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Unbound Essay

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Wadjet Eye doubles down on the narrative-driven puzzles in Unbound, ensuring it feels like an investigative procedural, which ultimately benefit the game. As in Legacy, you visit several locations in order to obtain clues, combine them into new ones, and revisit the places armed with new information. In Unbound, progress is almost exclusively achieved through confronting an NPC with a new piece of irrefutable evidence. Wadjet Eye has, to great effect, re-worked the item-based puzzles as well, ensuring they are narratively entrenched. Please indulge a slight spoiler: in order to help someone remember a person, Lauren has to use her Polaroid Camera to take a picture of a photograph of the person in question, so he can have him identified. Another example is how Lauren uses her phone book and telephone throughout Blackwell: Unbound. In Legacy, Rosangela used her computer in order to research clues, In Unbound this idea is expanded upon further and taken to its next logical step. Lauren may look up potential persons of interests in the phone book in order to give them a call or to obtain their address, unlocking a new location to explore. Giving the player a more …show more content…

In Unbound, Erin Robinson raises the quality of the both the characters and backgrounds even further; in addition to being more plentiful, each scene is highly detailed, and, in conjunction with the soundtrack, feels like a real, believable location both aesthetically and narratively. Erin Robinson imposed some alterations to the art direction as well. For example, the text boxes and animated character portraits of Legacy are gone in favor for more minimalistic, Lucas Arts style captions. While this change to great effect reduces screen cluttering, giving Blackwell: Unbound a smooth presentation, I found myself missing the portraits - in particular, Rosangela's disconcerting

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