Harper Pendrell is a simple man to do everything that lives in Yelltown. And right now, it’s not joy: the city is confined following the appearance of a strange deadly epidemic. One day, while he had just repaired the material of a scientific friend, he falls on a girl seriously touched by this mysterious disease. Knowing Lost, she entrusts her an important message to send to one of her contacts. And that’s how our guy is resulted in a story that goes far away than he would have imagined.
Virus, quarantine, pharmaceutical companies, all of this might seem opportunistic given the context of this beginning of the year 2022. But it is in fact nothing: UNFORESEEN INCIDENT is first released on PC in May 2018 and The development of the SWITCH version had already been mentioned at the beginning of 2019. In a way, the people of Backwoods Entertainment have even been more visionary.
Surfer on the fifth wave
UNFORESEEN INCIDENTS is a clearly traditional Click point. The player control Harper from the cursor and you have to collect useful objects and inspect the surroundings to progress in history.
The obstacle classics are found for which the objects harvested on the way to be used, sometimes combined with each other. Some other puzzles need to manipulate various systems and traffic the settings. The most twisted passages ask the player to interpret the indices scattered here and there; The answer is always present somewhere, remains to understand what we are looking for. We must therefore do some trips to reap all the necessary information; Fortunately, the game offers a fast travel system through a map of the current region.
The graphic style is nice, as hand drawn. The animation, on the other hand, is more rudimentary. It also happens that the character moves off in relation to the path (of the genre to walk on a wall instead of the neighboring staircase).
All dialogs are lined in English and French translations well made (except when comes the classic French restaurant that becomes Italian in texts). The music make their job without being necessarily striking.
All this serves an interesting story punctuated with twists and a few touches of humor.
confined to nomad
The game is tested here in its Switch version. As always with a game of the console, the cursor goes to the right stick and always gives the impression of putting three years to cross the screen. Fortunately, the triggers can quickly select the points of interest around the character or even only the output points. The left stick also allows you to move the character independently of the pointer.
It’s in nomadic mode that the game is the most comfortable to play because the touch screen is supported here. Everything is heading with your fingertip for our greatest pleasure. Finally, not really everything, in reality: some manipulations are not obvious by this bias and it is then easier to temporarily resume the sticks. It is also easier to bring out the points of interest with the X button rather than searching for the corresponding icon in the inventory. And the Drag & Drop in inventory objects can be delicate if you have big fingers.
Another problem of nomad is the size of the screen. There are some passages where the text is written in really very small, without possibility to enlarge. It’s better to have a good view.
Some bugs were noted: the cursor that hangs on a button, text bubbles that come out of the screen or password that does not want to validate. If most are benign, some may be more troublesome: I had a case where it had to reload the previous checkpoint to validate an action.
UNFORESEEN Incidents has all the ingredients of a good adventure game and its adaptation takes advantage of the console. But it remains in the whole very classic and the competition is already rough on the Nintendo eshop.
_Test made on Nintendo Switch by NEGOFTER from a version provided by the publisher.