Commanding an army of the undead has never felt so weak - The Unliving Quick First Impressions

Roguelites have skyrocketed in popularity in recent years, particularly thanks to the likes of some extremely well-received games like Hades. These titles feature the high level of challenge and punishing deaths of roguelikes, but with various methods for making small bits of progress that carry over across runs, so even the least skilled players can eventually make it through. With its top-down viewpoint, death-themed hub area, and heavy focus on characters and dialogue between runs, The Unliving is sure to draw comparisons to Hades. But can this roguelite possibly hope to live up to that modern classic?

THE STORY

The Unliving places players into the heavy boots of a powerful necromancer—one who finds himself trapped in the same cycle of life, destruction, death, and rebirth that his dark arts depend upon. The game begins with the necromancer rising from the dead without any memory of who he is and no goals beyond murdering local peasants and using their corpses for his undead army. As the game progresses and the necromancer dies over and over, he gains access to his castle, meets various devoted servants, and uncovers information about the broken world he exists in and the corrupt church that opposes his evil deeds.

PLATFORMS

For now, The Unliving is only available on PC via Steam’s Early Access program. Developer RocktBrush studio has promised that it plans to bring the game to consoles (though without specifying which consoles) in the future, but for now PC is all. And maybe that’s for the best while the game’s many issues are worked out.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve played around four hours of The Unliving thus far. In that time, I’ve attempted around four or five runs, all of which ended in brutal death, have met a handful of characters, and have unlocked and started progressing multiple means of powering up my necromancer through the castle hub area.

WHAT’S AWESOME

• Pixel art graphics. Pixel art is so commonly used in indie games these days that it can feel very hit or miss. The Unliving is definitely on the hit side of that equation, with gorgeous, detailed pixel art that captures the 16-bit aesthetic while moving far past anything the Super Nintendo could have handled.

• Plenty of content. Some games hit early access with the just the faintest outline of what the full product will be. Not so with The Unliving, which has reportedly been in development already since 2018. This may not be the full game yet, but it does feature several areas, over one hundred different spells and abilities to experiment with, and quite a bit of story (albeit mostly without voice acting past the prologue).

• Strategy gameplay. While the execution may leave something to be desired (see below), I at least love the concept of adding to traditional action-RPG gameplay with what amounts to a simplified version of real-time strategy gameplay. There’s a ton of potential here.

WHAT SUCKS

• Strategy gameplay. A ton of potential, sure, but not much of it has been realized yet. Raising hordes of different undead creatures to do your bidding looks and feels cool, but actually commanding those hordes is a mess right now. Your troops regularly get stuck on objects, don’t attack enemies properly, and generally just aren’t nearly as useful as they should be. And this makes an already challenging game much harder.

• Bugs. Working out problems is part of the point of early access, but you should know before trying it that The Unliving is full of bugs at the moment. The most brutal one I encountered: After dying on one run, I spent the currency I’d earned to purchase a few upgrades and then turned off the game. When I turned it back on, the currency was still spent, but the upgrades I unlocked hadn’t saved. Oof.

• Stability. In addition to the everyday bugs, The Unliving also sometimes just struggled to run. About half of the time that I started the game up, it froze and required a full Steam reboot to try again. When I did get in, I often got stuck on seemingly endless loading screens, to the point where I often found myself wondering if the game had froze again, only for the level to finally start up just as I was beginning to think about resorting to “CTRL-ALT-DEL.”

SHOULD YOU PLAY IT?

I don’t want to give The Unliving a full-throated “no,” because I think it’s a wonderfully unique concept with a beautiful visual style and a lot of room to grow. But I definitely believe it’s worth waiting until the game is either out of early access entirely or at least much further along, with more updates and improvements. I can only hope RocketBrush is able to deliver on the promise of this intriguing but flawed title.

💬 How would you feel about being raised from death and enlisted in a skeletal army sweeping across the land in a wave of death and destruction? It probably beats the boredom of just chilling in a grave, right? Share your thoughts in the comments!