Unknown 9: Awakening

This game does deliver an engaging action adventure, but it curtails its potential at every turn, literally. It's death from a thousand paper cuts. The story and world-building are basically strong but they are riddled with gaps. You are expected to care about the characters but are given virtually no reason to feel anything at all about them. Even the protagonist's motivations are unclear. The game is brutally linear. On the one hand it encourages you to explore and find the collectibles, but open the wrong door and you can't return to previous area. You'll find yourself constantly guessing which way is the "right" way in order to make sure you go to the "wrong" ways first. Many times I guessed incorrectly and missed a collectible that I knew I could get. It's not a fatal flaw, but it sure is annoying. There's a lot of focus on combat, and while there are some cool tactical mechanics, the controls make the experience quite unpleasant. The camera does not cooperate and actions are unbearably unresponsive. There were many times in which I very explicitly pressed the button to heal but instead Haroona decided to turn invisible, completely derailing my plans and plunging me into chaos. I would groan every time I encountered enemies. The presentation is very uneven. There are some beautiful scenes, but the characters and their animations are quite janky. Performance is all over the place and it's challenging to dial in settings that would result in a smooth framerate. There's potential here and I think this game could have been good with more effort put into story and character development, more playtesting of its combat and exploration, and more effort put in polishing the presentation. As it stands it's more frustrating than fun. Disappointing.

I wanted to give this a Yes, but the first boss fight made me stop playing. Basically, i liked the game, even though it was to linear for my tastes. But the Boss fight was not only tedious, but glitched every single time, so i could not progress.

+++ Interesting and well-built story and world. +++ Great actor performances. +++ Fulfilling stealth mechanics. --- Clunky overabundance of controls. --- Combat is a punishment, not a reward. --- Jarringly difficult boss fights. --- Poor graphical optimization, resulting in stutters and frame drops. This title could have benefited from lowering its ambitions, as it becomes obvious early on that it bit off more than it could chew. Even though it's a world that's inviting and full of adventurous promise, the effect soon falls flat as one goes from one enemy arena to another in a repetitive cadence, dispatching foes one by one through stealth if possible, and forced into combat when stealth fails - or when the plotline demands it. The lore and the worldbuilding are largely relegated to collectibles and shoved into a journal that makes it feel like optional reading, leaving only surface-level exposés delivered by characters who appear only for a brief moment before fading into the background - or disappearing entirely. It's a crying shame because the potential is visible, and it would have been wholly realized had a more relaxed approach been taken. As it stands now however, one is sent tumbling through a seemingly endless series of similar encounters before finding out too late that this was all a stairway to nowhere.

This is one of the most frustrating games I have ever played! Whether AA or not, this game has many inexcusable design flaws that cause all these annoyances. For example, on medium difficulty, your character has very little HP. Healing is weak and uses the same energy as your special attacks! This is a terrible idea. In many open fights, you die almost immediately, and you can't do anything because there's not enough energy for healing or disengaging. Either the developers were not very clever, didn't play this game themselves, or they did it on purpose to artificially extend this very short game. There are more problems with the combat system. The combo attack pull + heavy attack sometimes doesn't work because your character misses the heavy attack for some reason. Movement is very clunky; your character takes too long to start running, but the game requires dynamic reactions from you. In many cases during open combat, this is simply impossible and feels really frustrating. In short, avoid open combat — or better yet, avoid this game completely! There are also stutters, even on a strong PC that can run this game at 100 fps easily. The final chapter is an unnecessarily long series of fights against enemies that we have encountered many times before. The area from the epilogue is actually really beautiful. At least there's this one positive thing at the end. It's strange, because the art style of this game is generally not especially interesting. To summarise, it was a very deserved flop.

Beautiful game with a beautiful story, relatable characters and companions, nice graphics, great combat mechanics, great music and good dialogues. I saw reviews complaining about the combat mechanics. I honestly liked them, you can do fun things once you get used to the controls. The game is a little rough around the edges and has some minor design flaws, but you'll get over that. Give it a go, you won't regret it.

Was the narrative captivating? No. But was the combat responsive? Also no. But was the main character attractive? Not really. But did the graphics look good? Again, no. But would I play more of this game? Also no.

A charming and fun adventure game, that suffers from having a janky prologue/tutorial chapter and lack of post launch support. The characters are memorable, the voice acting really good, the locations beautiful, the combat fun and creative (once you get out of the prologue and start getting better abilities and work on unlocking the skill tree). I'm glad I've read the top review for this or I likely would have been defeated by the first half an hour as well, not knowing it gets much better. The story is a typical treasure hunting adventure, but a lot of thought has been put into the lore of the universe and every collectible comes with a flavour text. If you can look past the fact that it's been abandoned by the publisher and some minor bugs then you will have a good time. Also the shadow cosmetic is so pretty <3

I'm in Chapter 9 of 13 now and trying to get all achievements, including collectibles, and in my opinion, the game isn't as bad as the reviews suggest. It has an interesting story, a bit of Indiana Jones and Tomb Raider. Lore is even more interesting. Combat skills are quite unique. There are some drawbacks. The save system doesn't practically exist. The game saves the chapter and collectibles, but not the objectives, like transponders in Chapter 4. If you want to end gaming session, do it at the beginning of a new chapter. Collectibles are sometimes difficult to find, but the game tells you how many there are in the chapter. There are certain skills that make it easier. Combat isn't that easy even on easy difficulty :-) especially the boss fights – thankfully, not so many of them. Our heroine is ugly, aaaaa, but her chauvinistic jokes made me laugh one or two times. Another negative surprise, what is "Sweet Jesus" doing in the game, this Christian demigod of miserable life but meaningful, sacrificial death? But as I'm already quite deep into the plot, I probably found the answer by wondering whether his Satan has been put deep in the "spoiler". Even in the 21st century, the Church hates science and "protects" us from magic. Does magic even exist? Maybe we don't know something?

Just beat this game, and honestly... I liked it, and I know we're NOT going to get a sequel... but I'd be interested in one, personally. A little buggy here and there, controls are a tad clunky / slow, and combat can be a little frustrating when anyone can break you out of a move you're doing, and when there's 6 people around you attacking at the same time... kind of annoying. But later in the game, it's nearly a non-issue because you get way stronger, especially if you collect all the "anomalies". For $10 to $20, I think it's well worth it.

got free with my gpu like 2 years ago, regret buying my gpu because of this game