Unknown 9: Awakening
Top Critic Average
Critics Recommend
Unknown 9: Awakening Media
Unknown 9: Awakening – Cinematic Launch Trailer
Unknown 9: Awakening – Overview Trailer
Critic Reviews for Unknown 9: Awakening
Despite a few interesting ideas, Unknown 9: Awakening is a bland and janky adventure with a generic story and dull combat.
Even when my time leaping into enemies was interrupted by these technical issues, Unknown 9: Awakening’s excellent cast of characters and inventive soul-hopping combat mechanics kept me invested all the way through its gloriously last-gen adventure. With how depressing this generation has been at times, that is absolutely meant as a compliment.
Unknown 9: Awakening is more than decent, offering some fun combat and exploration with a cast of mostly likeable good guys and entertaining pantomime villains.
An adventure with a strong emphasis on narrative, plagued by a far from optimal technical side but more engaging than you might believe.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Playing through Unknown 9: Awakening left me with a cocktail of emotions when I finally rolled credits after 13 hours. I usually pride myself in my ability to see eye to eye with a game’s vision and try to find even footing even if I didn’t have a good time with it, but this is different. The experience of playing Reflector Entertainment's debut title is akin to watching a bunch of trailers for those Phase 1 Marvel movies alongside the opening act of the first Avengers flick. It felt like proof of concept for a multimedia franchise that doesn’t want to give away too much but hasn’t figured yet out what it’s even about. All of this is skinned onto the early 2010s cinematic video game experience which aside from a few fun, if janky combat encounters doesn’t know how to set itself apart. It's heartbreaking because there is a much better experience in between the in-between that didn’t work.
I really wanted to write about the positives of featuring more cultures in this genre, and about how cool it is to have a famous actor play the protagonist, but sadly the gameplay gets in the way of anything interesting. Unknown 9: Awakening is just a bunch of gaming tropes loosely tied together with boring and uninspired NPCs lazily lurching from set piece to set piece, as the poorly designed game creaks and groans under the weight of expectation.
A fun and unusual take on the third person stealth game, that suffers from some humourless writing but benefits from a surfeit of peculiar magic powers.
