UNLOVED
I have been playing this game for something like 7 years. Some players have a toxic relationship with Destiny, others with Call of Duty, but mine is Unloved.
The game is simple: You are a guy (or gal) with a gun. The elevator only goes down, and is powered by blood. The elevator has stopped. Somewhere on this floor is 7 blood machines that you must fill (with your own blood, obviously). Between you and that goal is a red key, blue key, and yellow key, and a lotta monsters. The games always go in this order. The structure doesn't deviate from that format in any notable way.
I have been playing this game for seven years. Fucking WHY.
Unloved, The Doom Mod
Unloved is based off of a Doom II WAD of the same name. It barely has anything to do with the game that was released on steam, other than vibes and the willingness to kick your teeth in.
I love Doom, but it's neither here nor there.
Unloved, The Experience
Ohhh, where to start.
There are lots of ways to approach this, so lets take this a step at a time.
The Vibes
The vibes are rancid. No surface is clean, everything discourages being touched, the button in the elevator has had its UP button ripped out. There is no hope here, you can only go deeper, things can only get worse. This even extends to the fonts in the game.
There are vanishingly few lights in each randomly assembled level. Most of the time, the only reason you see anything is your flashlight and the fact that items give of a slight red sparkle.
There are four tile-sets: city, apartments, basement, and the hospital. It is important to not think of these as real places; the elevator suggests you're miles underground, after all. They are merely perverted ideas of these places. Hospitals have operating theaters covered in blood, apartment rooms sometimes spawn the flesh variant, and the décor could be described as "defying gravity". You don't want to live here, nobody ever lived here, and you should leave as fast as possible.
The Meta
There is a progression system for profiles that dictates the likelihood of surviving different difficulty levels. It's... kind of strange.
I have too much personal damage to accurately judge where the pain precisely lies, but it is slow. Each mission earns you some currency, called Karma, and a handful of trinkets. Trinkets are basically modifiers to your person, and they each go into a slot. There are, as of writing, a figurine slot, an evidence slot, a slot per weapon, and a ring slot. It takes about 2k karma to unlock a slot, and it is only even useful if you have a trinket to put in it, and you only get about 500 karma a run, if you survive.
There isn't a direct gameplay result of having a high level; it is just a rating of your total upgrades. However, game-hosts can choose to limit players to be above a certain level.
Karma is earned by doing challenges and completing runs alive. They can also be gained by breaking down trinkets and unlocking memories with photos found in levels.
Later on, at about level 50 or so, you have the ability to do runs that may result in demon chests. At the great cost of lots of karma to open them, you might get a special trinket with extremely good stats or special abilities. Maybe.
The Gameplay
The shooting is serviceable. The monsters have analogies to Doom II enemies for the most part, and are defeated in similar ways. The levels are procgen and are tiles to a grid, but you never quite know what you might find in each.
But uh... um...
Esotericism
Esoterism is defined as knowledge known by few, and usually difficult to understand. However, it is rare to use it in the form of, say, pipeline engineering. When someone whips out a word like esoterism, it is almost always next to cults or mysticism.
The closest people come to esoteric knowledge is their religion. Why is God the father, the son, and the holy spirit? He just... is. It simply doesn't work any other way. I would argue the next common area is in games. In Fortnite, there is a very specific flick of the mouse and keyboard roll that allows one to put out 90's. In Quake III there is a very specific motion and flow to do strafe jumping and bunny hopping.
In Unloved, there are very specific procedures that must be followed to not die. Not all of them are describable with words, but high enough level players know the unspoken contracts.
Everything Here Wants Me to Die
You are never outright told there is an entity toying with you, which is ironic, because the entity absolutely will not shut up in the chat window.
Every time you hold the use button to interact, be it an item or door, there is a chance that the Entity will curse you out. If the chat comes out orange, you have just cashed a check you'll need to pay later. That can happen multiple times in a row. When it is red, then your time to pay the bills has come due. Monsters will spawn somewhere in the level, and the severity of monsters and number will increase based off your difficulty and how many orange messages went out before the red.
As far as I know it is completely random, but in my years of experience, these seem to be the best practices:
- Never open a door you don't have to.
- Never pick up a weapon you hold.
- Never pick up ammo to a weapon you don't hold.
- Only pick up boxes of bullets if you are below half full
- Only pick up small ammo pieces if you are below 75% of your max
- Always pick up weapon upgrade pouches, though it will make things harder in the short run.
- Always pick up ONE heavy weapon. On single player games you may pick up both, but there is no guarantee you will find both.
- Pick up color keys if and only if you feel safe to do so. The keys are special, they always are noticed by the entity and might add a floor to what spawns in, so things will be harder from then on out.
- Open doors only if your immediate room is clear.
The first game experience of a lot of players is joining in someone else's game and getting immediately kicked for breaking one or all of these rules. What those players don't get to see is the hosting player getting immediately murdered after the kick due to the onslaught their meddling summoned.
