Euphoric Brothers – still the new kids on the block when it comes to game development – have taken a break from the viral success of their Garten of Banban games to create a new IP. Unplagued was revealed on YouTube unexpectedly to almost a million disappointed subscribers who are still eagerly waiting for news on Garten of Banban 8. As Euphoric Brothers first non-Banban venture since the franchise started, many felt that it was a breath of fresh air, and very impressive that a team so small had been working on an ambitious title behind the scenes. Looking back, any hope that Unplagued would be massively different from the incomplete and bare-bones experiences Euphoric Brothers are known for were utterly misguided. 

 Unplagued describes itself as a ‘medieval co-op multiplayer online horror’ game. This alone makes it sound quite distinctive. The game works as follows: a team of up to four companions are dropped off in a small, procedurally generated medieval village in the Euphoric Brother’s signature art style. Together, you must gather ingredients and battle monsters before regrouping in your little hut and creating a potion. When you have the correct combination of ingredients to create this potion, the village becomes cured of its ‘plague,’ you head back to your vehicle and another village is created. The cycle then repeats. 

It sounds fun – and Euphoric Brothers deserve massive respect for being able to create a multiplayer experience like this – but there is no looking past the absolute disaster of a launch the game suffered. 

There are small annoyances, such as the ‘cooldown time’ between picking up items, which happens a lot. It makes the smallest job when you’re out in the wild laborious and irritating. However, these don’t hold a candle to some of the bigger issues, such as — game mechanics flat out refusing to work.  

Firstly, not all collectibles can be used as ingredients for creating a potion, but the items that can’t be used serve no additional purpose making them useless. When you have the right items (either 2 or 4, the game never specifies) the lever, which is used in your hut to operate the cauldron and begin creating a potion, has a 1 in 3 chance of working at all, even if all the ingredients presented are correct – leading to a lot of confused faces on day one from streamers and players alike.   

The in-game mic quickly made a name for itself as being unusable. Words are incomprehensible and the sound is so loud it makes a task as simple as speaking to your other teammates torturous.  

When an enemy is defeated, it isn’t guaranteed to actually die. In fact, sometimes they will continue to swing at players with four times the range and power.  

Due to the nature of the villages being generated at random, some environments spawn on top of each other, making some maps unplayable as some crucial items can’t be reached. The list goes on.  

When quality settings are set to low, the instructions on the walls of your hideout are unreadable and grainy. One reviewer has stated the graphics quality, when set on low, ‘looks as though you have a 90% alcohol level.’  

Even if you don’t encounter a single glitch when playing Unplagued, the game is a chore. Running between the forest area and the hut is boring enough by itself. I’ve played Unplagued for 10 hours and have achieved everything. The title has been out for a month, and has only broken 10,000 concurrent players once, despite being free to play for a short period. Today, that number looks more like 200 players consistently. Negative reviews outnumber the positive by a ratio of 2:1 which has caused the game to display on its Steam page as either ‘Negative’ or ‘Mixed.’ 

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