Ironically enough there is no exploration here, just a chore to clear a map.

A rare W for StarField if you know what i mean

Restarted the world and now my save is soft-locked.

game has fish but no fishing pole. tragedy

I can see some potential here (or maybe I see aspects that were carefully placed so the game looks like it has potential), but my experience was just VERY disappointing at the end of the day:

- You start with no goal or indication of what to do, you just explore aimlessly, but the world is procedurely generated, so you end up just walking around A LOT, and you end up backtracking A LOT more than doing anything else.
- You can explore the map off the beaten path, and each world is HUGE! But exploring is not rewarding at all. You have to spend a lot of time just seeing more and more trees until you reach a point of interest.
- The random order at which stuff are thrown at you make the mechanics too obstruse. For example, you find the rabbit soon in the game and it can create a bush, but I only found out a use for the bush on the 2nd world (and each world takes a LONG time), and only knew of that use because I looked it up.
- There's no real story. Everything is just too vague. Sometimes you find a creature that will tell you random vague self-help messages totally out of context or order, and that's about it. Throughtout my whole experience, I saw no purpose in my explorations.
- The game calls itself an "action adventure". There's no real action. This is more a walking simulator.
- This game is INSANELY repetitive. You walk around A LOT (I can't stress this enough), only to find a procedurely generated obstacle you've probably faced before, with some little variants that don't feel different at all to be honest.
- You can interact with animals, and some of them wil lhelp you a bit, but barely. Enemies are either very easy to avoid or really annoying, depending on the amount they cram into a given area. Also, there are some plant interactions that made no sense at all to me, I still have no idea of what they do. Everything is very obscure and make little sense. There's no feeling of reward in trying stuff out.
- Since you spend most of your time running through woods, it REALLY sucks that (1) you have stamina for running and (2) bumping into the trees will slow you down. You're just making the game artificially longer.
- Deaths mean little to your progress, but they're cheap, and sometimes they force you to backtrack a LARGE area. For example, you take the wrong turn, you die, Use the wrong teleporter, you die.
- Whenever I finished covering an area on the map, and then I saw the size of the next and figured the world was even larger than I'd expected, I just felt annoyed "ugh, more ground to walk over", instead of "great, more interesting stuff to explore!", because there's nothing interesting to explore, seriously!

Basically, this "game" is really uninteresting, boring, and repetitive. I've played for 5 hours and it felt like 15, And I didn't even finish world 2, which was dragging way too long and felt like it was 3x as large as world 1.

There's no sugar-coating, Future Unfolding is just a plain experience that looks pretentious enough to make you think "oh, I think there's something here", but actually there's nothing. Nothing. Maybe the whole point of the message here is that "life is meaningless", in which case, "yeah, that's obvious, but I'd rather have fun while I'm at it".

Don't even bother!

Beautiful exploration game

i love the mood of this game so much. the overheard art style with heavy use of shadows really add to that feeling like the sun is setting and you should be getting home, but you're lost in the woods and can't find your way home. it really represents both the strange beauty and dangers of nature well. i often compare it to Proteus, which may have better sound design, but represents nature in a bit of a flat one-dimensional way otherwise. this really feels like a world you're immersing yourself in - one that's both scary and beautiful at the same time, like the real world.

anyway, a really memorable experience overall - one that's hard to describe in words. i often recommend it to friends. my one complaints is the progression is a bit repetitive/a lot of the worlds kind of resemble each other. so maybe it's worth just playing in pieces and taking a break for awhile between them. and you also don't need to play the full game to get the experience.

I just played through this game. I don't think I can recommend it, though.

First, though, the game seems to have its speed tied to framerate, and the framerate is really variable on my computer (ranging from ~50fps to ~300fps when playing the game), so the character would sometimes be sluggish and sometimes zoom across the map. This, plus the saturated colours of the game, gave me motion sickness.

I have no clue what the story of the game is, other than perhaps a vague theme of "nature should be in balance".

