As I wandered into a stranger's camp in the wilderness, a curious optional quest text popped up: "Sing a song." brought to life by Unexplored 2's text role-playing system, I performed a popular little song with the flavor text at a loud volume I led the wayfarer through a series of small musical successes until I was told that I was to perform the song. The applause for my impromptu performance was not deafening, but it was enough to earn me a place by the campfire for the night.

When not singing, my roguelite avatar was busy lugging his modifier-laden gear around the hostile procedurally generated land. Yes, it's "Lord of the Rings"-esque, but "Unexplored 2" is inspired by Tolkien, as most fantasy games are not. Rather than having you go through another round of orc wars, hot elves, and magic swords with funny names, "Unexplored 2" focuses on the long, hard journey of the traveler, resorting to combat only when you run out of Lemba's Waybread and need to hunt, or when you are forced to defend yourself.

Unfortunately, no one's favorite part of the book is the part where the characters complain about being tired or hungry. The random events that my Wayfarer discovers along the way provide a brief moment of levity, but in the end, the journey of "Unexplored 2" is like a blabbermouth about the filler that happens between the really good stuff. Unlike "Lord of the Rings," you can't skim the text when your character is cold, hot, wet, or tired, and thanks to frequent bugs, you have no idea if your destination will work as intended when you finally arrive.

Unexplored 2's twist on the classic roguelike is that the journey to destroy Yendor's staff could take generations to accomplish. Moving from one overworld map node to another usually triggers an event. Some you have to navigate yourself, others occur automatically as you pass through, but most seem to involve dodging large numbers of falling rocks. They are relentless, boringly precise, and ubiquitous falling rocks.

There are better moments when you feel like you are on an adventure. At one point, a fellow traveler mentions a friendly trading post and points out its location on my map. Another time, after a long hike in the mountains, I was cold and wet and in desperate need of a warm campfire. Some days, we would go through narrow canyons with sharp rocks, dark caves, and strange beasts roaming about. [Combat is simple: hold a shield in one hand and a dangerous metal object in the other and quickly press the attack button to swing it around or charge for a more powerful swing. I have come to avoid combat not because it is dangerous or usually pointless (although loot is seldom available in "Unexplored 2"). It didn't feel like I was defending myself against enemies who were after my blood, but rather like the two of us were repeating stiff, unconvincing attack animations until one of us ran out of HP. This was especially true in "Unexplored 2" because every time someone tried to kill me, I would lock myself in that area and justify the encounter with a simple text message.

Yes, I know there are enemies nearby.

Conversations and mini-role-play scenarios are a more important part of Unexplored 2, combining the personal skills of my current Wayfarer with various unusual status effects and a "fortune system" that attempts to simulate a tabletop RPG The "Fortune System" is a combination of the following. I might be able to intimidate the bandits and make them fall on their heads, but that doesn't mean I won't have trouble picking rusty locks. Good business may make me well-liked by the locals, and one family may tolerate me wandering around town, but they may not allow me to sleep in their inn when I am exhausted or injured. On one occasion, I happened to pass a guard who did not take kindly to the appearance of an outsider such as myself, but I was unable to talk my way out of it, so I ended up skipping town with the mob on my back.

In these fleeting moments, Unexplored 2 is vivid and unpredictable. My Wayfarer is an individual trying to make his way across a harsh landscape, not a cardboard hero progressing through the game.

This feeling does not last.

Had Unexplored 2 not been plagued by some major storytelling issues, this moment-to-moment role-playing would have worked much better. When my quest began, the lore of the village informed me that I needed to take my staff to the first valley. I would have to find the game's most basic objective - that somehow destroying the staff would save the world - not from fellow travelers, ancient inscriptions, or dusty books, but from the quest log. It's a shame that the game is so detailed that even random peasants can form an opinion about me, but the crucial worldview ends up being presented in a menu.

Unexplored 2 desperately wants to be a rogue light with a story. Merchants travel from one distant camp to another, an evil empire spreads an epidemic of corruption across a good and free land, and a sinister shrine to the gods brings enlightenment. But there is neither the volume nor the content of text necessary to support these ambitions. [I saw two NPCs in the same village exchange dialogue, and one decided to devote years of his life to telling everyone he met that they should eat mushrooms.

At the very least, the game is pretty enough to distract me briefly; Unexplored 2's delicate lines, bold colors, and alien designs recall the surreal fantasy work of French artist Mobius. Giant lily of the valley swayed as I waded through the crystal clear water, and the edges of the pond glowed like flames in the morning sun. Birds flit about in the meadows and strange flowers glow in the darkness. Sitting by the deep orange of a bonfire, the long shadows of pink dusk turn to azure night.

How to make this world look beautiful is beyond the control of me or my PC, as there are only a few basic graphic settings. There are general presets that can be described in a few words, various levels of MSAA, and fullscreen/windowed modes, but that's it. There are no options to set target FPS, reduce shadow detail, increase ground clutter, etc.

No matter what settings I used, I experienced unpredictable and severe frame rate drops, even just walking down the stairs I just climbed or running across a flat, empty, pancake-like field. The same is true of the overworld map, the least graphically demanding of the game, which often stutters as it stumbles over on-the-fly level generation.

Unfortunately, these performance issues are nothing compared to the bugs currently plaguing Unexplored 2's core. A wise and mysterious NPC in an earlier chapter urged me to flee to Haven before the empire caught up with me, and you can imagine my surprise when I bumped into them again in the village and heard the idiot repeat the same line. This happens every time I return to Haven. In fact, they are still there weeks later, wondering why I haven't rushed to where I am standing now.

Later, upon entering the new location, a "friendly" message appeared, reminding me to take my staff to Haven. He had just finished taking his staff to Haven.

Collapsed door According to Unexplored 2, if enough force is applied, it will buckle and stop responding to any blows. The cave entrance in the tutorial section was half buried in a sturdy wall, visibly leading nowhere. I even got lost and the Wayfarer icon teleported to a cavernous area of the map.

Worse than any of that, when I resaved in a new world, Unexplored 2 suddenly wouldn't let me walk more than two map nodes away from the starting point. This problem persisted until I took a merchant's caravan to a specific location, but it was like a magic switch, and the game would behave normally, eventually allowing me to walk anywhere I wanted.

Trust plays a huge role in all procedural games, but it is absolutely essential in a persistent world where every machine-made place stays exactly the same from one character to the next. No one has time to pour hours into a game where key locations become inaccessible or important characters speak nonsense in places where they shouldn't be.

Future updates are promised, but the "full release" build I played for review (the developer's description) is currently too broken to operate as intended, and this uncertainty taints any challenge my Wayfarer faces. Even when things go well, I don't feel like I've conquered a new challenge in a vast and unknown world. For now, at least, I am simply relieved that the game is working as intended.