To say I have been excited for Unknown 9: Awakening would be an understatement. From seeing the trailer back in March to checking it out at Summer Game Fest and then finally going hands-on with U9A at PAX this year, I have been dying to get my hands on the full release. I am happy to say that Unknown 9: Awakening truly satisfied all of my needs regarding a fresh take on combat and a captivating story.
Unknown 9: Awakening truly managed to pull me into its story, leaving me invested in the characters involved. Many games have tried this, but only a few have really captured me in the way that Unknown 9: Awakening has. U9A follows Haroona, a young girl who finds herself with a power she doesn’t quite understand. Haroona is voiced and motion captured by The Witcher’s Anya Chalotra, and after speaking with her about the game, I can see how much her performance meant to her, putting a spotlight on her Indian background and playing a female lead in an excellent video game. Chalotra was outstanding in this role, with tiny inflections in her voice speaking volumes.
Haroona meets her mentor, Reika, at a young age. She learns she is a Quaestor and is able to harness these powers to move in and out of a realm called The Fold and use them to protect herself and those she loves. This power is linked to a group called The Unknown 9, which we learn more about throughout the game.
“Unknown 9: Awakening truly satisfied all of my needs regarding a fresh take on combat and a captivating story.”
Unfortunately, there always has to be a bad guy, and on an excursion, which Reika told her to stay away from, Haroona sneaks along and witnesses another Quastor, Vincent, kill her beloved mentor, and this sets her on a path for revenge—this was all in the trailer, don’t blame me for spoilers. The good news is that there is so much more to this story.
Vincent leads a group called The Ascendants, and they want to take this power from The Unknown 9. Another group, The Leap Year Society, is a group of radical thinkers and their goal is to stop The Ascendants. I believe that is all I can tell you about Unknown 9: Awakening without spoiling important story beats, and believe me, there are plenty.
Unknown 9: Awakening had me falling in love with characters, eager to push forward to learn more about the world they live in and the forces that drive them. Luther and Buchra are your companions who will eventually join you in the world, and there are more people who are a part of the team but aren’t directly in your party. You’ll also find some appearances from people from Haroona’s past, and yes, I was shipping them the whole time. There also isn’t a simple label for good and bad—well, except Vincent, we hate him. Everyone is complicated and sometimes not at all who they say they are, but that goes deeper than you think. And yes, there were tears.
Part of what drew me to Unknown 9: Awakening was a skill called Stepping. This allows those with Haroona’s abilities to step into the body of another person and control their actions for a short time. As the game goes on, that power becomes stronger, allowing for longer Steps and more of them in a row. By the end of U9A, you can step up to four times with the help of a device, which can allow for some outrageous battles.
However, Stepping is a lot more than a gimmick. I found that while playing Unknown 9: Awakening, I thought I could just run into a battle and take it head-on, punching my way to victory. Instead, it feels like every new area is a puzzle in a way, and you need to assess the situation and use Haroona’s skills in the most effective way possible. There are some light puzzles throughout U9A as well, but these always felt fairly straightforward.
The skill tree in Unknown 9: Awakening has three sections, Combat, Stealth and Umbric Abilities. There is a bit of her powers in each section, with Umbric being the most focused on The Fold. You will spend points found in each section to buy new skills or power up those she already has, and it was an interesting choice on Reflector Entertainment’s part to require finding these points rather than earning them with experience and levelling.
“Unknown 9: Awakening had me falling in love with characters, eager to push forward to learn more about the world they live in and the forces that drive them.”
Essentially, if you don’t take the time to fully explore each area in Unknown 9: Awakening, you will miss out on not only collectibles but Anomalies, which give Gnosis Points (skill points), but also something called Scribings that will raise Haroona’s health and Am, making her stronger, you can use Haroona’s skill called Peeking, which will help find some of the collectibles and important memories Haroona can see through The Fold. It was a beautiful way to experience her past, as well as more about The Unknown 9.
Those who barrel through the story will find the game impossible. However, there is an option to replay each chapter of the game and a menu that shows you exactly what you are missing, though not where it is. This only saves the item’s progress and does not affect your overall gameplay.
The game is a lot more linear than the titles I usually jump into. There is really only one path through each area, aside from a few hidey holes for these collectibles. Taking on teams of Ascendants gets more and more complicated throughout the Unknown 9: Awakening’s 13 chapters, and as Haroona becomes more powerful, so do her enemies.
There were plenty of skills that would allow for combat combos. For instance, pulling an enemy toward you and following with a heavy attack could gain a bonus, or parrying/using your shield at the right time to cause damage. I was more interested in skills that allowed me to push or pull enemies, as well as Umbric Attacks, which would use Am to overload an enemy with Faze damage, allowing for a chained burst attack to defeat them.
