Unknown 9: Awakening is taking a swing. An absurdly ambitious multi-media push from Montreal studio Reflector Entertainment and Bandai Namco, the game is the flagship for a broader franchise effort that includes a celebrity lead, a trilogy of novels, a scripted audio drama, and a comic book series. First unveiled four years ago before a hibernation period and eventual return to Gamescom earlier this year, the Unknown 9 story world is primed with proper nouns, lore, and entries ready to dive into before the game’s launch in late October. You’d also be forgiven for having never heard of it.
Part of the wider problem new media faces in the current landscape is the absolute glut of options available to audiences at any given moment. When everyone and their dog is launching an IP or new franchise to fall in love with, there’s a flattening effect that creates noise instead of buzz. It can be exhausting and forgivably numbing, so when the preview for Unknown 9: Awakening came knocking, replete with new proper nouns and promises of a new world to love, I braced myself for more noise. Instead, I found a humble but enthusiastic game that gleefully plays with genre mechanics and tropes and is poised to be the sleeper AA hit of the year.
Unknown 9: Awakening marks yet another instance where we play as a sardonic young woman with a magical bracer at her disposal, picking up with Haroona in her pursuit of the man responsible for the death of a loved one who also happens to be heading up a country spanning invasion effort in the form of a paramilitary organisation. Played by The Witcher’s Anya Charlota, Haroona initially appears to be a fairly standard video game protagonist but already there are hints at a deeper portrait of a woman here and her struggles against the invading force form a decent backdrop for the game’s third-person action/stealth adventure.
Across the few hours spent with the game, I climbed, stealthed and struck my way through humble city streets and out into a denser jungle environment, marking an escalation of mechanics and enemy encounters as I went. Unknown 9: Awakening’s toybox is immediately familiar and, somewhat easily, dismissed as a Ubisoft-lite package. Haroona is a Quaestor, a person gifted with the ability to Step into the Fold, a reality that simmers just below ours and flows freely with immense fantastical power. For Haroona this places her squarely on collision course with a legion of soldiers as they conduct an inquisition against Quaestors, but for the player, it opens up a whole host of sick as shit gameplay possibilities.
We start small; Haroona needs to clear a courtyard or market of soldiers by crouching through tall grass and using environmental hazards for takedowns. As the guards mingle and loudly discuss nefarious plans, you use the Fold to “Peek” and enter the game’s Eagle/Detective mode and spy heat signatures through walls, and you feel right at home with what’s happening here. But then the game invites you to Step right into an enemy’s soul, freezing time for you to take full control of an NPC, piloting them to initiate attacks on fellow soldiers, stand next to an explosive barrel, or even walk clean off a ledge. Time resumes its flow, and your spirit returns to wherever you left your body and the chaos you conducted unfolds from the safety of your hiding spot.
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It’s a Godly ability that fundamentally shifts the vibe around what could have otherwise been a fairly rote stealth loop. Unknown 9: Awakening escalates the Step even further as it can be freely wielded even during combat; in a deeply entrenched jungle encampment, I had blown my cover and accidentally gone loud, leading to all Hell being unleashed on me. With a few light and heavy moves at my disposal, I kited and exchanged blows with foes but a heavy brute dogged my every move until the background math of the level design clicked into place. I Stepped into him, navigating him right into a burning oil spill before Stepping into a rifleman on a nearby ridge and placing a shot clean through his head. Whipping back to my body, I watched this man crumble beneath the combined damage and realised just how much fun Unknown 9: Awakening could be.
My time with Unknown 9: Awakening was full of these moments, small instances where system and player merged neatly to make for cascading “huh!” and “that’s cool” situations. The Fold can be used to “Shroud” Haroona, walking through the otherworldly plane right in front of enemies if you want, or after spending some Gnosis Points in one of the game’s several skill trees (combat, stealth etc), Haroona could summon a shield of Fold energy to block projectiles and push deeper into a level. Or that one time I realised I could turn into an ethereal cloud of particles right as a soldier loosed a shot and simply phased through the bullet to punch him in the face. How these abilities and situations evolved over the full game remains to be seen of course but having just come off the stripped-back stealth of Star Wars Outlaws, Unknown 9: Awakening winds up feeling like a much more accomplished game.
Conversely, and perhaps unsurprisingly, there is some signature AA crunchiness to contend with here. Combat is fairly functional and impactful enough but the camera lingers too closely on Haroona for comfort, especially during crowded scenarios and boss fights. And the overall level design will turn you around more than you’d like, signposting for progress murky amid some unpolished texture work and smudged colours. This is, to my mind, not remotely a deal breaker as the race to photorealistic fidelity has slowed development to a crawl and is producing diminishing returns. And while a preview build has time for last-minute polish, the game’s killer art direction can’t obscure its rougher visual edges.
These gripes fall away when I think back on the small touches Reflector have crammed into the game though, even in just my two hours with it. Haroona is a playful protagonist, her snarky rebukes infused with an underlying sincerity and clarity of purpose that makes her pairing with an old gunslinger from the West all the more compelling. In an inverted Uncharted, Haroona takes the lead in her own culture and world as the two traverse a fantasy-infused South Asian landscape, its heritage and beauty under threat from forces very explicitly riffing on colonisation and the march of industrialisation. The writing too sings between mandatory exposition; our aging gunslinger grumbles about not trusting machines and Haroona chides him on the silliness of his ways, later still he warns her that the ground in a cave is loose, “then step tightly” she fires back.
In our first preview of Unknown 9: Awakening we theorised that the game could provide players with the kind of inventive, game-first systems focus not properly seen since the prime days of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Having spent a few hours poking at the edges of it, I’m thrilled to say this hope is alive and well, as the game taps right into that familiar sense of joy and discovery we associate with stealth titles that really want to let the player just play. The world surrounding ghe game, the books and podcasts, may or may not find its footing but Haroona’s mystical skills, sharp tongue, and compelling fantasy landscapes seem worth knowing.
Unknown 9 Awakening releases on October 18th for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. The cheapest copy is currently $79 from Amazon.
