Wadjet Eye Games has made a name for themselves in the last several years with stand-out point and click adventures like the Blackwell series, A Golden Wake, Technobabylon, and Shardlight. Honestly, they are among the few companies that really have my attention when they have a new game to announce. Their latest endeavor, available today, is called Unavowed, which I recently had the pleasure of playing through.
One element that Wadjet Eye never fails to bring is a fresh setting and characters. Other than the Blackwell series, they don’t “settle” for sequels, they’re constantly making new characters, new settings, new stories. Unavowed takes this principle and runs with it. Instead of a ‘default’ character, players have some influence on their character and origin story, choosing between male or female and three occupations. It promotes replay value, although not in a drastic sense, but it’s nonetheless a welcomed step outside the norm. Unavowed, as you can tell from the “box” art, also features several key protagonist characters that are your companions throughout the adventure. You can talk to these NPCs anytime to get their feedback on events and to help direct you where to go next, and you’ll often need them to solve puzzles as well.
So Unavowed is actually one of the more maturely themed adventure games I have played, to the point of being actually pretty shocking early on with shootings at a local goth-themed nightclub. The tone of the game is dark and serious, and a nearly constant rainstorm adds to the grim atmosphere. Your character was (is?) possessed by a very violently inclined demon. After committing multiple murders, your character, or their demonic-influenced version anyway, have managed to continue to use dark, supernatural powers to steer parts of New York into darkness. The Unavowed, an ancient, small group comprised of supernatural humans, must use their skills to keep humanity safe, or safer anyway. Eli Beckett is a fire mage, while Mendana is a Jinn who can discern when someone is lying, has been alive several hundred years, and is also great at swordplay. Their help will be crucial as you try to track down the demon that possessed you and stop it from causing increasingly more harm. Other characters join the Unavowed as the story progresses, offering their unique abilities and take on the situation.
Interestingly, Unavowed breaks from a traditional point and click adventure game by separating the game’s main areas into distinct missions. Characters take the subway to get to different parts of New York in which they embark on their next adventure. You get to choose which two team members come with you, as long as one of them is either Mendana or Eli. Once you choose which location you’re going to, you cannot leave the area until you complete it, but this rarely turns out to be a difficult task. On the whole, Unavowed is actually one of the easier adventure games I have played through, but I don’t consider that a mark against it. Puzzles are logical and easy to flow through, and given that each mission takes place in a relatively condensed area, if you do end up having to brute force your way through dialog or puzzles it shouldn’t take that long.
Fortunately, the design and execution of the adventure is such that back-tracking, grinding, and guessing are not that common; instead, you tend to make steady progress and encounter very few headaches. For some hardcore adventure gamers, this might be disappointing, but with time constraints being what they are these days, I appreciated the streamlined experience that offered more story and progression than grinding through obtuse puzzles. Besides — with the ability to tweak your own character origin story, optional achievements such as setting trapped ghosts free, and a branching storyline that puts a lot of interesting life or death situations in your control — there’s reason to go back and replay. So having puzzles that are logical and not a pain to revisit helps promote the idea that you may well play through Unavowed more than once, perhaps with a different protagonist origin and making different choices at the end of each of the missions along the way.
As far as presentation, Unavowed has twice the resolution of a typical Wadjet Eye title (640×360), but more importantly the art work looks great. Voice-acting and dialog is nicely done, and you can also enable a commentary track as you play to learn more about the development. In sum, if you enjoy the genre, you’re sure to enjoy Unavowed.
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