There are also some great options in the Stealth section like Ripple to distract an enemy or Shroud, which hides Haroona and allows you to walk behind an enemy and take them down quietly, which also refills a Stepping token. All of that is, of course, when I am not doing everything in my power to use Stepping to take down as many people as possible. Unknown 9: Awakening is the first game that really had me wanting to use a little from every skill tree, and I found that they were all woven together so well that I was never favouring one over the other.
“The locations in Unknown 9: Awakening, though linear, are absolutely stunning, with beauty everywhere you look—from barren deserts to bustling cities.”
The locations in Unknown 9: Awakening, though linear, are absolutely stunning. Whether you’re in a barren desert, lush forest, or bustling city, there is beauty everywhere you look. You traverse the world in a way similar to something like Uncharted or Assassn’s Creed. You can climb walls, slip through cracks, hide in the grass or jump through rooftops. It is a bit less free than Assassin’s Creed, though. Where you can go is pretty planned out ahead of time.
What really blew my mind were some of the design choices that Reflector didn’t skimp on. The journal is a place where you can keep up on the story so far. Because it isn’t a standard adventure with quests, you’re just following along her journey. So, her journal documents this in her own words. When you open it, it’s a gorgeous book filled with sketches and handwriting, and it is Haroona’s sarcastic personality. You can, of course, pull it up in plain text, but I love that it wasn’t just a soulless codex or quest book. Every stunning detail in Unknown 9: Awakening was so well thought out.
However, all of that isn’t to say that Unknown 9: Awakening is not without its issues. Throughout my 20+ hours or so of gameplay, there were plenty of glitches and graphical issues that came up. The further I went into the game, the worse they got. Originally, they were small like cutscenes when you head to a new area being cut off to go to a black loading screen abruptly, heads floating in the air after you defeat someone, or Luther climbing a wall in the middle of the air.
The bigger issues that actually affected gameplay came in later chapters. I never came across issues that would halt gameplay and stop me from progressing, but I had quite a few that became clear issues that affected my careful planning for each battle. More than once, I would get stuck with all the controls for Stepping on my screen even when I had finished the sequence. Even worse was when I would jump into a Step, and none of the buttons would work, so I would have to wait for it to time out and waste a Stepping token. These issues didn’t come up every time, but they did come up enough that I was annoyed.
“Unknown 9: Awakening brought a great story to the table that weaves in an excellent combat experience, making it both unique and thoughtful.”
I think perhaps the worst part of Unknown 9: Awakening for me, however, was the final boss fight. I won’t spoil the story details here, including who or what it is, only combat issues. I will say that I was extremely disappointed in how the battle played out. First, it was incredibly long. I could have been doing something wrong and found the “slow” way to do it, but if not, it was needlessly tedious. I would continuously use Faze damage until I was able to use the burst attack. I had to do this five times after moving to story mode because I was being slaughtered—and those five times were not quick.
After I died once when my save reloaded, there was no longer a health or bar to tell me if the Faze was working, so I was holding on with a breath and a prayer. But the most important issue to me was that the entirety of Unknown 9: Awakening was teaching you to use and mingle all these amazing, unique combat abilities Haroona learns, and when it comes down to the final fight, they are all irrelevant. I had more fun during the mini-bosses. During the final battle, you can’t push or pull; there are no people to Step into (kind of anyway), nothing to crush…it was basically just running, healing and slowly using Umbric Attacks.
It was so disappointing to me to have a game build this incredible combat system to watch everything you’d mastered go to waste. I sincerely hope I missed some mechanic somewhere and I am completely wrong, but after more than 30 minutes of trying every skill I had, I had to press on and use the one that worked. It was not an easy fight, but it was also so unsatisfying compared to the rest of the game’s combat.
That being said, the plot continues for a short while afterwards and tells a story a lot deeper than that battle. Unknown 9: Awakening brought a great story to the table that weaves in an excellent combat experience. Unique and thoughtful, my experience with U9A was a blast, and I can’t wait to jump back in and snatch up the rest of those collectables. Anya Chalotra and the rest of the cast brought the story to life, and I can’t wait to check out more of the Unknown 9 universe.
- You are Haroona, a Quaestor born with the ability to venture into a mysterious dimension that overlaps our own, known only as the Fold
- On her quest for powerful hidden knowledge, Haroona will learn to master her unique connection to the Fold
- You are Haroona, a Quaestor born with the ability to venture into a mysterious dimension that overlaps our own, known only as the Fold
- On her quest for powerful hidden knowledge, Haroona will learn to master her unique connection to the Fold
