Despite being very interested in the subject and having high hopes for this game I can't recommend it.

The gameplay itself is forgettable and repetitive: Go to each territory, recruit whomever is ready to join you and fight the enemy. Always picking the weakest enemy guarantees that you will win. There is no character development or any choice, aside from who you recruit and fight.
There is no dialogue with the other characters, they will just give you a quote (which is sometimes cut off mid-word at the end as if there is a character limit)

But then again this game, like other games from Locomotivah is not about gameplay, but about the story and about reflection. So does it deliver on this front?
Well, as stated before I was pleasantly surprised at seeing the title but my excitement was replaced with worry as soon as I saw the protagonists name as Miala is not a Congolese name. It made me worried about the research behind the game and unfortunately this worry proved to be justified.
None of the Congolese names are actually Congolese, they range in Culture from Southern African to Western African and anything in between. This made it very hard for me to get into the game, as I never got the idea that I was anywhere near the Congo, the Belgian names were reasonably accurate though.
You get virtually no background information before you get started and even if you click on "learn more" there is very limited information, including a 5 book Bibliography of which only one is from the past twenty years.

I also find it strange that one of the locals would compare Leopold II's riches to Rochefeller in one of the quote's. What would they care about Rochefeller? The story about Miala himself, which progresses whenever you kill a district commander, is also rather classic and unimaginative. And why in the world did the writers feel the need tohave him schooled and taught by a white man in matters of philosophy and warfare before he could rise to be a hero and rally his people? Every one of his ancestors probably knew more about those subjects than the average Belgian...

Anyway, to summarize: This game is a shallow execution of an interesting topic.


Pro's:

+ Interesting topic
+ Attempt to bring a lesser known part of history to attention

Cons:

- Poor immersion
- Very limited roleplay
- Hardly any strategy
- Sometimes text is cut off
- some spelling mistakes

The story suckered me into it, but the gameplay ruins it. The story seems like it's just a series of quotes and a few slides of text after a successful battle. The battle system itself quickly becomes repititive and lacks any variety. The game itself isn't that long, and hour or two and your done, and that's if you carefully read everything. Save your money and get something with more meat and sustenance in it.

Positive things first: Good intent in the story and selection of topic. Yet the game leaves the impression that the historical issue was only scratched on the surface. The choice of the actual gameplay mechanic, which is quite simplistic (build up army, fight, repeat, repeat, watch your fatigue) and that of the protagonist seem both quite out of touch with historic realities.

I might have rather played a text adventure as E. D. Morel in the «Congo Free State Propaganda War» or anything from a western perspective that touches well documented reality, than as Miala, a fictional very vaguely defined native African rebellion leader in his early twenties. Spoiler: He dies after winning the final Battle against King Leopold II himself (seriously?) at age 31? Just Why? .

The gameplay almost exclusively consists out of grinding through battles and increasing the strength of your army by beating the easiest opponents first (conveniently labeled «very easy»). The Campaign is beatable in under 30 minutes, probably always in under an hour. Once you figured out what does what in the very abstract fights, it's pretty much impossible to lose the game if you stick to the easiest opponents first. Since there is no variation or obvious alternate endings, the game itself doesn't offer any new content or difficulty in repeated playthroughs. It seems to be strictly linear.

A lot of good chances were missed here and the lack of media other than text is astonishing, no explanatory maps, no short general introduction into the history of colonialism. The game itself transports no feeling of the horrors, only facts. One might want to read Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" or (re-)play Spec Ops: The Line (which is very loosely based on Apocalypse Now and Conrad's Book) and just imagine the setting being transformed to the Congolese jungle, to compensate for that.



But for anyone who starts playing this and eventually learns on elsewhere about the topic and in the process probably gets lost in Wikipedia, I can still only recommend the game and hope for a better more extensive revisit to the topic at large in the future.

This is an odd game, if you can't tell. It's not a choose-your-own-adventure. It's not an RPG. It's basically a browser-style clicky game that runs in Adobe AIR, or like a time-management game where you click as fast as you can to keep tasks from overwhelming you. It tells the story of Belgian atrocities in the Congo in the early 20th century, although it uses fictional characters and events to do it. Your goal is to win battles by choosing "battle cries" and spending "hero points", basically managing about three choices constantly in real time while the losses of your troops and the enemy troops are displayed. Besides the battle cries and hero points, success depends on picking up rewards for defeating village bosses or for amassing enough men or weapons, setting your battle stance, and keeping morale high and fatigue low. This sounds more complicated than it is, and none of this comes with graphics other than some basic background images. Battles play quickly, allowing you to retry immediately if you lose.

