Unknown 9: Awakening

[Maryokutai]

Saw that this is getting sold for 15-20 bucks, so I decided to unwrap my full price release day copy and give it a go. Only played the first hour so far, which is the usual prologue/tutorial affair, pairing your player character up with her mentor while she explains both game features and a bit of the lore. I'm rather lost on the latter to be honest – the titular Unknown 9 are a group of knowledge keepers who fell victim to their own hubris or something, but the intro sequence only showed eight of them, so I predict a 'chosen one' plot twist at some point.

 

The gameplay is probably best described as low-budget Last of Us/Uncharted hybrid without guns. You go through linear levels, do some easy-mode platforming and climbing and some areas are filled with enemy goons you then have to dispose of, either in hand-to-hand combat or stealth. The game seems to nudge you towards stealth, which I've been following so far. It's very by the books: tall grass makes you borderline invisible, you can take down enemies from behind, get a one-off chance to disappear again if you cross LOS. Where it tries to differentiate itself a little bit is through the player's supernatural powers, which allow her to use some sort of spirit world wallhack, affect pre-determined objects around the map or take control of an enemy for a short time, Geist-style. Conceptually it's all very cool, and I quite enjoy watching the takedown animation, which sees her pull out the soul of an enemy and knock it out, as she lacks the physical strength to do so with their material bodies. But in terms of how it plays you can tell that while this wants to align itself with the TLOU style, it only had a fraction of its budget to pull it off, and it shows (and feels).

 

As mentioned, there's also combat, which seems more of a last resort if stealth should fail. So far it seems very basic, with one standard attack and one stronger attack activated by holding the same button. You can also use your special powers here, though, and there's a skill tree which I haven't looked at in detail yet, so maybe it'll be more open later on.

 

So far I can see why this hasn't really lit the world on fire, because it's about as janky as your average Piranha Bytes game. Considering they went through the effort of hiring a proper actress for the main role (she's played by Anya Chalotra from the Witcher series), it's rather jarring how bad facial animations have turned out, with the protagonist in particular having severe dead-eye-syndrome. Visually it's also rather low-end and doesn't even run that well with a wonky 30fps target, though I might have to get back to this because I was playing it in its 'ready to play' state but not after the installation was fully complete. Didn't find any fidelity settings either, so I actually might have been playing the Xbox One build (speaking of: for such a small studio to be forced to build last-gen versions still is a bit nonsensical IMO).

One really cool thing about this is its setting though. There's only so many dieselpunk games taking place in India out there and while I haven't seen too much of it yet, this might end up being its biggest strength.

 

But yeah, really janky, low-budget stuff that was probably too ambitious for the amount of experience and money involved. I don't know if anyone here played Velvet Assassin on Xbox360 but it sort of reminds me of that game, in the sense that it's similarly janky and out-of-date compared to its contemporaries but wraps a stealth game into a somewhat unique package.

 

 

[shinymcshine]

First - The game title is a bit confusing - as I genuinely had to check whether it was the 9th game in a long running, but obscure, series (particularly as it had the Awakening subtext too).

 

Second - Still not wholly sure I understand whether you play as one of the nine, or you can switch between them for different powers (like in Killer 7 or Clive Barker's Jericho) or if you are a single character helping or preventing the nine doing some weird sh*t?

 

It's really tough for someone to launch a new IP, esp. if you're pitching it as something that looks / plays like something else, but can't (due to budget) meet those expectations.

[Maryokutai]

The title isn't good, they probably should have spelled out the number to make it less look like sequalisation. But they really went all out, there's two novels, multiple comic books, a podcast and more in that same universe. Not sure if it was worth all that effort but I respect the enthusiasm.

 

In the game the Unknown 9 (or Nine) are those historical/mythological figures in its lore that I mentioned. The player character is, at least so far, unrelated to them and instead someone from a group of people called Queastor (iirc) who are trained in abilities that let them access another dimension, which is where the supernatural skills come from. It's only that one character you play as.

[Maryokutai]

Just for the record, I played a bit with the installation process completed entirely and it's still a very unstable 30fps. So not the most technically accomplished game.

 

Also managed to chain a few stealth tools together which probably does a better job showing how it plays than my explanation above:

 

 

You can see there's some cool ideas here, but they didn't have the means (or maybe know-how) to go all the way. Looking back at the clip did remind me that I should maybe check out Dishonored at some point, from what I recall that did similar things but with more freedom and mobility tools.

