Dan Stapleton
It only took 10 minutes of playing Unknown 9: Awakening for me to feel a keen sense of deja vu. Taking out enemies in small arenas, watching an emotional story of personal growth, and squeezing between plenty of tight cracks in walls – it’s a formula that feels all too familiar, sticking to the well-established traditions of the “Crevice Crawler” genre. It does try out one or two unique ideas to set itself apart, like mind-control powers that let you play puppet master with your enemies, but the problem is that it executes on the fundamentals significantly worse than its contemporaries. There are certainly glimmers of hope within that new stuff, but any novelty quickly wears off, resulting in a generic and underwhelming slog full of performance issues and other jankiness to boot.
Set in an alternate-reality version of the early 20th century, you play as Haroona, a distrustful woman who loves spouting trite platitudes that has been imbued with the power to tap into an unseen dimension called the Fold. Her powers let you do typical magic stuff like go invisible for a brief period of time, Force push and pull baddies around like an off-brand Jedi, and enter a ghost form so you can walk around and solve the easiest puzzles ever conceived. You’ll use them to worm your way through a series of small arenas separated by cutscenes clearly pining to be the next HBO adaptation – if you’ve played The Last of Us or God of War then you already get the idea, but instead of finely-tuned combat encounters and nail-biting stealth sections, Awakening offers sloppy fisticuffs and barebones crouch-fests.
Despite the extremely generic setup, the worldbuilding here is actually not half bad, and there’s clearly been a lot of time and effort put into establishing this universe’s timeline, lore, and supernatural rules. Like a knock-off Indiana Jones, this alternate version of Earth is home to mystical secrets and hidden histories kept just out of reach in parts unknown, including a mysterious cycle of extinction, a race of beings who cheated death by making themselves immortal, and secret societies vying for paranormal knowledge. Unfortunately, that promising foundation doesn’t do the story itself much good, as Haroona’s predictable tale is full of cliches and unremarkable characters, eventually getting horribly lost in a sea of magical jargon and convoluted references that completely whiffed on any attempt to make me care about what was happening.
A lot of that wonky journey will provide opportunities for sneaking about to dispatch enemies discreetly, but the stealth is extremely run of the mill and offers few innovations. You’ve got a ghostly rock you can throw to distract people and you will, of course, spend plenty of time hanging out in tall grass where no guardsman has ever thought to look. Unfortunately, the hopelessly dumb AI has a hard time detecting you even when you’re making things explode and leaving bodies in plain view. Still, there’s some small enjoyment to be had in the subpar stealth, as feeling like a master of the shadows who can clear an entire area without being spotted is still rewarding to pull off. Plus, your companions will sometimes comment on how sneaky you are if you can get through a section without being caught – that’s a nice touch.
Sadly, you’ll have fewer opportunities to engage with stealth than you might think, as Awakening railroads you into outright combat frequently and with great relish. This weirdly seems to happen more and more as you get deeper into the roughly eight-hour story, which wouldn’t be as much of a problem if it weren’t for the false choices it sets up in its skill trees. This simple three-pronged upgrade system makes you better at combat, stealth, or mind control abilities as you collect barely hidden “Gnosis Points,” and does basic things like allow you to remain invisible for longer or make your melee attacks do more damage. After spending the vast majority of my skill points on the stealth abilities tree only to see those encounters dry up, I began to wonder if I’d wasted my efforts and started hedging my bets by investing in other playstyles.
It’s really unfortunate that you’ll find yourself in more straightforward combat as you go, too, because it’s easily one of the things Awakening does worst. These wimpy encounters pit you against the same handful of enemy soldiers who wield guns and melee weapons, and they mostly amount to the typical dodging, light attacks, and heavy attacks recipe you’ll have seen in dozens of games before, only less polished. I played my entire run on the hardest difficulty and the AI is so stupid that the vast majority of the time I was able to fudge my way through battles by spamming the same set of attacks and effortlessly moving out of the way of highly telegraphed moves.
Whether you’re squatting behind crates or punching dumb minions, at least you’ll be able to enjoy Awakening’s best feature: mind-control powers. You can leap out of your body and into others with the press of a button, then use those dim meat puppets to carry out your twisted designs, including activating that unit’s special ability to wreak havoc on the environment or their fellow villains. For example, you can possess one of the big bruisers and use his ground pound ability near a cluster of his friends to deal a ton of damage, or you can take over one of the sniper enemies and have him shoot at a piece of surveillance equipment to make your stealth job easier.
As you progress, you’ll eventually be able to chain-possess multiple enemies in a row, instructing them to perform various misdeeds, then watch it all play out in slow motion, which can be a lot of fun. It’s not exactly revolutionary stuff and starts to grow a bit tiresome by the time you reach credits, but it’s definitely the most entertaining part of an otherwise disappointing adventure. Also, quite hysterically, if you start making your foes kill each other while remaining hidden nearby, they seem only vaguely aware that you’re messing with them and quickly go back to what they were doing – because, again, they are so very stupid. That’s definitely not a good thing, but it did at least crack me up with regularity.
If sloppy encounters and a weak story aren’t discouraging enough, Awakening also suffers from various performance issues, bugs, and general jankiness throughout. The framerate dipped on a regular basis while I was playing on a Ryzen 9/RTX 4090 PC, including during combat in moments that might get you killed. Haroona likes to get stuck on objects and bounce in place bizarrely, and cutscenes do this really weird thing where they jump abruptly between a bunch of shots that only last a couple seconds each, like they storyboarded the scene but never bothered finishing it. That last one is mostly kind of funny, but it also adds to a general lack of polish that makes an already subpar game feel even more feeble.
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