Unferat is, by its own description, a "Warlock simulator". You play the role of a young man working under his father, a librarian and scholar in a small coastal town. The local miners uncover a strange scrap of metal, and after some examination and research your father manages to work out that this is in fact an ancient and terribly powerful artifact; the dagger "Unferat".
However, word spreads quickly in small communities like this, and your father quickly comes under scrutiny by the church. Not trusting the militant order to adequately respect the power held within the blade, your father resists handing it over to the anointed thugs and for his defiance is struck down on the spot. In his last moments he sends you away with the unholy artifact, and through its awakening power manage to escape the violence, eventually landing upon and laying claim to the abandoned lighthouse which was said to have once been inhabited by a powerful warlock in ages past. Frightened and enraged, you curse the township for selling your father out to the church and plot your revenge...
And it's at this point that the game really starts! How shall you go about taking that revenge, exactly? With Unferat gathering strength and binding itself to you, and the old warlock's ramshackle facilities available, you have several options at your disposal.
The game is predominantly split into two main mechanisms: Spellcasting and alchemy. Spellcasting is performed by bringing up a three-tiered wheel of arcane phrases, and then correctly selecting the appropriate words of power in order to align the wheel. The very first spell you learn, for shapechanging into a crow (and back into a human when you're done), is a succession of the words "Vita", "Orma", and "Atur" (and by this point I've heard that chanted enough times to recite it from memory). Failure here doesn't really mean a whole lot other than having to try again, but time doesn't stop when you're chanting and you can't move while focusing on the wheel, so you have to be careful about it. With rare exception, spells require you to have the appropriate spellcasting reagent available in your inventory, which will be consumed as a focus point for the spell's energies.
Alchemy requires a large brewing cauldron, of which there are two in the game. Luckily, you just happen to be the proud owner of one of those! Inserting the proper ingredients into the cauldron interface along with cauldron commands such as "Heat", "Mix" and "Filter
in the correct order will allow you to brew potions and transmute materials into other states. Now, this bit is somewhat finicky, as failure here means not only that you lose all the ingredients put into the cauldron, but you also end up *damaging* the cauldron and will need to repair it using somewhat rare lumps of iron ore.
How sensitive is it to incorrect order? The recipe "Rat tail + Ungus + Mix" will infuse the rat tail with pestilent energies, meaning that when used in the appropriate summoning spell it will call forth enhanced plague rats that can poison your opponents, rather than weaker mundane rats. However, inserting "Ungus + Rat tail + Mix" will result in losing both ingredients and putting a sizeable dent in your cooking apparatus. This could probably do with some tweaking, in my opinion, but the gist of the matter is:
Be careful and pay attentionAnd, really, that's more or less the main philosophy of the game. Be careful. Pay attention. Plan ahead. As a warlock, you have some very powerful energies at your disposal, but they're generally not great at helping you out of a sudden bind. Spy on the villagers, make note of their routines, prepare potions and enchantments ahead of time, and pick your battles.
It's a very slow-paced game, as there's generally a great deal of waiting involved. Also a lot of busywork running around and harvesting the specific herbs you need to enact your plan. And your little human legs move you sooooo sloooooowly... Crow form is generally the best way of getting around, but you need to either manage your crow feather usage carefully or invest enough skill points into the spell that you don't need them anymore.
Speaking of skill points: Skills! Through the death of named characters and a couple other means (sacrificing to old gods, conducting dark research, eating berries etc.), you earn skill points which can be invested into any of the four main schools of ability: Necromancy, Witchcraft, Alchemy, and Demonology. Each school has 6 skills to pick from, and three levels of mastery in each.
Necromancy is, of course, mainly about summoning various types of minions who will heed your command and can either follow you around or be set up to guard important locations. These vary from skeletons conjured from alchemically-treated bones, zombies raised directly from fresh corpses, and giant hulking monstrosities patched together from large amounts of various remains (and taking on different statistics depending on which components get used and in what amounts).
Witchcraft is mostly about transformation and utility. You start the game with one point in the crow spell, and there's also a book right in the tower that gives you a free point in Rat Master so you can summon a few rats by expending a rat's tail as a component. Other abilities include: Changing trees into giant evil flytraps, short-range teleportation, and turning into Sauron's war form.
