Alain’s journey also involves rekindling allegiances with either his or other allies’ long lost or estranged family members
With a face – as unkindly described by another character – resembling a corpse, Gammell is your typical RPG lowlife, the leader of a group of unscrupulous brigands who is supposed to warm you up for the main event. But upon defeat, the cutscene that plays out is unexpected. Begging for mercy, he speaks of his ailing sister and the exorbitant cost of a cure as the motivation behind his life of crime and villainy: “Thievin’s all I’m good for”. Given the choice to spare his life or execute him, we go with our bleeding heart, albeit not without protest from one of our onscreen allies.
When we encounter Gammell again, he’s fighting alongside the subjugated elves in Elheim – a man reformed, though one who still falls under the thief class when we recruit him. While this is an example that takes many hours to pay off, it’s a running theme throughout Unicorn Overlord: liberating Fevrith, it turns out, takes all sorts. There’s a familiar fantasy narrative trope, with the emperor Galerius having the power of mind control; Alain uses the Ring Of The Unicorn to restore people’s minds after defeating them in battle. However, you’ll also encounter opponents who have chosen to align themselves with the empire, be it out of desperation or self-preservation. They don’t all have sob stories to tell like our thief – we also encounter a mercenary hired by the empire to guard an ore-rich city but who had treated its imprisoned populace benevolently, while we also meet a cleric helping her lord conducting unspeakable experiments on a plague-ridden town, all for the purpose of producing a cure.