Also On: PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X, Xbox One
Publisher: Bandai Namco
Developer: Reflector Entertainment
Medium: Digital/Physical
Players: 1
Online: No
ESRB: T
Unknown 9: Awakening marks the beginning of what appears to be a new IP/universe from Bandai Namco, featuring podcasts, comics, and more as a way to really immerse yourself. It’s an action/adventure game with pretty linear progression, somewhat harkening to games like Uncharted. It has its own merits, but it certainly isn’t mind-blowing.
As a story, it starts off seemingly in the middle of a lot of lore dumping. It’s solid for a bit, but having a world of all sorts of otherworldly magics getting relatively side-graded for a revenge story isn’t stellar. It’s not unenjoyable, but it’s not gonna be immersing you in any excellent narrative or anything of the sort. Think of Indiana Jones with an “evil” organization seeking some artifact to obtain power to achieve whatever typical villain goals they may have. On the plus side to this, at least the main antagonist has a history with the “mentor” figure the main character has.
You play as a girl named Haroona, blessed with powers to weaponize and peer into the “Fold”. Think of the Fold as the Force, with the dimension being just, well, another alternate dimension. You’ll use it to engage in very punch-based combat, stealth takedowns, and other various Fold abilities to assist in stunning enemies for counterattacks. The combat is…less than stellar, all things considered. You do get a skill tree to upgrade, but it’s nothing game-changing or anything. You can get counterattacks on perfect dodges, parries further refill your magic meter, etcetera. Combat boils down to a lot of spamming RB/R1 for your quick light attacks, with an occasional RT/R2 to break enemy guard to let you continue spamming your light attacks.
You can use your Fold attacks to build up a stun meter and get a critical attack, but it didn’t seem particularly worth it with everything being a pretty gnarly stagger, kicking you out of your combo to try and stun enemies. With the Uncharted comparison, obviously that physical combat isn’t super in-depth either, but at least there’s guns to give you more than just mind-numbing melee. The combat isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just shallow and gets boring after hours and hours of punching enemies that mostly look the same.
Enemy variety isn’t good either. You’ll see a lot of enemy soldiers dressed basically the same with variants of weapons. From spears to clubs, guns, or just “big” enemies that take a bit more to bring down, the strategy to deal with them remains effectively the same: continually throw light attacks until you need to stagger them with a heavy attack to interrupt their block. Whether that’s a fault of encounter/enemy design or an issue with the combat system is up to interpretation.
Despite aforementioned linearity with the game and its progression, the levels are genuinely gorgeous. From a sprawling desert to an Indian marketplace to the deep jungle (and more), the game does look great. The character animations leave some to be desired, as the animations can look really strangely uncanny at times, but the designs are pretty solid. The alternate world 1950s-ish style brings an excellent feel to the world, even if there’s not a lot to explore.
Unknown 9: Awakening feels like it wants to be greater than it is, which is a big shame given how much effort was seemingly put into it. Having an extended out-of-game universe is really neat, but I think it unintentionally hurts enjoyment of the game when you go to play it. I specifically wanted to avoid the external media of the game going in to see what it would be like, and it makes the game feel like it’s following up on something we should already have knowledge of as the player. Combined with subpar combat, glitches resulting in cutscenes being wonky, and hit-or-miss performance on PC, it definitely hurts Unknown 9. If Bandai continues to work on this franchise (can you call it that yet?) I think they can really knock it out of the park, but as a first entry it really fails to hit its mark.
Note: Bandai Namco provided us with a Unknown 9: Awakening PC code for review purposes.