Alchemy is, well... Alchemy. It's all about creating and improving various types of consumables, from healing potions to poisons, to lumps of chalk that you can inscribe deadly traps with. Potentially very powerful, but it can get rather expensive as far as herbs go and you need to use the concoctions carefully to get the best effect. That said, those rune traps have saved my bacon on a few occasions.
Demonology is a quirky one, and what I mostly focused on during my first run. Demonology is based around opening demonic portals, which do not require reagents but do take some of the warlock's current health in order to open and will close again if he ventures too far away (roughly a screen's length). With a portal, you can transmute certain items into cursed versions that are used in infernal spells, or sacrifice materials in order to summon forth fiendish allies. Demonology takes a lot of waiting and planning ahead in order to get to work, and it doesn't *really* come online until midway into the game when you have enough skill points to invest at
least three into the school... But once it opens up, you have access to the strongest defensive emplacements/roadblocks in the game.
Now, I say "roadblock"... This is because it can occasionally be desirable to stop up a road and block anyone from traveling past that checkpoint. Not just in order to catch named targets that are patrolling the roads or to harvest some poor peasants for their juicy flesh and bones, but also because the game features a logistics system for the village itself.
The villagers aren't just meandering around aimlessly; the farmers are actually collecting food, the woodcutters are actually gathering lumber, and the herbalists are actually high off their asses on mushrooms that
rightfully belong to you! They then venture back to the village in order to drop off their harvests in the square, where they get cooked, forged, or distilled into resources that benefit the townspeople and confer statistical advantages to them.
Plonking down an ambush at the mine doesn't just kill off those annoying miners, it also prevents the town from getting more iron ore. Without ore, the smith can't create new equipment. Without equipment, the village watchmen can't have their armor and weapons enhanced to become far deadlier than they otherwise would be.
Now, this is all very interesting
in theory... But the issue is that, first of all, you cannot feasibly prevent certain resources from being harvested/utilized. Even if you *did* dedicate your entire day to hunting down the herbalists (they, unlike other professions, will just scatter and go frickin'
everywhere), by the time you have the capacity to reliably kill them like that the village will already have an herb stockpile in the thousands that can be converted into scores upon scores of healing potions for the townsfolk to use. It'd be better to just kill off the healer himself, who has a much more reliable schedule and tends to spend a lot of time by himself in the back end of the village. But even then, due to respawns you'd have to dedicate a portion of just about every day in order to kill off each replacement as they come through, and that can get pretty expensive for
you.
In addition to all that... Any death, whether it's a named target or some hapless villager, goes towards the kill count. The kill count is effectively the game's progression, and will unlock new named targets, new routines for the townsfolk, and other special events. Supposedly, this is meant to be a measure of how much influence you've pushed on the surrounding area, making it safer and more profitable for you.
This is a lie. There are exactly two milestones that I could list as being predominantly beneficial to you, and they both come with caveats. Outside of that there are things like increasing the number and quality of guards around the village, setting up patrols to scout the roads day and night, secret order assassins plonking down next to trees and camping there until you show up so they can snipe you, high-powered hero bands that rove the countryside, and angry torch-and-pitchfork mobs that assemble to try and knock over your tower themselves.
It's a niche little game, and while there's some definite room for improvement (beyond the aforementioned hiccups with supply and whatnot, the UI is... Not great. Almost as bad as the character controls), it's a compelling little title that has some absolutely fantastic potential to it.
The dev is Russian, as are most of the posts in the Steam forum, and with as little attention this game has received so far there aren't a lot of useful English-language resources for it. I'm trying to collect enough screenshots from my current playthrough to put together a map of all the Tricea berries (there are 30 in total, eating 15 will grant you a bonus skill point), but I'm honestly a teensy bit burned out after
just having finished my first run in a pretty marathon gaming session...
I think this thing has some serious future to it! The dev is still quite active (pushed out a new update just yesterday), so even though he's being modest and trying to not promise anything grandiose I do believe that there are improvements and expansions in store. With any luck, the rougher edges of this title can get rounded off and we'll have a very nice little gem on our hands.
If anyone does decide to give this thing a go, I'd be happy to try and assist with what experience I've managed to accrue thus far. There are a bunch of little tips and tricks that can make life for an aspiring dark sorcerer easier, and frankly... We need all the help we can get.
Until then, keep calm and
Char Orma Reda
Author
Topic: Unferat: I Require More Shrooms (Read 4519 times)