The Unknown

Sildevik. Late October 1994. 02:00. Raining.

Something has been walking the town at night, wearing the faces of people you know. The police log never names anyone: it says persons unknown, and the name stuck. At ten past one the priest phoned the cordon. Forty people are in the church, he said, and the west door is open.

Four of them go in past the police cordon on Langgata: a Home Guard soldier, a hunter, a firefighter and the nurse from the pharmacy.

The Unknown is Sildevik Tactics: a turn-based horror tactics game in the spirit of XCOM, drawn like a PS1 game. Wobbling polygons, swimming textures, 15-bit colour, sodium lamps and rain on the cobbles.

Sildevik

Sildevik is a small town on the Rogaland coast, a fictionalised Sandnes: six thousand people, wet cobbles, a kiosk with a dying tube light and a church spire over all of it. People make jokes because the alternative is screaming. Nobody in this town has ever explained anything, and they don't start now.

It is a town that keeps turning into games. It began as a retro first-person shooter, and then became Sildevik, a point-and-click adventure: you are a journalist in a tan trench coat, with a notebook, an empty wallet and no reason anyone here should talk to you, asking the wrong people the right questions on Gågadå. That game knows something has gone badly wrong at the south end of Langgata. It just never shows you what.

The Unknown is the night it all comes out. The same town, the same people and the same sounds as the adventure (the baker, the priest, the Doctor and his nurse, the Home Guard lad guarding the police station "against nothing in particular"), now seen from above, on a grid, one turn at a time. It is an attempt at a Sildevik Tactics.

How it plays

• Two actions a turn. Move inside the blue line for one, dash to the yellow line for both. Firing ends the turn.
• Cover. Half cover (benches, crates, bins, the cordon) and full cover (walls, cars, the kiosk). Get round the side of something and you flank it: no cover, and a much better chance to crit.
• Light is sight. The street is dark. You only see the Unknown where there is light: your flashlights (right click turns a light), the sodium lamps, a flare, a flash of lightning. In the dark you only hear them.
• Nerve. Seeing them, being hit from the dark, watching a friend fall: all of it costs nerve. Shaken shooters miss; at zero, someone panics. Standing together and standing in the light steadies you, and the nurse can talk someone down.
• The dead get up. A squad member at zero health goes down. Get to them in time and they live. If not, they get up again, wearing their own face.
• Guns. Dozens of them, and blades, grenades, molotovs and dynamite. Single shot, burst, full auto and aimed fire, each gun with its own feel and sound.
• A campaign. One night at a time through the town's own streets: Langgata, Gågadå, the Kino, Kirkeparken, and further down. Your people earn experience, levels and perks between the nights, if they make it.

Controls

• Left click: select a squad member, move, pick a target
• Right click: point the selected squad member's flashlight
• 1-7: fire, watch (overwatch), reload, hunker, flare, medkit, calm
• Tab / Shift+Tab: next squad member, or next target while aiming
• Enter / Space: fire
• Backspace: end turn
• WASD / arrows, middle drag: move the camera. Q / E: turn it. Wheel: zoom
• Esc: back, or the pause menu (volumes, PS1 filter, full screen, screen shake). F2: PS1 filter. F11: full screen

This build

An early build of a game in development. Expect rough edges and things that change from one upload to the next. The date and version in the bottom-left corner say which build you are playing.

• In the browser: it is a big download (about 270 MB) and takes a while to start. The browser version draws with a simpler renderer, so some fog and lighting is missing. For the real look, download it.
• Windows: unzip and run TheUnknown.exe (keep the .pck next to it). The build is not code-signed, so Windows may warn about an unknown publisher.
• Linux: run TheUnknown.x86_64 (keep the .pck next to it).

Made with

Godot 4.7. The town, its people, props and sounds come from Sildevik. Every character line is a real recording: Olti performs them himself, and Applio (voice conversion, not text-to-speech) turns them into each character's own voice. Animation from Mixamo and Quaternius' Universal Animation Library. Built by Olti together with Claude.

Sildevik is a fictionalised Sandnes. © Olti81. All rights reserved. Free to play; the game, its art, writing and code are not licensed for reuse.