Unknown 9: Awakening (2024, Windows) Review

THE FLOP TO END ALL FLOPS

Also for: Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series

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Unknown 9: Awakening is one of the weirdest cases of overreaching I've ever seen. It was supposed to be the start of a major triple-A franchise; the "Unknown 9"-brand, a cross-medium epic branching into comics, novels, podcasts and a web series. Reflector Entertainment must've had one hell of a sales pitch to get the green light from Bandai Namco to produce this ambitious mess. Having played the final result, I'm in shock. I can't believe the complete lack of talent connected to such a major investment. What the hell happened?

The game became a monumental, Concord-level flop, reaching an all-time peak of only 276 concurrent players on Steam. That number is even worse when you consider the fact that the game was never released on the other major storefronts, GOG and Epic Games. That basically means the entire PC-player base was represented by those abysmal numbers. And as I was playing it for this review, four months past its release, the numbers were down to 9 people. I suppose that makes me part of an unknown 9.

So, what made it such a flop? I'd say the factors are too many to count. But to begin with, "Unknown 9: Awakening" is a horrible title. Without knowing anything beforehand, what does it tell you about the game's story, genre or even intended audience? Absolutely nothing, that's what. It's essentially a pretentious way of saying "Something unfamiliar begins". What's more, because of non-existent marketing, the game was on nobody's radar at first. Once people finally caught its scent, poor word-of-mouth did nothing to help - it became apparent that the game has no qualities whatsoever.

You're playing as Haroona, a young Indian woman (voiced by and modeled after Anya Chalotra) who's been raised into a "questar" by her mentor, Reika. Using your special powers, you're the only one able to keep an evil group of people, The Ascendants, from doing sinister stuff (my choice of words). You visit a number of locations around the globe; a city, a jungle, mountains, caves and more, stepping in and out of "The Fade", a spiritual world that's poorly explained in this lore. 

Who are the titular "Unknown 9", you ask? Well, they're an esoteric group of immortal beings trying to stop civilization's cycle of death and rebirth. Their impact on this story is very limited. They were obviously meant to be expanded upon in other additions to the franchise.

And what's a "questar", you ask?

If you're familiar with Star Wars, a "questar" is essentially a Jedi knight minus the light saber. Everyone and everything in this universe has a connection to "The Fade", and Haroona can use her willpower to manipulate it. This is best demonstrated in combat. She can do a lot of things. She can push people into walls, or pull them towards herself and smack them up real good. She can sneak up from behind and knock them out by pulling their souls out of their bodies. She can generate a protective force field as a shield against most attacks. She can even briefly turn invisible. Her coolest ability is to possess enemies and cause them to attack each other.

It doesn't sound too bad, right? But the ideas don't amount to much, neither narratively nor in terms of gameplay. Haroona is entangled in a confusing story with an unclear end goal. You must stop the Ascendents, a group of people with a hidden agenda. In fact, it's so hidden that I never exactly understood what they sought to accomplish - even after beating the game (I admit I lost interest in the story quite soon). So I just followed the linear levels like a drone, never fully comprehending Haroona's driving force. What seemed like a revenge plot at first quickly turned into something else, and then I stopped caring.

Her personality doesn't help me emphasize with her plight, either. At the outset, Haroona is insufferable. Why does she reject help? Why does she treat everyone with disdain, why all the hostility towards well-meaning people? The answer can be one of two; either she's a badass girlboss, or her character development involves learning how to trust and confide in people. Luckily, it's the latter.

In between chapters you have some downtime on an airship, where you can get to know a handful of side characters. They're a super-duper-mega-diverse group; an American cowboy, a Norwegian pilot and her engineering daughter, an old Italian stallion who's too much into opera, and others. They're a good bunch, although most of their involvement is limited. However, for the game to earn a bonus diversity review score I would've also required a ginger, an albino, an Eskimo, an epileptic and at least one should've had chronic kidney disease.

The lore, which seems interesting at first, quickly degrades into generic mumbo-jumbo about the impending end of the world. It's an apocalypse that's never seen or felt in any way. No natural disaster, no weapon of mass destruction, no world-scale alien invasion, no nothing. I've seen similar concepts done to death, and they've all been more convincing. Unknown 9 has cycles of life and destruction, conduits, the spiritual world, magicians, mana, religious fanatics - generic concepts with new labels to make them seem original. Scratch the surface and you'll see it's all stuff stolen from the fantasy recycling bin.

Weak story elements aren't exactly elevated by the repetitive gameplay loop, which involves stealth, combat, combative stealth and stealthy combat. Following the traditions of linear, narrative action-adventures like The Last of Us and the A Plague Tale-games, it attempts to replicate the tension of those far superior titles without much success.

