Unlucky Seven began life as a pixel art game called (un)Lucky7 back in ~2013, and that original incarnation was going to tell the story of seven anthropomorphic prisoners being granted freedom in exchange for exploring the expanses of space, a mission that quickly takes a turn for the worse and leaves them scrambling to survive on an alien world. The crowdfunding didn’t pan out, however, and the scope of the project was such that the team eventually moved on (developing the well-received The Way, which was inspired by Another World). The underlying concept of a bunch of miscreants being stuck together remained, however, and found new life in Unlucky Seven, an indie adventure game telling a story about cannibals hunting alcoholics or something. To be perfectly honest, I still don’t know what this game is about, as it meanders without purpose, aimlessly throwing so much irrelevant, poorly translated information out there that it’s difficult to piece together anything resembling a plot. Unlucky Seven is like a game of Clue where you know who the murderer is ahead of time and have to go through the motions (which consist of QTEs, pipe puzzles, and typical adventure game “use the item on the thing to progress” stuff) for the 5 hours it takes to reach the end anyway.

Unlucky Seven‘s English translation is so bad that it’s borderline gibberish

I’ve been racking my brain trying to come up with a compelling reason for Unlucky Seven to exist, yet nothing comes to mind; this is a passion project gone horribly awry, and it manages to be bizarre without leaning into its weirdness in a charming or mind-bending way. Mostly, it’s just boring. You play as every character outside of the main cannibal at one point or another, including one of the pro-cannibalism villains whose aim is to make money through a darknet show where he creates vodka out of dead people. That’s an interesting motivation, but it’s poorly communicated (not least of all because the Polish word “bimber” is used instead of “moonshine”; I’d wager most English-speakers have never heard of bimber) and quickly ceases to be a factor. Instead, the story shifts to a group of alcoholics—and apparently friends, though the bonds between them are sketchy—who skip out on their AA meeting to attend a member’s birthday party at her dad’s motel and get wasted, only to find themselves on the run from a cannibal and the moonshine guy. Unlucky Seven‘s gory story from this point on reads like something written after watching Scooby-Doo on acid, as various characters get killed and/or eaten and the survivors run around while implausibly escaping capture in the tiny motel. Baddies: “The guy we were going to kill took the elevator to the second floor, so let’s give up instead of cornering him up there.”

And now, it’s time to dive into the fact that I have no idea whether this is a furry game or not. Anthropomorphic characters are common enough that including them doesn’t tip the scales one way or the other, but Unlucky Seven outright prefaces one of its news posts with “dear fans of furries.”

You can decide whether characters are anthropomorphic or human toward the beginning of the game, though, so you can conceivably make it to the end of the game with the only animal being the moonshine guy, who’s an alligator for some reason. Are alligators a furry thing? I’m seriously out of my element right now, in case you can’t tell. Whatever the case, I didn’t notice anything that would make this any more furry-friendly than the charming and infinitely better FoxTail.

The bonds between characters aren’t established before they begin dropping like flies. Unlucky Seven gets pretty weird once it does finally begin sharing crucial information about how people know each other, with possible hints of incest getting dropped into the story toward the end, but deciphering developer intent from the game’s barely-functional strings of words is virtually impossible, and the important love triangle character who almost everyone revolves around in some way never shows up. It makes sense, though: Unlucky Seven is unfinished, dropping a “to be continued” before a single plot point is resolved. Calling it deeply unfulfilling is an understatement, though you’ll likely be glad for the inane blathering to end; Unlucky Seven‘s script goes heavy on the small talk, leading to a cast that continually harps on the most irrelevant, annoying details. Before long, you’ll be rooting for the cannibals for the sole purpose of speeding up a resolution that never comes. Again, I find myself wondering why this exists. What’s the plan here? There are a couple of twists that are undeserved and exist purely for shock, but you’re mostly just escaping from rooms and fixing fuseboxes. The character development is so poor that it’s difficult to care about anyone in this game, much less in a sequel that might never come out.

And the English translation is a mess. Typos are the least of Unlucky Seven‘s problems; Polish text sneaks into the menus at times, characters speak as though the player has been gently introduced to the way this world functions (when you’re really just thrown in the deep end and left to witness conversations that only make sense to the developers), and the entire script reads like it was run through Google Translate and Babelfish multiple times. These are major issues, but I can’t find adequate words to describe how deeply they course through Unlucky Seven‘s writing. Watch one of the embedded videos and you’ll see what I mean in a matter of seconds, though. That’s how profoundly stilted and nonsensical it is. And I haven’t even mentioned the incessant immaturity; there’s a character here named Creampie, and I don’t think he was named after a dessert. This isn’t used as the punchline to a joke so much as existing as a random thing that you’re evidently supposed to find humor in on your own.

This is a 2D adventure game with 2-3 depth layers and zero adventure

One of the tags on Unlucky Seven‘s Steam page is “choices matter,” and this appeared to be a huge part of the game back when it was (un)Lucky7, but the only choices you’re ever given in the project’s current incarnation are whether a character is a human or animal. Those choices result in nothing more than some minor dialogue differences right after you choose. I’ve only played through Unlucky Seven once, admittedly, but the lack of an ending more than confirms the absence of choices—after all, how could the story go on in a sequel if you had any agency over how things end up? I tried leaving areas, talking to every character, and solving puzzles in a number of different ways; characters would refuse to move to new areas, NPCs had nothing interesting to say, and puzzles could only be solved in a single way. The choices in Unlucky Seven don’t actually exist.

