E3 2019: Unexplored 2 Revealed

4.5

It started, as so many games do, with Lord of the Rings. But not with the fantasy tropes of elves and dwarves, goblins and wizards. The vision for Unexplored 2 started with adventure—that sense of a grand journey, the fellowship crossing all of Middle-earth on a quest to save it. You need to feel isolated and small in a vast world. You need to carve your own path. And you definitely need to get out of the dungeon.

"We want to put the adventure first, and really try to double down on the sense of narrative and accomplishing this thing," says creator Joris Dormans. "That's one of the things that I really love about roguelikes: If you pull off a win, it really is your win. It's not just the hoops that we set up for you to jump through. It's your story. And that story becomes so much more interesting if there are actually narrative choices in there, with consequences, with a history that you've built up with the world. What I hope is that when players beat the game for the first time... I almost want them to feel sorrow for having to leave that world behind, because they are invested in it. I don't know if we can pull that off, but that's a design target for me."

The first Unexplored, released on Steam in 2017, did not have these ambitions. It was a more traditional roguelike, a quest through 20 floors of the Dungeons of Doom in search of the magical amulet. What set it apart from so many others was its subtly brilliant procedural generation, which laid out an entire dungeon with more care than a jumble of randomized floors. It seeded in little mysteries, bits of story, and knowledge of what was on other floors, so that a random book you read on level three could actually allude to something you'd find an hour later, six floors down. It doesn't sound like a big deal until you experience it yourself, but no other roguelike I've played weaves together storytelling and level design in the same way.

In other words, Unexplored was good. But Unexplored 2 is the game Dormans really wanted to make.

"Unexplored was more or less a game for me to prove the technology, that we could do the content generation in the right way," he says. "And now it's really opening the world and making it much grander. Here we're doing something similar: Instead of planning out a dungeon, we're planning out the entire map. So we know what's going to be on the map and we can use the same sorts of foreshadowing techniques to fill in every individual level and try to make it feel as coherent as we possibly can."