You sneak around in tall grass or hide behind crates, trying to catch enemies unawares or trigger elemental hazards as they walk by. You can ignite explosives, unleash poisonous gas or zap them, but most of it only chips away at the enemy's health. The only surefire way to instakill someone is by sneaking up from behind and do a takedown. Should they detect you, Haroona's invisibility ability lets you avoid a fight.

That's recommended, because the martial-arts combat absolutely sucks. The camera can't keep up, in spite of a lock-on function, and bad things happen out of screen constantly. Haroona's abundance of powers make the controls confusing, and they're all introduced way too soon, before they've had a chance to settle. They don't always respond, either - it's as if movement randomly takes precedence over other commands and cancels them out.

For what they are, the few boss battles scattered across the chapters are better than expected. Presented like the adversaries from Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, with the boss name and red health bar at the top of the screen, these fights at least attempt to test your reflexes and profound knowledge of the zen of combat.

Don't get me wrong, they're not good, but not the disaster you'd expect from all the surrounding jank. The problem is that you can defeat them without much skill. You'll get hit constantly, but near unlimited healing possibilites make sure you're practically unbeatable. And yet, the bosses' enormous health pool ensures the fights go on forever.

Apart from a scant few puzzles, these combat- and stealth sections constitute the entire gameplay loop. They are far too numerous, especially towards the end, and hardly evolve throughout the game. They pose no challenge while taking way too long to clear. You'd assume that you'd be able to sneak past the enemies towards the next section, like in any competent game, but the exit remains sealed until all enemies are dead. 

To make matters worse, everything is unpolished and unstable. At one point several of Haroona's powers stopped functioning, including the takedowns and invisibility. Only the movement and martial arts worked. As a result I died, and upon reloading my latest checkpoint they were all back again. Later, one enemy soldier got stuck on a ledge. I couldn't proceed until I found a way of luring him down. Close to the end, I suddenly could no longer access my journal and character upgrade menu, and had to reload the game.

The jankiness isn't contained to combat. In exploration mode, the quick-step dodge shares button with the situational jump-across-chasms move. Because of super-particular situational triggers, the jump often fails to trigger. You may end up dodging a lot at a cliff's edge, which normally would be bad, but the game is laden with invisible walls that don't allow for stupid falls.

Further jankiness permeates the visual experience. At their worst the graphics are PS3-level. All character models look shockingly bad, particularly their facial animations. Haroona's blank, expressionless stare takes the edge off all dramatic cutscenes. And in the second chapter of the game, which takes place in a city, the crowds of people all share the same handful of hideous character models, with only slight color variations. The worst examples look like they had a face transplant.

The world's exterior visual design is decent, however, but it isn't a saving grace. A city in India, night-blue forests, dark caves and brown-reddish cliffs in the sunset - it all looks like it would be fun to explore, but it's hardly doable because of the strict linearity. A few, extremely short offshoots lead to Gnosis points that you can funnel into character upgrades (stealth, combat or "The Fold"-skills). Or you might find collectibles that reveal tidbits of history and character background, but none of it is of any particular interest, because the lore feels so vague.

An exerpt from the lore, here: "The Cambrian will be a lens through which the life-form can be bound to a host's neural matrix." Such sentences may sound intelligent and scientific to the one who wrote it, but most readers will have to read it at least three times before they can make sense of it. And when they finally decipher it, they realize it's just answers to questions they would never care to ask. Such is the lore behind this universe; impenetrable blandness.

On the lower end of the intelligence spectrum, the level designers have thrown in insultingly simple puzzles in an attempt to make you think. These are the typical, dumbed-down Pipemania-challenges where you're altering the flow of "the Am"(mana/life force) to power up a switch or whatnot. The solution is often to click each node once.

Unknown 9: Awakening tries to the best of its capabilities to convey the sensation of a grand adventure, but the skill just isn't there. As a first entry in a cross-media franchise, it is bogged-down by seriousness that fails to resonate with the player due to very poor production values and shallow storytelling. At launch, it was allegedly mechanically broken as well. That's now been patched, at least in my version, but the core concept cannot be fixed, not without going back to the drawing board and rethinking the entire process.

I was hoping for something hilariously bad, but playing it, I was only bored out of my mind. I felt detached, as if it was an out-of-body experience. You can perhaps say my spiritual self was trapped in "The Fold", watching my corporeal form reclining in an awkward position on my gaming chair as I stumbled through the levels. I could see myself wearing a face of concern, betraying emotions of frustration and hopelessness. Maybe a picture of that face could've been my entire review. 

And speaking of face - to poor Anya Chalotra I just want to say this: In the future, be mindful of who you lend your sweet face to because they might just butcher it, like Reflector did in this case. I've a feeling she might not do something like this again in a long time.