Gameplay-wise, the game doesn't explain itself very well; there's little tutorial other than showing prompts for the controls at the very start. I feel like there's more to the game than what I managed to figure out.

The game claims to encourage exploration, but the forests are generally dense enough that trying to move through them is a chore. Yet you're required to do that when exploring, which poses the question "why are they so dense that they act as a deterrent?".

The deadliness of the wolves, snakes, and bees, especially given that I often found hordes of them placed right upon completion of a puzzle, felt like cheap deaths all around. The puzzles themselves weren't generally that deep either (though I'm not sure this is that much of a flaw). The game is procedurally generated, apparently, something I didn't realise until I got stuck and decided to restart the level.

If you can look past all the flaws, then what you have is a pretty cool exploration game, but its flaws are really dragging it down.

I'm going to go throw up now.

Honestly kinda torn with this game.

Future Unfolding is an odd game in that you'll see most people's experiences are positive, but the all of the negative reviews share the same problem; The game is excessively vague, and the gameplay is extremely repetitive. My main issue with Future Unfolding is that, like most Indie games, it relies on breaking away from the mould, but this also usually comes with a gimmick.

The gimmick here is that Future Unfolding, is a very predictable, and monotonous style of play, that requires you - ideally - to fully explore your surroundings to fill in your map, and then use certain mechanics to solve puzzles. As there are collectables and secrets hidden in the map, you will spend more time than you want to scouting around instead of accomplishing goals. The ambiguity and vague map layouts will have you finding trail after trail, and only when you reach the end you may realise you were following your main objective the entire way. For the completionist, this means you're going to be backtracking a lot to fill voids on your map. The visuals are unique but they lose their charm pretty quickly when you realise how empty the game actually is. Outside of key areas on the map, there's very little to find, and most areas feel very cut+paste with any real personality. Pair all of this on top of a sprint system that you can only enhance by finding special white flowers, expect the game to be drawn out a little.

The puzzles, whilst not too obtuse or demanding, focus around core mechanics that you have to discover yourself. Eventually they'll build up to be more complex, but the indeterminate story begs you to ask why you're even completing any of these puzzles. Pair this with some rather, punitive gameplay features, whilst I never felt overly 'pressured' I felt more frustrated when set back from being killed by a hostile creature, in which you can expect to die to them, a lot. Most of them have the ability to one shot, encouraging you to be increasingly agile in encounters, wherein upon death, you will lose everything you've gained, mainly, your sprint duration boosts.

Most people here speak of finding some, profound meaning behind the game, some greater purpose, something spiritually lifting or some kind of revelation. In my short experience with this game (I didn't finish it) I found hints of what could be some intellectually engaging commentary, but the presentation felt overly superficial and pretentious. This is where I found first impressions to be extremely crucial. The game, due to its flaws in game design, couldn't reel me in beyond the first two hours, especially when I noticed that I had only completed a third of the game by that point, and I had already grown immensely tired of the formula the game was enforcing onto me.

I'm usually pretty open and engaging to indie projects like this, but this was a game that really seemed to communicate to me, that the beauty here is only skin deep. Maybe there was something at the end of the tunnel, maybe there was some wisdom to be found amongst the spirit animals and winding mountain paths snaking through the pine forests, but I guess I'll never know, because for everything this game does right, namely the visuals, it fell short in every other aspect, and it couldn't give me anything to make me truly care to invest potentially 10+ hours into a game predominantly involving running nigh aimlessly around a map, just to have a sense of direction.

For an action/adventure game, this couldn't be any more of an overstatement. Action doesn't exist, and usually adventures come with some kind of motivation and/or purpose, neither of which you'll really find here.

Based on my experience, no more than a 4-5/10. Absolutely, positively, not anywhere remotely worth $30. Pick up on either extremely heavy discount, or wrap your head around some other games like Dear Esther or Gone Home, which whilst just as vague, are far more rewarding.

I can do exploration games. I found this one though not to be that appealing and it's very repetitive.

Beautiful, engaging, intriguing, relaxing.