When we talk about what games have to offer today, we have to acknowledge that developers and audiences alike are drunk on content. Whether it’s live service games you’re expected to immerse yourself in to consume it all or single player games that boast hundreds of hours of playtime as a selling point, content is king. Content is how you get the value out of the games you buy. And if content ends up contradicting themes and mechanics in the games? Content almost always wins out.
This is why missing out has slowly been made a taboo concept in games. After all, if you can miss some of the content you paid good money for, that’s a feel-bad moment for the player, the consumer, right? That’s why you see games tout player choice but only offer mild consequences for each choice most of the time, with Mass Effect 2’s suicide finale being the most notable exception in recent memory. Compounding that is the perpetually escalating arms race when it comes to providing content to players to the point where the Dying Light 2 developer, Techland, is touting that its game has “500 hours of content” to chew through, a reality that isn’t exactly conducive to making consequences feel like they matter.
Unsighted, by Studio Pixel Punk, a small indie studio out of Brazil, flies in the face of the ever-ballooning trend of content for content’s sake by using timers and resource scarcity to make it clear you can never see–or save–everyone and everything.. In the game’s world, something is causing the sentient robots that you find yourself among to turn into mindless robo-zombies. You have the unique ability to see how much time each of these individuals have left before they turn. You can mitigate this by giving someone an item that gives them 24 more hours before they pop. This item, dust from the very meteor that gave the robots sentience, is a precious resource for obvious reasons. There are too many people to save with the meteor dust you can get in-game. Even scouring the different areas the game has to offer for a bit more dust has bad consequences, as the timers won’t wait for you to arrive with the stopgap measure. They’ll keep ticking down regardless.
Every person you meet has a different amount of time. Some people’s timers are big and comfortable, while others are right on the brink. This imbalance means you need to prioritize some people above others right off the bat, but that doesn’t stop you from playing favorites. For example, Iris, a fairy bot that can accompany you through most of your journey, is kind of intrinsic to the game. Keeping her around–and using valuable dust on her early–makes sense since you quickly bond with her. With everyone else, the decision gets harder. You have to weigh multiple competing factors against each other.. If you look at things from a purely rational perspective, you’ll want to prioritize the people in charge of amenities you’ll need later, like shopkeepers and such. But the heart is stronger than the brain sometimes and you might find yourself helping characters whose stories really resonated with you.
You’re not going to start out rationalizing terrible decisions that the game forces on you. You’ll start this quest with the high-minded goal of saving everyone. If you’re just fast enough, if you get enough resources and use them wisely, maybe you can pull it off. But inevitably, you can’t, not during a first playthrough, and unless you are a seasoned speedrunner and put a lot of work into it, probably not ever. This means the best you can do is staunch the bleeding as you go and accept that some people will not survive, a notion that hurts all the more as you get to know these characters and grow close to them – a relationship system encourages players to do just this, so it’s even more likely to hurt once the time comes.
What many developers who tout player choice in their games seem unwilling to do is introduce the friction necessary to make the player feel something once their choices bear fruit. The choices you must constantly weigh in Unsighted are terrible, even cruel. But they all make you feel something. The timers give the campaign urgency that most games lack, and the consequences of your choices are laid bare from the word go. And even then, there’s the possibility that these same choices – who you choose to save, how you staunch the bleeding – will fail thanks to a miscalculation. You don’t just have to make choices but have the ability to execute them as well. You still have a game to beat, after all, so miscalculation is inevitable and terrible. Unsighted isn’t afraid to make it hurt, and it isn’t afraid to leave giant holes in what most other games consider content. It’s a game that has an unbelievable amount of trust in the player even as everything is rapidly crumbling away underneath you.
And then there’s the two elephants in the room that threaten to undermine everything the game builds: you can save everyone after all, either by flipping a setting that turns the timers off or getting the super secret ending utilizing a time travel item to cheat the timers. And yet the existence of these ways to play don’t undermine the game’s power one iota because, again, of the immense trust the game places in the player. The timer setting allows players to approach the game how they want, and the time machine item is hidden piecemeal all over the game’s map in places that aren’t even part of 100% map completion, making it highly unlikely to stumble onto on a first playthrough and serving as an invitation to experience this work another way.
That’s where the nexus point of content vs. choice lies: Not in letting the player have their 500-hour cake and burdening them to try eating it all too, but in letting players approach the game on their terms, viewable from different facets without robbing any moments of their thematic power. Because even if you find the idea of racing against death’s clocks for your friends too anxiety-inducing, Unsighted is still a powerful story of bonds, community, and most of all, a world built on love. These are universal no matter the medium.