Since the game’s store page does a terrible job of explaining how it plays, suffice it to say that this is a 2D adventure game like Tales of the Neon Sea, only with depth layers that you can move between kind of like in Guardian Heroes. These depth layers don’t serve any actual purpose outside of slowing down Unlucky Seven‘s gameplay by giving you several 2D slices that you need to check for items. Combining items isn’t required by the puzzles until about halfway in, and can only be accomplished at designated spots, but having to watch your character slowly pull out items in an unskippable cutscene every time you want to try a new combination is so tedious that it’ll stick with you. On the bright side, most puzzles in Unlucky Seven can be solved by picking something up and then using it somewhere else, which makes getting stuck unlikely.

Basically, you find yourself in a tiny section of the motel and spend a minute or two collecting items (with the interactive points changing between chapters rather than everyone being able to access the same items), then use those items to complete a meaningless task that does nothing to drive the story forward. There’s never any sense of urgency—not even when bodies start piling up—so these tasks are unremarkable, asking you to find a way to open a door or fix yet another fusebox so that you can use the elevator or turn on some lights. Unlucky Seven tries to spice up the gameplay with timed and mash-the-button QTEs, as well as a couple of minigames (I hope you like pipe routing puzzles and Frogger), but if anything, this makes it even duller.

Bugs and bizarre design decisions make Unlucky Seven groan-inducing

A month or so ago, I used some old computer parts I’ve had lying around to build a second computer that’s connected to my TV, and I started playing on this second computer because I had some family over and found myself watching their dog, who didn’t get along with my dogs at first. Long story short, I started Unlucky Seven on a computer with a 6870 and old processor, and it ran at about 30 frames per second. Unlike most games, this one requires 60 frames per second to function properly; inputs are only properly detected at 60 FPS, so playing at 30 FPS or below is an exercise in frustration that’ll see half of your inputs eaten. It took me 5 hours to beat all 18 chapters on my main computer that could play at 60 FPS. On my weaker computer, it took me 1½ hours to reach chapter 3, and then I got stuck on a button-mashing QTE that I couldn’t beat because most of my button presses weren’t registering. Unlucky Seven is going to be downright unplayable for people close to the minimum specs.

You pick up two flasks at one point in what initially appears to be an item duplication bug. You’re able to try combining them at a workbench, and you’ll only get one back as a result, but it turns out that both are necessary to solve a later puzzle, and losing one by combining them forces you to restart the chapter. Unlucky Seven only saves at the beginning of each (mercifully short) chapter, so getting hit with a bug means having to go around and pick up the same items all over again.

It’s kind of funny that Unlucky Seven clocks in at 666 megabytes. I genuinely expected it to live up to that bit of devilry with a twisted story full of darkness, but it instead goes the route of being player-unfriendly. For one thing, your movement speed is painfully slow, and you’re only given the ability to run on 2-3 scripted occasions. Outside of those few combined seconds of running, you’re stuck walking around at the speed of a snail, which makes backtracking a chore. It’s also possible (and incredibly likely) that you’ll get stuck on the scenery at some point. This happens because moving between depth slices takes all control away from you until you reach where you’re going. Quitting to the menu and restarting the chapter isn’t an option, either, as Unlucky Seven remembers that you’re in a no-control state and leaves you paralyzed until you quit to the desktop. And if you accidentally hit “new game” instead of “continue” at any point, you can expect your save to be overwritten, forcing you to start from the beginning. It’s not all bad, though, as I only suffered a single crash in my 5 hours with Unlucky Seven.

Oh, and there were a bunch of lines that were outright missing, displaying random letters, numbers, and symbols in place of the actual text string Unlucky Seven was calling. That’s what’s happening in the header image, and I’d estimate that this happened on 4 or so separate occasions.

Unlucky Seven‘s visuals are blurred out, and its sound design is a mess

Despite its low-poly look, this is a pretty demanding Unity game (probably because of a lack of optimization), which makes it all the stranger that the visuals are then blurred with a non-optional filter to look like they’re being upscaled from 1280×720. The art is interesting, with the textures of 3D objects consisting of pixel art, but you’ll be spending most of your time in the uninteresting motel, and I found myself wanting more variance and sharpness. There’s no way of telling if the blurring is intentional, either: Unlucky Seven has a pretty serious problem with options randomly turning on and off, as evidenced by its god-awful voice acting. Even if you turn voice acting off and opt instead for the Yooka-Laylee talking sounds, the setting will reset as soon as you reach a new chapter, and even if you keep it at one setting, both mix up lines with the other (see 7:28 and 7:40 in this video for one of many examples of this). There’s no escaping the voice acting, which is so amateurish that you can actually hear the noise gate opening right before and after characters speak, which sounds like white noise fading in and out. And there’s at least one line that’s delivered only in the left speaker, which is to say nothing of the boxiness; apparently, no one here has heard of EQ, as almost every line of dialogue needs a cut in the ~400 Hz range, among other tweaks. Now, I don’t hate the music as much as the 0/2 in the music department likely suggests (though “underwhelmed” would definitely be accurate), but this is a game where the menu music blares louder than anything else in the entire game. The sound in this game is a mess, with each issue further reinforcing my contempt for it all. I don’t know how—or even if—one could salvage this.

Story: 0/3 Gameplay: 1/3 Visuals: 1/2 Music: 0/2 ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ – 2/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

Unlucky Seven Review Screenshots

*A Steam key was provided for the purpose of this Unlucky Seven review, and someone out there is probably regretting that decision right about now. I, too, wish I had loved it.

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