how literally the game would commit to that.
Loading into the Single Player mode presents its own problems, as Unknown: Evolution also happens to be rather buggy at the moment. Loading into a map takes a long-time here, and the game had a frustrating habit of freezing during loads for me. And since the loading screen is just a static background with a small progress bar, I found it difficult to tell whether I had run into another crash or if I was just in the middle of a particularly lengthy load.
Before loading into a match, you must choose from one of three jobs to play. The three jobs offered appear to be selected at random from a wider pool, but it’s unclear how many jobs there are in total. They include fantasy mainstays like “Priest” and “Apprentice Mage,” but also more unique offerings such as the “Shield Master” (a Dwarven-looking fellow who wields, you guessed it, a big shield) and the “Rogue Sisters” (a bow-user who, despite the name, seems to be a singular entity).
If you’re successfully able to overcome the loading challenge, you’re dumped into a top-down view of a map that looks vaguely like something out of Warcraft III or Dota 2. Monsters begin spawning from the upper part of the map, and in spite of a giant “Attack” button in the lower right corner of the screen, your character will move to auto-engage with enemies.
At first glance, particularly with the auto-attack option turned on by default, Unknown: Evolution seems like something comparable to the popular Vampire Survivor and the many games taking obvious inspiration from it. Your character auto attacks, and your focus is, presumably, one maneuvering to stay alive and choosing which upgrades you get. For example, as the Shield Master I was able to nab a passive skill that would occasionally resurrect skeletons when I killed enemies, as well as an active skill that would bathe a huge area in a beam of light, greatly damaging any bad guys who stepped within that circle.
In practice, though, this couldn’t be further from the Vampire Survivor experience. Those two skills I mentioned? They dropped from two of the first enemies I killed, and I received no more as the match progressed. Instead, enemies drop a currency that I’ll call “purple orb thingies,” since there’s no in-game terminology that I could find. When I gathered enough purple orb thingies, I could spend them at a statue on the map labeled “Attribute Challenge,” at which point a special, slightly meatier enemy would spawn. Defeating that enemy would provide a boost to whichever attribute I chose (hit points, damage, defense, magic power, etc.—the options seem to rotate, though I wasn’t sure if that was based on which job I chose, or if they, too, were selected at random).
However, these attribute challenges are expensive, and enemies don’t spawn that quickly or drop purple orb thingies in that great of numbers. In the multiple matches I played, I was only ever to grab two or three attribute buffs before the humiliating moment where all of my matches came to a screeching halt: when the boss spawned.
As with the jobs and maybe the attribute challenges, bosses seem to be selected at random from a pool. No matter which boss I went up against, though, I found myself completely outmatched. And given the game’s stubborn unwillingness to provide any direction, I was unable to determine if I was just playing the game wrong or if these boss encounters are just wildly unbalanced at this point.
The worst part about the boss fights is how they seem to rely on quick response and fast movement in a game where that just isn’t possible to pull off. In World of Warcraft style, bosses in Unknown: Evolution telegraph their big attacks with huge red markers that appear on the ground. Presumably you’re meant to tap the “Parry” button to leap out of the way of these attacks, but they happen within seconds of the red markers appearing, and this is far from the most responsive game I’ve ever played. Even when I did manage to successfully dodge out of the way, most of the time my character would automatically waltz right back into the danger zone to start slashing at an enemy that was standing there—or at the boss itself.
Did I mention that most of these boss attacks were one-hit kills? On the plus side, dying in Unknown: Evolution doesn’t end the match; you just have to sit for ten seconds before you resurrect. But if the boss is not defeated quickly enough, you lose the match. I have no shame in admitting that I only managed to defeat a boss here once.
It is because of that one fluke time when I managed to defeat a boss—shoutout to randomly getting the “Mechanical Turret” skill, which ended up being overpowered by dishing out damage while I was dead—that I was able to get a glimpse of what seems to be some depth buried somewhere deep beneath the surface of Unknown: Evolution. In addition the the aforementioned attribute challenge, the game also has “relic” and “gem” challenges that provide a less commonly dropped resource to purchase (the elusive green orb thingies), and I saw at least one tool tip reference a “treasure challenge,” though I was never able to figure out what that meant.
And that’s only one of the many little mystifying puzzles that I was never able to piece together in my time with Unknown: Evolution. For example, there’s a whole inventory system, seemingly with eight different gear slots to equip; I did not witness a single piece of gear drop either during a match or upon completing one. There’s that “talent” screen I mentioned, which suggests a means of permanent progression between matches, which would be in keeping with the Vampire Survivor-esque overtones; I did not receive nor could figure out how one is supposed to receive said talent points. There also appeared to be a way to swap jobs during matches, which is certainly intriguing, but I had no idea what benefit (if any) this would provide.
That’s really the resounding refrain of all the time I spent playing Unknown: Evolution: “I have no idea.” I couldn’t figure out how things worked, how I was supposed to succeed, what the moment-to-moment rhythm of gameplay was supposed to feel like. In that sense, Unknown: Evolution speaks to the messy reality of game creation becoming easier and easier. That process means you’re going to run into projects like this, which appear to have all the passion in the world but no actual grasp of the basics of game design backing that passion.
But for as barely playable as Unknown: Evolution is in its current state, it also hints at the promise of that ease of development. The two-person, amateur team that created this game has the tools, and now that it’s available in early access they can receive feedback from players. If they can turn it around from here, it will be a perfect example of the creative power that is now available to anyone who wants to reach out and grab hold of it. Here’s hoping.
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