Unheard

My first hour with Unheard was mostly spent losing track of people. You get dropped into a recording of a crime scene with a flat floor plan, a scrub bar, and a set of unnamed voice icons drifting between rooms, and the game expects you to work out who everyone is by ear alone. The problem is that three or four conversations run at once and you can only listen in on one room at a time, so your first pass through any case is a mess of half-heard arguments and doors closing on exactly the thing you needed. That friction is deliberate rather than sloppy, and the moment it clicks (for me, somewhere in the second case, when I stopped trying to hear everything and started shadowing one person end to end) is when the whole thing starts working. Push through the tutorial case even if it feels like the game is withholding on purpose. It is. What you are playing is not an RPG, whatever the store tags suggest. There is no character to move, no combat, no inventory, nothing to level. Each case is a fixed audio recording a few minutes long that you replay as many times as you like, clicking rooms on a top-down map to eavesdrop and dragging the timeline back when you realize you missed a handoff. The only real verbs are listen, rewind, and name. At the end of a scene the game quizzes you: which voice belongs to which name on the list, who was in which room, who is lying about it. Get it wrong and you go back in and listen again. It sits much closer to a well-produced radio play with a rewind button than to anything with dice rolls. The writing carries it, and the voice work does more heavy lifting than most narrative games ever ask of theirs. Because you never see a face, the cast has to build itself out of vocabulary, timing and tone, and the good cases weaponize that. A line that sounded like nothing in the kitchen becomes a confession once you have heard the phone call happening two rooms away at the same second. The best scenarios are the ones where the answer was audible the entire time, arranged so that no single pass could have caught it. There is also a frame story stitching the cases together, involving the listening device and the person operating it, and it pays off well enough to reframe what you assumed the game was doing to you. It is also short, and uneven. A confident listener finishes the base cases in an evening or two, and the extra downloadable scenarios add hours rather than a second campaign. At least one case leans on voices similar enough that identification turns into an audio-processing chore instead of deduction, which is the bad kind of difficulty: you are not out-thinking the puzzle, you are squinting with your ears. Once a case is solved there is nothing to return for. The recording never changes, nothing branched, and a second listen is nostalgia rather than replay. Anyone arriving from character-driven detective RPGs should also recalibrate expectations, because nobody in here reacts to you. You have no build, no dialogue options, no reputation. You are a pair of ears with a mouse. Play it with headphones, in a quiet room, with a notepad you are willing to fill with names and arrows. It rewards the sort of player who already keeps notes on NPCs in a 60-hour CRPG, or who reads mysteries for the mechanism rather than the atmosphere. If you want a story game you can finish across a couple of sittings that respects your attention instead of inflating itself with padded objectives, this is one of the sharper small experiments on PC and the ideas in it still have not really been copied. If you want scale, build variety, or forty hours of consequence, this will not scratch that. Keep it in your back pocket for the weekend you want something clever and finite between longer campaigns.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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