Face terrible evil in UnHoly Neighborhood for Android – Android Central

I love a good point-and-click adventure game. Thimbleweed Park scratched that itch for me, although it was honestly a little too hard for my sweetie, smooth brain to manage. So I decided to try Unholy Neighborhood, another point-and-click, and loved it so far.

A more recent title released in May of this year, Unholy Neighborhood (listed as Unholy Adventure in the Google Play Store) is a rare example of a free, a good quality game that doesn’t get drowned in ads or monetized. The game description claims it has ads, but I played on the BlueStacks Android emulator and only ever had one “ad” I can think of, a little pop-up asking me if I wanted to download another of the developer’s games. After this experience, I might do that, Dali Games.

Unholy Neighborhood opens with a cutscene that reminded me The purge, with a healthy dose of Eldritch horrors mixed in for good measure. A city’s sky turns red as seemingly insane hordes of people (or maybe demons?) Clad in animal heads roam the streets below, wreaking havoc. An unhappy observer watches the scene unfold in terror, not realizing that an unknown monstrosity is sneaking up behind him, ready to claim another victim.

Peter Grim, a seemingly ordinary man, must navigate a bustling city to find his missing wife.

Smash reduced to a standard, boring apartment in what appears to be the late ’70s or early’ 80s. A perfectly ordinary looking man, Peter Grim, stands in his living room surrounded by hideous yellow wallpaper, a matching yellow carpet, an old CRT TV in a wooden case and an original Atari game console, among other things. Local news reported an oncoming storm for almost a month and now it’s finally starting to hit the city. Red lightning flashes through the dark clouds and Peter realizes that he does not know where his wife is and that he cannot reach her.

So begins Peter’s quest to find his missing wife. Did she disappear of her own accord? Was she kidnapped? Did she just get trapped in the city during this savage storm that seems to be driving the entire population mad? These are the questions you’ll attempt to answer as you head into town to find Betty and bring her home safely.

Designed as a relatively traditional point-and-click adventure game, Unholy Neighborhood doesn’t demand much from the player from a mechanical standpoint. You just click left or right to move Peter; in doing so, icons will appear on nearby objects or people with which you can interact. Hand icons indicate items you can pick up, text boxes for people you can chat with, and magnifying glasses for things that will take a bit more work to figure out.

Enter the main objective of the game, the puzzles of the story. Integrated directly into the progression system, you will have to solve hundreds of puzzles to get to the end of this twisted and revolving tale. Unlike the classic revivalist Thimbleweed Park, these puzzles are a bit easier and tend to stay contained within their specific area rather than multiple characters or locations.

For example, you might have to hack your wife’s emails to try and find out where she’s been, but you can’t remember her password. Well, first you need to find the cable to plug in the computer because it has been hidden. Once you’ve done that, you’ll need to find the password when playing a game of Pong on your Atari, which of course you need to correct before you can even play. Then, assuming you win a game of Pong, you will find your wife’s nickname in her high score leaderboard. THEN, using her nickname, you’ll liken it to a cipher to figure out which letters correspond to which digits to generate the actual password to access your wife’s account.

Find objects, to solve puzzles, to find more objects to solve more puzzles! It’s not revolutionary, but it’s fun.

This cycle of finding items to complete puzzles, which reveals more items that will help solve more puzzles, is by no means revolutionary. But personally, I found it charming, and the gameplay loop in Unholy Neighborhood is, on the whole, quite satisfying. You can sometimes find yourself a little puzzled; when this happens, the game has a handy built-in hint system where you check a pager for hints. However, those clues often revealed the whole puzzle, so I tried to dodge them to at least keep some level of challenge in the game.

There are some things that I wasn’t too excited about in this otherwise engaging title. Firstly, I admit that once you get into the flow of the game, the puzzles can start to get a little too easy. Second, while the graphics are perfectly fine for a mobile title, I personally wouldn’t describe the art style as particularly pleasing. I could even go so far as to say that the character models and portraits are actually quite ugly. My final point of contention is that the game features a small amount of vocal dialogue, usually just the first two lines of a given character, and that dub isn’t particularly good. This is fine, but the delivery appeared to be cold, bland, or awkward most of the time.

That being said, none of these issues was enough to keep me from playing, in large part because I found the atmosphere and story of the game interesting enough to continue. I’m not going to reveal too much, but there are finally some clues to a possible Rosemary baby-esque situation, combined with a disturbing setting that seems to be based on an alternate reality that smacks of Orwell’s 1984 on time. Government propaganda, surveillance, and mistrust among citizens float just beneath the surface of the story, adding to a relatively unique experience despite famous sources the developers may have drawn inspiration from.

The story also begins to become really weird later on, so buckle up, suspend your disbelief, and be prepared for some very weird scenarios. Like I said, Unholy Neighborhood is completely free, with mostly non-intrusive ads and no in-app purchases. It’s honestly great value for money, with minor flaws that can be easily overlooked, and I would recommend point-and-click adventure seekers to give it a try!