Unknown 9: Awakening

“Unknown 9: Awakening is a promising start for a new series once you learn to love its combat.”

Despite some technical issues and a lacklustre final encounter, Unknown 9: Awakening brings a unique take on combat with an extremely well-acted plot that creates a story truly worth experiencing.

In the end, I enjoyed the first video game of the Unknown 9 universe, and I sure hope it won’t be the last, as I wanna keep going back to this vast fictional world. And while I want to applaud Reflector Entertainment and Bandai Namco for trying something different, perhaps they stuck a little too close to the action-adventure videogame genre’s tropes, in an attempt to better appeal to the masses. Still, it’s a game that has some good ideas and terrific lore, one expanded upon by all the transmedia products out there. Fans of action-adventure games should take this leap of faith into The Fold a...

Unknown 9: Awakening is full of originality, but suffers from some frustrating gameplay decisions despite the interesting mystery of its narrative.

Unknown 9: Awakening is a generally solid action-adventure mystery let down by irritatingly repetitive combat encounters in the game's later half. The character dialogue and environmental exploration are a highlight, keeping me playing even when other aspects annoyed me.

Unknown 9: Awakening has some issues, but is an overall interesting story with awesome powers to play with, and is technically playable on Steam Deck.

Unknown 9: Awakening is the debut game from studio Reflector Entertainment but not the first entry into the Unknown universe; so far there are novels, comics, and even a dramatised podcast. Thankfully, Awakening is a standalone experience and so you don’t need to delve into any of the other cross-media releases to understand anything.

I love a good walk and talk. Some of my favourite television series — most notably, Star Trek The Next Generation and Buffy the Vampire Slayer — always used the technique to convey copious amounts of exposition as Picard and Riker exited a turbolift on the way to a transporter room, or as Buffy and Giles made their way to the library.

Playing through Unknown 9: Awakening left me with a cocktail of emotions when I finally rolled credits after 13 hours. I usually pride myself in my ability to see eye to eye with a game’s vision and try to find even footing even if I didn’t have a good time with it, but this is different. The experience of playing Reflector Entertainment's debut title is akin to watching a bunch of trailers for those Phase 1 Marvel movies alongside the opening act of the first Avengers flick. It felt like proof of concept for a multimedia franchise that doesn’t want to give away too much but hasn’t figured yet...

Unknown 9: Awakening boasts great combat and an ambitious story, but performance issues are too many to look past.

In the ever-expanding realm of action-adventure games, Reflector Entertainment’s Unknown 9: Awakening arrives with the weight of a multimedia franchise on its shoulders. In this comprehensive review, we’ll find out whether Unknown 9: Awakening successfully translates its multimedia potential into an engaging gaming experience or falls short of its ambitious narrative promise.

Unknown 9: Awakening is the perfect example of having great ideas, interesting lore, and well-written characters that are thrown to the wall in a random fashion to see if they stick together. The plethora of technical issues is so large that by the time the game gets going, one's investment is long gone.