The Unexpected Quest is a unique adventure and strategy game developed by Rionix and published by PQube and OverGamez for PC and Nintendo Switch. Farmville creatively combines simple resource management with strategy, puzzle, and adventure elements to create a compact and enjoyable toybox-type game.
I had no idea what to anticipate going into The Unexpected Quest. You could say I was, myself, on an unexpected quest to play this game. And also the outcome was absolutely satisfying. The storyline is simple. Your ship is stranded, and you've got to outlive against monsters to rescue yourself. The plot quickly becomes irrelevant, though, as you are immersed inside a beautiful game with creative and fun gameplay.
There are essentially two sides to the gameplay. First, you have the resource management aspect. You use workers to construct buildings that either generate resources, hire warriors and other folks, and expand your convenience of hiring more people. Your resources are food, building material, and gold, that you simply generate from certain buildings, get in the wild, gain through potions, or drop from slain enemies. You need these resources to build more buildings and clear blocked paths.
These elements are all pretty casual. There is nothing that consumes your resources without your choosing to achieve this, and if you’re have less something you require to advance, you can usually just wait patiently to generate them or enough to market for gold. I appreciate that you simply never get stuck because you misappropriated your resources. You are able to choose to challenge yourself to spread with the game’s eight, a growing number of challenging and longer levels. Or, you are able to take it slow and enjoy it at your own pace.
The other aspect of The Unexpected Quest is the adventure, almost point-and-click, gameplay. Each level includes a specific larger goal, but throughout, you’ll encounter folks who provide you with smaller quests that you’ll need to complete to advance or accumulate stronger items. These things may include potions that heal or bestow your characters with abilities or level them up. The item management system would be a tad confusing at first. The game does not give great instructions which buttons do what, so it took me a long time to figure out how you can move items from my limited five-item holdings towards the chest that allows you to save items for later or subsequent levels. After i figured everything out on my own, the controls are usually just as simple as pointing and clicking.
The game itself starts simple, doing one small task at a time like clearing pathways, lighting campfires, and slaying one monster at any given time. But quickly, the levels be intricate and branching. You don’t need to solve their puzzles or explore the maps in almost any specific order necessarily, but clearing one quest may be necessary ultimately to pay off another. Figuring out what I needed to do next to open a brand new pathway, procure a brand new character, or gain the force or special capacity to defeat an enemy was always satisfying. And the difficulty did begin to increase, though never to a point past the nice casual pace the sport nails excellently.
I also adore the look of the game and also the sound from the game. It has a kind of claymation aspect to it that is absolutely endearing and makes exploring the maps again and again searching for stuff you missed all the more enjoyable. The character models have personality in their simplicity, and the toybox-like levels constantly give me the feeling of having fun with little clay figures in a diorama world. While sometimes the music seemed to switch at near-random, every track was soothing and welcome. The reality is, it’s very charming.
Truly my only real complaint about The Unexpected Quest is that it’s short and never especially replayable. While there are achievements and stars given out for clearing levels without losing any characters and collecting every hidden chest, you might well accomplish this in your very first time of most levels, and when not, probably your next. There’s a timer on each level too, that we suppose you can use to try and beat your time and effort, but that’s not something which ever seemed worthwhile to me. I appreciate that your items carry across each level, making your playthrough feel like one connected story. This also implies that if you get stuck in later levels, you can begin over to try to find chests you missed or carry over stronger potions into subsequent levels.
The Unexpected Quest was unexpectedly charming and quite fun to experience. Its toybox feel and unique blend of resource management and adventure and puzzle-solving elements made my time with the game quite fun and quite enjoyable to check out.
The Unexpected Quest is on January 22nd on Nintendo Switch and PC.