[shinymcshine]

From the clip it does look a lot like Dishonored (which was a game where I enjoyed the first one, but couldn't get into the sequel, no matter how much people enthused that the Clockwork Mansion was one of the best video game levels ever....)

 

TBH it's more to do with me & stealth games (Hitman, Sniper Elite, MGS etc) where I'll stealth around for a while then mess up by throwing a grenade when trying to duck into cover, or sneak up behind a guard then hit machine gun rather than knife, and then all hell breaks loose.

[Maryokutai]

I think if the game doesn't communicate you messing up the stealth portion as a figurative fail state, it can result in quite interesting scrambles. Last of Us 2 was pretty good at this, you're not going through that game like an invisible ninja, but through its dynamic encounters it feels very organic even if you mess up and have to pull out the machine gun for a bit. I've always hated objective trackers or side missions à la 'don't get spotted' because that's when stealth turns into trial and error and becomes a slog IMO.

[Maryokutai]

Finished this today, unfortunately it never goes beyond what it shows you in the first 1-2 hours. In fact I think it regresses a bit, because not only does it force you into combat scenarios from time to time, it also has three boss fights which aren't fun at all. As I initially barely levelled combat skills I did end up beating the combat scenarios by going invisible and resetting the enemies' awareness to zero, but that felt more like abusing a wonky foundation than a genuine way to proceed, particularly as one of those moments has an NPC character operate machinery and you're supposed to protect them (they are invisible to enemies like in TLOU, which takes any kind of tension out of that encounter).

 

I also found out after the very last stealth encounter that fully upgrading one branch of the kill tree unlocks a special ability. Had I known that earlier I would have focused on one aspect. But I don't think it would have mattered much, because even though you have a lot of cool skills, like the body control, you have to spend a ton of finite resources into maybe getting one or two kills that way. Just sneaking up behind an enemy for a silent takedown on the other hand costs absolutely nothing and instantly kills any enemy (after one specific upgrade). 

 

Unfortunately the storyline, while technically ticking all the boxes of a nice little globetrotting adventure, didn't really grab me either. I blame the character writing here, because there's maybe one or two NPCs that are somewhat likeable, but everyone else is just ... there, the protagonist included, and character arc feels forced and undeserved. It's a bit of a shame, because on paper this does really do anything you'd want of an action adventure type game, but it just shows that we're at a point now where you just can't do multi-featured projects like this on a budget anymore. The first thing they should have ditched are the realistic visuals I think, then maybe opt for an isometric perspective and make it stealth-focused, instead of having this layered approach. In previous generations this would have been a good first step to build upon (anyone remember how mediocre Uncharted 1 was?), but as we're now in a super unhealthy industry where that doesn't seem possible anymore – the first redundancy stories from the studio came out a week or two ago – this probably was it for this IP. They were planning more, as the incomplete Fellowship of the Ring-style ending suggests, but this will probably end as a one-off. I can't really recommend it either, but I would have liked to see a better execution of its ideas in a sequel.

 

 

[shinymcshine]

Nice write up, thank you for sharing your experience - doesn't even sound like I'd enjoy this as a niche title (once it was heavily discounted).

[Maryokutai]

Yeah, because it tries to just mimic other things but fails to replicate them in the same quality there's no real feature here that is worth visiting when it's on sale or even part of a subscription. The setting is cool, as is the soundtrack btw (never really mentioned that but there's some rather unique tracks in the latter game) but as an overall experience there's not much to take away from it unfortunately.

[Nag]

This "series" is officially dead...

 

Quote

“Continuing this project would not have been sustainable for the future of the studio,” he explained. “Regrettably, this also means that there will be redundancies following this decision”. He went on to add that: “This decision correlates directly with the failure of the studio's ambitious and courageous first project, a new IP with a rich transmedia universe.”

 

https://www.xboxachievements.com/news/unknown-9-franchise-cancelled-universe-doesnt-warrant-further-exploration/

[Maryokutai]

They did bite off more than they could chew with the transmedia universe I think. I doubt it took away anything from the game, but like I mentioned above the scope of the game itself was too ambitious for an AA debut project.

 

The silver lining here is that at least the studio is still alive and seems to be working on a Bandai Namco property? Wonder what that is, but it'll likely be a while before we see it.

 

 

[DANGERMAN]

I'm still tempted to pick this up one day, but I don't think I saw anyone say it was actually worth picking up. I'm glad they're still going, shame this didn't work out for them