There is a small amount of strategy involved, but the game reports your chances before you choose a battle and it autosaves, so you really just click until you win. You have to beat 11 bosses, but you can choose more if it helps you acquire people. Essentially you just play the "very easy" battles until there aren't any more, then the "easy", then "fair", then "hard". Actually I missed some rather obvious choices early on and still beat the game in less than two hours without restarting, just retrying. If I had done it right, I may have never had to fight a battle rated "hard".

The game is redeemed by the story, which is fairly well-written in English by an apparently Brazilian developer. There are a few typos or instances of strange grammar, but the actual text is not terribly long anyway. The game could be improved, of course, even for what it is. For example, I accidentally clicked past one of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle quotes and had no way to re-view it.

Anyway, if none of that turns you off, get it cheap (I got it in a bundle) and try it for an hour and a half. For what that's worth, I'm glad I played it.

Let me start out by saying: this game is boring.

King Leopold II ruled over the Free State of Congo in the late eighteen-hundreds, and he greatly abused the natives living there. The story the game tells is about "Miala" (the person you also play) who "controls" the Revolutionary Army and attempts to help the locals. And by "controls," I mean, "clicks a button every two minutes and hopes that their army wins." It's really not exciting at all. While this "game" might be good to learn about the events of the Congo under Leopold's rule, it does not do well as a game. This feels like one of those games that my history teacher might tell me to play and then fill out a worksheet on.

Yet another game that's neither worth the asking price nor a positive recommendation.

This is basically a text-based RPG that tells a revisionist history of colonial Congo, in which the Congolese rise up and overthrow the King of Belgium. (Picture Inglorious Basterds in text form, stripped of verbal pizzazz, and with Leopold II taking the place of the fuhrer).

I'll concede upfront that it's not a particularly good game. The basic mechanic involves clicking on various villages, recruiting any of the locals that feel like joining your army, and then attacking whichever colonial official is labelled "Very Easy" at that moment. (The game calculates this automatically, depending on how many soldiers and weapons you've got with you at the time). The battles themselves require a bit of quick-thinking resource management, as various options pop up while the two sides trade attacks. Increase your defense, or call in reinforcements? Make yourself invulnerable for four rounds, or take a chunk out of your enemy's stamina stats? This is pretty much the only part of the game that requires any degree of skill, and the lack of clear instructions meant that it took me an hour or so until I realized that I was even supposed to be making some of these choices at all. Once you get the hang of it, though, the game becomes incredibly easy (probably mind-numbingly so for some players).

There's no animation or sound effects to accompany any of this, just a mournful classical music loop that gets pretty annoying after awhile. However, the game is just short enough (1-2 hours) that I didn't get bored, though that's probably due to the fact that I'm a history nerd with a soft spot for a good colonial uprising. I particularly enjoyed the way that the victories snowballed into each other, with your army becoming larger, more and more villagers joining your side, and the momentum of inevitable victory beginning to take hold. (None of this is really communicated by the game; my imagination had to do the work). The final battle against Leopold himself is totally ridiculous from a factual standpoint, but also cathartic: who doesn't want to take some revenge for Congo's historical suffering, if only through a cheap Steam game?

Unheard Screams is a curio, and probably won't be enjoyable unless you've got a particular interest in both colonial history and experimental video games. I'm gonna go out on a wild limb here and guess that's quite a niche market -- but it also happens to be one that I squarely belong to. So it's a "thumbs up" from me, and a bit of a warning to everyone else.

While it's 'gameplay' is questionable, I certainly found it worth my time and money for the writing, which gave insights on a piece of history hitherto completely unknown to me.

Well... it's a nice little role-playing novel, I enjoyed it. A lot of supplementary material and a bit of imagination can make you feel the spirit of the revolution.

Depressing as heck

2.5/10

Interesting topic and good that it's steeped in history, and good that dev is trying to expose a topic not covered usually. Unfortunately gameplay sucks soo bad nobody wants to stick around. The whole thing is text based. All you do is click on villages, and a setence pops up. You go to a vendor and click to hire people and click to buy guns. Then you click on an area in captivity and then click attack. The combat isn't explained and doesn't make a lot of sense, or how to get money or do anything. I attacked a guy, lost my stuff and my money. But in reality game is soo boring and uninteresting to play I didn't really care. If you like reading go open a book, if you like only clicking on words go to any random website. Save yourself the money.