Unrest: an RPG about uprising and famine on the streets of Ancient India

It's the calm before the storm of E3, so now's the perfect time to highlight a game that isn't going to be crammed into the noisy event. Unrest describes itself as "An Unconventional RPG Set in Ancient India", concerning such topics as famine, drought and civil unrest. Rather than playing as some heroic adventurer, you'll play as the sort of everyday citizens they'd usually chat to on their way to the weapon shop - for instance "a young girl betrothed against her will, who is trying to escape to a nearby kingdom". While Unrest has already been funded, and then some, you still have 11 days left to pledge your support for the game, should this fresh take on the RPG appeal.

From the Kickstarter page: "Every person in the world will have their opinion of you – some might despise you simply because of your birth or caste, some might admire you if you are a priest of the religion they follow, or some may be indifferent to your fate. We measure all these possibilities using 3 values for every character – Friendship, Respect and Fear. This system enables the game to portray a number of nuanced relationships that are not fully conveyed with a single "opinion" value…"

In addition to playing as that poor young girl, you'll also fill the shoes of "an aging priest who might need to choose between feeding his family, his ideals and his religion, as his order becomes more involved in violence", "the chief of the mercenary guild, the person somehow holding the city together, and "the sole heir of the former royal family, now biding her time as a street urchin." If you're as intrigued by Unrest as I am, you can find more information about it here .

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.