Unknown 9: Awakening Reviews

Unknown 9: Awakening is a thoroughly AA gaming experience. Like a lost gem from the Xbox 360 era, its charm and jank are intermingled in interesting ways, but its commitment to a unique cultural perspective and killer remixing of the stealth/combat loop elevate it above its slightly unpolished wrappings.

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 a promising start for a new series once you learn to love its combat.”

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.

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.

Unknown 9: Awakening is the debut title by Canadian developer Reflector Games, as well as the first entry in a rather ambitious multimedia shared universe that is set to expand across comic books, web series and podcasts. Despite being saddled with an unintuitive title that makes it sound like the 9th entry in a franchise you’ve never heard of, coupled with an unwieldy and generic subtitle, I am pleased to announce that Unknown 9: Awakening is actually quite a lot of fun as an action/advent...

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

I went into Unknown 9: Awakening really wanting to like it; to see its transmedia experiment succeed. But it's such a horrible-looking game, featuring game mechanics from fifteen-odd years ago and a story that will put you to sleep, it's hard to offer any sort of a recommendation. Play it if you want a renewed appreciation for how great other games can be.

Part of a mixed media web, Unknown 9: Awakening isn't strong enough to pull us further into its universe. Anya Chalotra's Haroona is a great protagonist, and causing havoc with supernatural powers can be a delight. But, lacking in polish, Unknown 9: Awakening feels torn between what it wants to be, ultimately undermining its areas of promise to deliver a janky experience. Despite it all, it can still charm – but takes work to love.

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

Despite a few interesting ideas, Unknown 9: Awakening is a bland and janky adventure with a generic story and dull combat.

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.

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.

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.

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 out what it’s even about. All of this is skinned onto the early 2010s cinematic video game experience which aside from a few fun, if janky combat encounters doesn’t know how to set itself apart. It's heartbreaking because there is a much better experience in between the in-between that didn’t work.

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 and give Unknown 9: Awakening an honest shot, with its budget price that should help with pulling the trigger over such an… Unknown quantity.