'Future Unfolding' Is a Game About Exploration, Relaxation, and Childlike Wonder

Some games overwhelm you with instructions, filling the screen with button prompts, hints, and maps. Others drop you in a world and let you figure it out for yourself.

In the latter, there's something incredibly relaxing about a lack of tutorial. While having no guidance might seem overwhelming, it's actually the ultimate relinquishing of responsibility. You have no choice but to explore and experiment.. If you don't know the controls, you can't get them wrong.

It's something Inside did fantastically well—I remember the section with the tiny chicks, because I had no idea what I was supposed to do at that point, so I just spent 15 minutes trying to get all the tiny chicks to follow me, because that seemed sweet. When I stumbled upon the answer to the puzzle, which involved using the tiny chicks to knock down a hay bale, I was breathless with excitement. There's no way that's the solution, I thought. It makes no sense! It's too cute! Too weird! Too… accidental! And yet, it was. A brilliant moment of lightbulb game design.

This is the way I've been feeling about Future Unfolding, a game I saw entirely by chance in the common room of the hostel at GDC this year. It's actually one of the best ways to see games—away from the bustle and press of the show floor, where game developers aren't trying to give you their frantic one-minute pitch before your eyes glaze over with lack of sleep. In the hostel, people are chilling. There are beanbags, there is tea. And there was Future Unfolding.

Future Unfolding is part of this new corpus of games that specializes in allowing players to explore for themselves. And as I've mentioned already, it does this with minimal interference from the game—I didn't even learn the extra controls until about five minutes in. I spent those minutes doing what seemed most obvious from the way the game looked.

In Future Unfolding, you play as a small stick figure, running through candy-colored, procedurally-generated woods from a top-down perspective. You are given no objective, but your instincts kick in as you move around using the analog sticks, gradually discovering more of the world as you weave through trees and chase mysterious animals across rocky terrain.

I had no idea what I was doing or where I was supposed to be going, and it was incredibly freeing.

Then, the game told me I could open up the map, and suddenly there was a new incentive to explore, beyond my own curiosity about this beautiful, top-down world. I saw objectives, mysterious symbols, animal silhouettes scrawled across the plains like a hastily-written warning. It's all told without words—a wonderful thing for a player, a slightly worrying thing for a writer who makes money off people needing words—meaning that your interpretation of everything feels just as valid as anyone else's. There it is again: a way of diminishing responsibility for the player by taking away right and wrong answers.

Just like playing Proteus, I found myself trying things just to see if they'd work, and revelling in the things that did. I rode a deer, I made friends with it by yelling at it, I went inside a tree, I swam through still waters, I ran through a maze of pink pine trees just because the gap between them looked just big enough for me, and it was. That last thing is emblematic of what games like these represent against the bigger, more stressful games: forests and lakes are usually symbols of your limits; they function to add prettiness to an environment while also keeping you fenced in. You can look at the forest, you can gaze across the sea, but you can't go in them. They are boundaries. They are not for exploration.

The thrill I got when I realized that I was supposed to weave through the trees was fantastic, and only possible as a subversion of what I expected based on other games. When the language of games teaches you that woods = no, and then another one takes your hand and pulls you, gently, between the trees, it's like learning a curse word for the first time. Your eyes light up, your world becomes that much more colorful, because suddenly you know things that other people haven't noticed yet.

Above: Launch trailer for Future Unfolding, courtesy of Spaces of Play UG There are games that want to change you, games that open up a space within themselves for you to be. These games are not hard, linear things that have been polished and primed, ready to sit on a shelf in their totally-finished glory. They are not sculptures to be admired. They are, instead, play spaces—fluid and dynamic, responsive to your touch, inviting and ready for you. Proteus is one of these, but there are so many others, some from years and years ago: from abstract exploration game Panoramical and Florian Veltman's Endless Express, to the DS's relaxing audiovisual toybox Electroplankton and the PS1's slightly trippy ocean-based sound lab, Fluid. These games—and this idea of their ability to provide a relaxation space—isn't new, but it's been seized upon by indie game developers in a way that is worth exploring.

Game designer and writer Merritt Kopas puts these kind of games under a label: "Soft Chambers". On the website, Soft Chambers is described as promoting "warm games"—games that prioritize human interaction, emotional growth, rest, and care. Tenderness. Vulnerability. The lack of a 'conclusion' or goal. Play until you are done. "These games," Soft Chambers says, "have lost utility to us as soon as we complete them." We play them to finish them, not to enjoy them in a moment, free from responsibility.

Where did this new(ish) wave of chillgames come from? What's their meaning? What is their purpose? It's tempting to see them as a response to how terrifying things are right now, but that's not true, and it's largely putting the cart before the horse. No, these games have been going for a while, with Proteus, Journey and Minecraft putting emphasis on the sensory experiences within the game (all of the above have incredible, soothing music) and the player's sense of exploration, discovery and wonder.

I think, if anything, it's down to the age of the games industry. It's a medium in its adolescence, and we're still all trying to find our feet while the ground beneath us shakes and cracks. The "currently graduating class of game developers"—that is, the ones experimenting with their styles and the stories they want to tell—are reaching an age of increased and unwanted responsibility, going from making games in their bedrooms after school to, instead, having to balance the creative projects they want to spend time on with boring, tedious stuff like taxes and healthcare and budgeting.

So why shouldn't we have games that take the weight off our shoulders for a little while? Games which tell us not to worry about how to win, or where to go, but instead give us a little space to explore and play for a while? It's a way of reverting to a childlike state, when worries were few and play was plenty; when we had time to poke and prod at the edges of our tiny world. Future Unfolding isn't the first to do this, but it certainly won't be the last.