Developer Comon Games dived into the world of a robot-led post-apocalypse with 2016's The Uncertain: Last Quiet Day. The studio has now split into various parts, and the development section dubbed New Game Order has returned to this world with The Uncertain: Light at the End, together with publisher META Publishing, changing the focus from the robot inhabitants of a new world to a ragtag bunch of human survivors. However, players may find that the mysteries of the setting are let down by a multitude of issues.
The Uncertain: Light at the End is a modern adventure game that mixes puzzles with quick time events and dialogue options, occasionally throwing major decisions at the player during critical story moments. In a way, it feels similar to the titles of Telltale Games, albeit without the depth of story or character, but similar framing applies in terms of player agency against the branching but restrictive pathways of the plot.
Much like Telltale offerings, the core selling point is its setting and story. The Uncertain: Light at the End definitely has an engaging framework to explore, set in a future where humanity was suddenly overthrown by the robots that it relied upon for everything from healthcare and policing through to manual labor. No one knows exactly why this happened, or what the robots are doing with the humans that it captures and takes away to places unknown, and this offers up an immediate point of intrigue for the player.
This is matched in some of its locations, too. The post-apocalypse of The Uncertain: Light at the End is messy but clean, with humanity suddenly swept up by the robot threat and leaving their cars, shopping, and items behind. There isn't the detritus that comes with the apocalypses of the likes of Fallout, with the robots proving to be minimalist overlords of the new world, not requiring much by way of destruction of the remnants of human culture.
The Uncertain: Last Quiet Day used this to great effect, in part thanks to the fact that all its characters were robots, adding an element of otherness. This isn't the case with The Uncertain: Light at the End, and the pivot to human survivors as the main focus causes some issues here. The survivor group acts unnaturally and is often irritating, feeling less human than the robots they come across not by design but thanks to subpar and blunt dialogue.
This isn't helped by some of the multitude of technical issues in The Uncertain: Light at the End. The game is full of unnatural and awkward animations, particularly in cut scenes, with characters popping in and out of existence, walking with stilted animation, and speaking without moving mouths. In one particularly egregious example, when a vulnerable member of the team is captured by robots, most of the group stand around in their default stance, even as they complain about the failures of the main character.
That's not the only bug to cause problems, though. Subtitles will sometimes disappear, or fall out of sync with the dialogue, while the audio of the dialogue itself can often drop at random moments. Control, too, is a problem, and if the player is looking to use a controller they may find that they have to hop over to their mouse for certain actions. The game's stealth sections can be extremely frustrating due to poor controls, particularly during a section in a television station.
The developer has noted that it is addressing these problems, but unfortunately The Uncertain: Light at the End has more deep rooted issues as well. The threat of the robots is never really explored outside of the occasional audio log, meaning that the game never feels as threatening as it should be. There's a lack of focus on what works about the setting; why explore the robot apocalypse when you could fix a boiler? Why look at the tragedy of a dead city when you could take a break from finding supplies to have a go at a VR shooting gallery?
Because of this, it's hard to recommend The Uncertain: Light at the End. The strong work done on its setting is consistently undermined by technical and storytelling problems, while its position as the second part of the trilogy means that its story beats are never successfully concluded. This could all be resolved with its final episode, but as it stands there's a lot of improvement needed.
The Uncertain: Light at the End is out now for PC, with console releases planned for 2021. Screen Rant was provided with a PC download code for the purposes of this review.