Talking escape rooms, past successes and Unsound Love with Professional Villains' John Tinning

Earlier this summer, Danish-developed horror game Unsound Love was "unveiled," although perhaps that's not quite the right word. The game's Steam page is about as revealing as a nun.

"Unsound Love is an open-world horror game where you must figure out everything yourself. We are not allowed to say anything else," reads the description.

Of course, we couldn't be satisfied with so little, so we called John Tinning, one half of the small Aarhus-based developer duo Professional Villains. He told us that the limited information is not necessarily just an attempt to arouse curiosity.

"The concept is that you have to figure it all out yourself, and we mean all of it. Without giving too much away, you won't be told how to control the game, for example."

It's not like the developer's previous game was particularly outspoken. Security: The Horrible Nights from 2024 continued a now proud Danish tradition of atmospheric but extremely wordy games. Here you play as a security guard on night shift at a - as it soon turns out - monster-infested hospital. Although the game contains more screams than actual words, it still managed to win Best Narrative at the Danish Game Awards 2025.

Unsound Love seems to continue the same tradition, as the violent events and macabre actions drive the story rather than endless chatter. What's the premise this time? Again, the Steam site certainly doesn't give it away:

"You are born into a new world through the backseat of a destroyed car. Escape."

Whether this is intentional or not is unknown, but John Tinning reveals that the game's own origin story is actually quite similar to the one you experience in the game. Unsound Love originated from a project that ended up going off the rails.

"It's no secret that we had a game that we didn't get funding for. One of the characters that appears in Security: The Horrible Nights, one of the monsters you meet, technically starred in that game. Unsound Love is an evolution of that project, but we focus less on combat and more on weird shit."

Although born from an unrealised project, Unsound Love also harks back to several of the developer's other projects, John Tinning reveals. We find some of the humour from Security: The Horrible Nights and the genre-defying Anglerfish, and in terms of mood it leans towards the creepy and macabre The ER: Patient Typhon.

However, the most important parallel can be drawn to a time before Professional Villians lived up to the first part of its name. The developers were publishing non-commercial games on itch.io at the time, and one of these was Hunting Huber, a small experimental open world game with references to the gaming medium Easy Allies. Through this project, they got an early but hard lesson in the challenges of designing games with an open structure.

One of the most important aspects of creating a vibrant open world is that you should be able to miss a lot and still get to your destination.

In the game, you are initially asked to follow a path down to a house. Once you reach the house, the game really begins. The problem was that many players never made it that far, explains John Tinning. They immediately turned on the path, ran into some bushes and then spent their time in the still-dormant game world, with no goal or direction.

"They were running around for fifteen, twenty minutes, and then they forgot what they were told. That's what happened when I played Fallout 3. I came out of the bunker and the first thing I did was run in the opposite direction of what you were supposed to do. In Unsound Love, we want to set the player free and let them figure things out for themselves. But the game has to be built so that it can be understood no matter which direction you run in."

However, the open world represents a challenge not only in design, but also in terms of development resources.

"One of the most important things in creating a living open world is that you should be able to miss a lot and still get to your goal. That's not the case in a linear game, where you have to experience everything. There should ideally be three times as much content as you actually need in an open-world game."

John Tinning says they were inspired by Escape Rooms, where you have an open environment that you can explore relatively freely, and where the story slowly emerges through solving puzzles. However, most Escape Rooms are still linear, as the puzzles must be solved in a certain order for the story to cohere.

To allow for more player freedom, Profesional Villians is therefore working on having more possible solutions to the game's problems. There shouldn't be only one way forward. Or to put it another way. When the player has to figure it all out on their own, it helps to have more than one right solution.

After talking to John Tinning, we understand why Professional Villians have been so cryptic in their presentation of Unsound Love. It's simply in the project's DNA that the player shouldn't be controlled too much. But of course, there's another, simpler reason why the game's Steam page isn't yet filled with long text descriptions and bullet points. Unsound Love is still in early development and a lot can still change.

If this article has made you curious about Unsound Love, you don't have to wait long. On Tuesday, the YouTube channel Alpha Beta Gamer will reveal the game's trailer, and we will of course follow up on any new revelations at Gamereactor.