There are other factoids along these lines that I do because it seems true, but I couldn't prove them to save my life. Like how items on the ground don't seem to generate as much ire as ones anywhere else, or how the blood machine room is guaranteed to have a medpack somewhere.
The Invisible Dance
The little gameplay tweak of the fact the player must look at an item for at least 2 seconds straight in order to use it affects your movement in the world in ways that you don't even realize it at first.
Doors are the enemy. As stated before, opening doors generates Ire, but an open door is a barrier that may never be closed. Door are a corner you will need to check. Doors are an opportunity for monsters to spawn. Colored doors with monster noises behind it is a promise and a threat. A door that needs to be opened but isn't yet is 2 seconds of staring at it.
In a tower defense sort of way, you need to open doors so that monsters that spawn in far away rooms must travel the furthest to get to wherever you are. In a way, you write runes with the rooms themselves, incantations that if misspoke, will result in hoards crashing into your position.
Added to all this is the fact that all the low level monsters can, at random, move so fast they might as well be teleporting. You will spot one at the end of a hallway, when suddenly it is in your face. You may be trying to pick up a ammo pack and suddenly something is tearing you to shreds behind you. Sometimes you'll shoot at a monsters and it disappears in a puff of smoke.
You start favoring items in bookshelves because you can reach around it in a way that keeps your back to the wall and your eyes up. You dread trying to pick up dropped monster ammo because it means staring at the ground for a few seconds, so you do this crouch maneuver that at least lets you see something as you do so.
You start making choices with your totems that favor item interaction speed over move speed, or even damage. Damage is nice, but once you get to the point where low tier enemies die to one shot, it's diminishing returns.
The Moves Change but the Rhythm Doesn't When You Add a Partner
Unless you tell it not to be, every game you make is public. Your goals don't change, but the process does.
Adding another player multiplies how many monsters spawn. This sounds like it's not that big of a deal with another player to shoot at said monsters, but consider: they have to pick up ammo too. Now two motherfuckers are antagonizing the entity and using double the ammo to kill double the monsters coming at double the rate. This can become untenable really fast.
The current mystical wisdom is split into two camps. The first is that some players get really good at melee only builds. This has advantages: basically all you are touching is health and objective items at that point, but the stamina bar being tied to the melee attack makes getting swarmed very easy. This compensates somewhat for one person spawning two people's worth of monsters.
The other way is not mutually exclusive; basically, one person fights for their life at a chokepoint, and the other player searches for the objectives. This works better than it should since one player makes it safe to put their back to a door, and the other can search without being hounded. And because one is doing most of the fighting, they aren't using two people's worth of ammo.
Adding Instruments
There are a lot of random elements that this game forces you to read and interpret very quickly, but I'll leave with the last one:
The Chests.
Little lockboxes may appear in a level, and you will need a small-key to open them. If you can bring one to these boxes, you can open them to get a very random boon to you and everyone currently in the game.
They are usually good, like upgrade damage, reload speed, or relevant stat to one or all of your weapons. They are sometimes strange, like runspeed increases or the chance of reloading not taking from your ammo pool. And they're sometimes unsettling, like being able to see every enemy on your minimap.
There is a price. There is always a price. Opening these chest just about always prompts at least an orange Entity call-out. Is it worth opening these things late game? Is it worth opening them at all? Consider: everyone in your team gets the boon. Also consider: the boons may go to weapons you don't even have.
In high difficulties, a variant of these chests called demon chests may appear. They are red, they glow, you can't miss them. You want to open them, but doing so instantly pisses off the Entity and backfills your run with Ire. Most players I roll with try to save it for last... but not all.
Answer the Question, Mr. Black
Ok. So why.
This isn't the complete answer, but it's on the right vector:
Throughout the game, there is a sort of story of sorts, lore really, that can be extracted if you find enough Polaroids. You can spend these pictures to uncover increasingly expensive lines to various related stories.
One claims the elevator goes to Cthulhu. Another talks about missing children in a school, never seen again. Yet another is someone who finds the elevator for themselves, goes crazy, and kills their compatriots.
The elevator only goes down. The blood machines only enable you to go deeper. Your only option is to die, or go deeper. There is a similar idea going on in 2024's El Paso, Elsewhere. Though in that, not only does the elevator have a bottom, but it eventually goes up.
You see, the floors are the destination. While the subject matter is grotesque, it is you (me) who chooses to load this game and get off the elevator. The shooting, while simple, is tight (the reload animation for the super shotgun is different if you reload one or two barrels, how cool is that). Being so aware that I know the difference between a slow exhale and a sharp gasp is the difference between life and death.
You know, the game knows, the elevator knows.
Near the bottom of the lore items you uncover, you uncover "Missing Person Report #01".
An elevator that doesn't go up doesn't elevate anything at all.
What is it called?