Unlife

I have a soft spot for games that feel like they were assembled by a single person at two in the morning, driven entirely by a need to make the thing exist. Unlife fits that description almost perfectly. It is a 2D side-scrolling survival platformer built by one developer, Dmitriy of diedemor studio, and the handcraft shows in both the best and most frustrating senses of that word. The world it builds is genuinely compelling. In an alternate history where nuclear weapons were used continuously after World War II, the sun went dark, glaciers melted, and the land drowned under a poisonous Black Ocean full of radiation-mutated creatures. You play the last survivor on a crumbling ocean platform, seriously ill from a parasite, piloting a WWII-era submarine between what remains of human civilisation. The core loop asks you to dock at platforms, scavenge food and med kits, pick up melee weapons and firearms, and push toward a cure before your disease progresses. What separates the two endings is whether you collect enough genetic material from the monsters you kill, which gives the combat a subtle resource-management layer beyond simple survival. There is also a section where you personally pilot a small submarine through the underwater world, which breaks up the side-scrolling tension in a way that feels like a genuine tonal shift rather than a gimmick. Atmosphere is where Unlife earns its keep. The hand-drawn visuals bathe everything in near-total darkness, your tiny circle of light barely pushing back the black around you. Enemies include mutated humanoids, spiders, and what reviewers describe as a full-scale kraken encounter. The themed dark soundtrack does exactly what a solo developer's score should do: it holds the mood without overstaying its welcome. You feel the loneliness of the setting in a way bigger-budget post-apocalyptic games sometimes miss because they fill every corner with chatter. Here is where honesty matters, though. The controls have a real learning curve that tips into frustration for some players. Rather than free directional movement, facing and moving are handled as separate inputs, which creates clumsy moments in combat, and enemies can deal damage even through animations that look like they should have already resolved. The English translation carries grammar issues throughout, and the UI has rough edges. These are not dealbreakers if you go in understanding the context, but if polished moment-to-moment feel is your baseline requirement, Unlife will test your patience before it rewards it. The audience for this is specific and I am happy to advocate for them. If you have ever picked up a mid-tier survival horror game from the early 2000s and loved it precisely because it felt handmade and a little awkward, this is your kind of game. It knows what it wants to be: a short, tense crawl through a beautifully bleak world, with two endings and a story worth seeing through. It does not pretend to be anything else, and there is real dignity in that.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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