New demo born out of Unsound Love

• Announcements by Sam Amiotte-Beaulieu
• Published:

Surreal open-world psychological horror adventure coming to PC in 2027

It’s easy to feel disoriented when the line between reality and nightmare is blurred beyond recognition, so expect to feel a lot of that in the upcoming Unsound Love, a veritable fever dream of bizarre mysteries from Danish indie studio Professional Villains.

As a nameless, voiceless man adorned in a dark hooded raincoat, you emerge abruptly into “a new world through the backseat of a wrecked car.” Visions of a woman surrounded by flowers haunt your every step, and you set out to explore a vast landscape of gnarled forests that appear to meld into the fabric of the world beneath your feet. Bizarre creatures populate the land, from mechanical angler fish who drag themselves around on land with tails made of fully articulated human-like hands, to snails who grow pairs of human legs and charge off at a furious pace when you attempt to mount their shells. If all that wasn’t weird enough, you find you are “trapped in a time loop,” doomed to forever re-emerge from the same crashed car over and over unless you are able to get to the bottom of this world and break the cycle.

Defying easy classification, Unsound Love has been compared by the developer to “classic Zelda possessed by Silent Hill,” a “Soulslike without combat,” or a “haunting blend of Outer Wilds and Little Nightmares.” And yet it’s also very much an adventure-like “horror escape room” in which you are tasked to explore a sprawling open world and uncover solutions to puzzles through your actions and the use of different items you collect. Some doorways will require heart-shaped tokens to progress, while others need a sacrifice of angelic creatures at a gaping maw to allow you to move forward. Whatever the objective, it is up to you to discover for yourself, as the game provides no hand-holding or hints of any sort, and “you can choose which stories you want to explore and how you want to experience the world.”

The majority of the game is played via keyboard or gamepad through a zoomed-out bird’s-eye perspective with movement in any direction, but some sections are on a horizontal plane with only two directions to move. Characters, creatures and backgrounds are all crafted with a 2D pixel art aesthetic with grimy color palettes, but everywhere you look is filled to the brim with surreal, sometimes macabre inhabitants both friendly and hostile. Equally notable is the audio, as “every sound … has been created using musical instruments – from the sound of wind moving through the trees to the roars of the monsters.” There is no combat but stealth may sometimes be required. Even then you can meet your demise, but any death results in you coming right back out of the same wrecked car you began from. Indeed, this may even be necessary at times in order to proceed, with the terrain altered when you emerge anew.

Unsound Love is set to release sometime in 2027, but it has a newly updated demo currently available for Windows PC as part of the Steam Next Fest for anyone looking to start their nightmarish excursion early.

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