HomeFeaturesUnknown 9: Awakening
After years of silence, Unknown 9: Awakening re-emerges as a supernatural mash-up of Assassin’s Creed with Star Wars Force powersThat’s the spirit
That’s the spirit
Image credit:Bandai Namco Entertainment
Image credit:Bandai Namco Entertainment
It was a striking, if utterly ambiguous debut, and with talk of accompanying podcasts, books, comics and a web series also on the way to help build out this new world even further, it felt like developers Reflector Entertainment were really setting out to make a bold and ambitious first impression. But it’s now been four years since that trailer. The books, podcasts and comics have all come and gone, seemingly making little impression, and Awakening, the game aiming to pull this big, expanded universe together, has arguably slipped from both time and memory. Perhaps this will change with its newly-dated summer 2024 release window on the horizon, but having seen a small, hands-off slice of an early mission in the game at publisher Bandai Namco’s offices a couple of weeks ago, Awakening’s certainly got its work cut out for it.
Image credit:Bandai Namco Entertainment
Image credit:Bandai Namco Entertainment
Image credit:Bandai Namco Entertainment
In addition to stepping, Haroona can also become invisible to make a quick getaway (and seemingly right in the middle of combat, too, without enemies becoming any the wiser or jolting you back into full view). This is one of many so-called ‘Umbric’ powers Haroona’s able to use, and they have their own specific magic bar to govern their use in combat. Another one is a Force-like push that can send guards cascading backwards into flaming lanterns and other obstacles, and yes, you do have the option to punt them over cliffs and ledges to their doom. There’s also the equivalent of a Force pull to yank them forwards, too, allowing you to close the gap on enemies to give them a swift punch to the jaw, interrupt their attack patterns, or bring them tumbling down off ledges and staircases so they can fight on your level. Melee attacks are important for replenishing your limited number of Step Tokens, though Deschamps stresses that every situation can technically be handled entirely through stealth, without having to resort to out and out violence.
Image credit:Bandai Namco Entertainment
“There’s also that famous sentence that knowledge is power, which is kind of true, too. So if you add up all those things, in the history of our specices, knowledge is what you should seek, whatever it is, whatever level it is, knowledge is where it’s at. […] It’s a powerful idea. It’s an idea that’s really open, and an idea you can scale and express as you wish.”
With our demo handlers playing on the easiest Story difficulty mode, it was, admittedly, a little hard to gauge just how challenging or satisfying these potential stealth puzzles would be in practice. Chaining Step combos to culminate in using a muscular tank lad’s AOE ground pound to take out multiple goons at once certainly has its appeal, as did yanking out people’s literal souls from their spines while performing a silent takedown. Enemies had the wherewithal to attack all at once, too, rather than circling politely and waiting their turn, but shunting them back into fiery torches looked quite flat and lacking in impact. Likewise, as an observer, firing enemy guns in third person also gave the impression that they had all the heft of a toy pellet gun.
What we were shown outside of combat didn’t raise the pulse much either. While Haroona’s glowing bracelets will alert her to special ‘scribing’ tears in the fabric of reality that can increase her health and magic powers, they aren’t visible to the naked eye, so she’ll need to hunt down through a combination of environmental cues and her peek ability. In our demo, this was simply a ‘follow the glowing energy lines’ kind of affair, requiring little thought or input from the player. I’d hope that later scribing areas are a bit more puzzle-driven to prevent them from turning into tedious hide and seek trails, though when asked if the game had many Tomb Raider or Uncharted-style puzzles further down the line, the answer we were given was merely “some” rather than lots.
Still, with the end of our demo culminating in a sequence with Haroona freeing a honking great zeppelin from the middle of a rainforest, I’m hopeful that we’ll at least get to see some interesting places along the way. We’re told this zeppelin will serve as our main hub between missions in Unknown 9, carrying us across the globe in linear setpieces as Haroona follows the trail of the big bad. There’s also mention that its story will delve into Ashoka mythology rather than the traditional western cannon, but there’s no denying that its 1912 setting does have an air ofIndiana Jonesabout it, too.
Image credit:Bandai Namco Entertainment
Whether it will all be enough to make enough of an impact, though, remains to be seen. For a game that’s been in development since the studio’s founding in 2016, Unknown 9 verges on feeling too little too late in some respects, and not enough of its own thing to really set it apart from the bigger, flashier blockbusters it’s clearly taken much of its inspiration from. Yes, what we saw was taken from very early on in the game, and probably amounted to no more than 30 minutes. But even this no longer feels as striking as that initial teaser trailer did all those years ago.
