The artwork, too, benefits from artist Ben Chandler’s years of experience with the genre. She’s a funny, adorable little kid who clearly enjoys being a ghost, but she’s also a kid that died young, presumably unpleasantly.Īs always in Unavowed, warmth and humour is still tinged with melancholy. KayKay, Logan’s ten-year-old spirit guide, also deserves a mention. If I’d picked the cop origin story, she would have been the first. I never grew that close to Vicky, but that might have been because she was the last character I met. Yet there’s a warmth and companionship to them that made me treasure their company.Įli was my favourite, with his strange love of accountancy and longing for the family he had to leave behind when his power manifested. The members of the Unavowed are also almost always recovering from some great sadness in their past, including the player character. Instead, the game becomes about accepting these tragedies and trying to move on. People have inevitably died, and even the survivors are hurt or traumatised, and despite the presence of sorcery, there’s no way to magically undo it. Each chapter has the player investigate a different supernatural happening in a different part of New York, and it’s always some kind of tragedy. Specifically, it has the Blackwell games’ sense of bittersweet melancholy. Unavowed also shares a tone with Wadjet Eye’s previous games. It’s a heartening tale for fans of unfashionable genres everywhere. The puzzles are simple, but not too simple, just long enough to occasionally stump the player for a few minutes, but never longer than five.Įverything that makes Unavowed great was successfully prototyped and refined in those long years in the wilderness. The interface is simplified and accessible, with only a mouse and left-click required. That experience really shows, as Unavowed carefully sands off the harsh edges that marked the adventure gaming’s previous heyday. The two games are set in the game’s universe, and Logan’s powers are identical to those of Rosa Blackwell. Their most famous work, the Blackwell series, connects directly to Unavowed. They’ve been developing and publishing games in this supposedly dead genre for the past 12 years. It’s from Wadjet Eye Games, run by husband and wife team Dave and Jane Gilbert. Interestingly, though, Unavowed hasn’t been made by some newcomer genius or returning prodigal son. And since this is an 8-10 hour adventure game, not a 50-hour RPG, you probably will.Īll of this amounts to a big shake-up of the point-and-click genre. This, combined with a choice of three playable prologues (a la Dragon Age Origins) means that you could easily play Unavowed through two or three times, getting a fresh experience every time. I honestly sat there thinking them through longer than I did some of the puzzles. Every chapter ends with a difficult moral choice, and they’re not easy choices to make either – you’re almost always choosing between two bad options. This is reinforced by the other big import from RPGs: moral decisions. Yes, Unavowed is that previously impossible dream: an adventure game that stands up to repeated playthroughs. It also ensured that a second playthrough with different characters would be fresh and interesting. Every character can solve every puzzle, just in a different way, so refusing to let me switch them out challenged me to make use of who I had. This can seem frustrating and arbitrary when, for example, you forgot to take Logan and there’s a ghost right there you can’t talk to.Įventually, however, I came to appreciate it. You can take only two of them with you at once, and you’re locked into that decision, unable to shuffle your pack. So the solution to a problem might be “use Logan on ghost” or “Use Eli on flammable object”. These characters actually appear in your inventory, alongside the random collection of items any adventure game protagonist acquires. Here your protagonist is joined by a group of supernatural crimebusters, including straight-laced half-djinn Mandana, accountant turned fire mage Eli, newly sober spirit medium Logan, and cop-who-saw-too-much Vicki. The signature gimmick here is to take the concept of the adventuring party from games such as Mass Effect or Pillars of Eternity, and inject it into the point-and-click adventure. By splicing together adventure games and RPGs, Unavowed elevates both genres. Unavowed is the most important thing to happen to the world of point and click since Tim Schafer decided to check out this new Kickstarter website everyone keeps talking about.
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