Wadjet Eye Unavowed - Dave Gilbert's RPG-inspired urban fantasy game

[Alpan]

Hell, I remember picking up Dave's early titles from the IndieRoyale bundle years ago, got Blackwell 1-3, & Gemini Rue for a pittance. After languishing in my steam library for a while, I finally got around to playing them and came away really impressed; Dave earned day 1 purchases from me on all his future titles based on the strength of those titles alone. Seeing the series' art style evolve into the edifying beauty that was Epiphany over the next few years was something to behold. It'll be a sad day if WE ever loses that style.

This is exactly the same way I got started on WEG. Gemini Rue was a pretty big deal back in 2011.

 

[fantadomat]

Speaking of good games,did you play whispers of a machine? I do hope that it sold well and we will see a sequel,pretty decent game .

Yes, I quite liked it. Primordia's coder, Dualnames particularly loved it.

Shame that it was that short.

 

[WallaceChambers]

And yet, the way I remember playing it, it was significantly harder than Unavowed. I was actually mildly stuck in some places.

The only "difficult" parts of Blackwell Legacy are clumsy puzzles like the dog leash (which I actually thought was pretty neat just for actually using movement). It's harder than Unavowed, but not by much. Legacy is still one of the easiest adventure games I've ever played and I use it as an example to show that Dave has a history of eschewing traditional puzzles. The Shivah and Unbound are easier than Unavowed. So I'd say Unavowed is in the middle of the pack for his games, challenge wise.

 

[MRY]

By the way, another fun tidbit from my exchange with Dave a decade ago -- his plan at the time was to shift to RPGs ("a Fallout-like role playing game set in a 1930s prohibition era city, with gangsters and such"). In another reality, adventure games didn't pan out, and Dave delivered a Codexian dream game!

 

[ERYFKRAD]

a Fallout-like role playing game set in a 1930s prohibition era city, with gangsters and such"

Basically New Reno

 

[taxalot]

I could not help myself.

 

[MRY]

Game recognize game.

 

[HorribleHombre]

My hero.

 

[Boleskine]

taxalot, you should ask Dave if he still has RPGCodex blocked in his browser.

 

[fantadomat]

My hero.

So......have you played Unavowed?

 

[HorribleHombre]

My hero.

So......have you played Unavowed?

Yes. It was fine, pretty much what I expected. Definitely had its flaws. Definitely not the "best adventure game ever made." Glad to see people calling that out for a change.

 

[Boleskine]

 

[Morality Games]

My hero.

So......have you played Unavowed?

Yes. It was fine, pretty much what I expected. Definitely had its flaws. Definitely not the "best adventure game ever made." Glad to see people calling that out for a change.

Best adventure game ever is definitely a stretch, but it does feel like a game that was struggling to push the genre forward in a two steps forward, two steps back sort of way. It doesn't really succeed, but the presence of actual creative effort is tangible and adds a lot of value to the experience.

 

[HorribleHombre]

Sure, you can tell a lot of effort went into it. But it didn’t do anything new or innovative, and not just for the genre: Gilbert has been making the same game (urban fantasy in New York) for years. It was more of the same, just with higher production values.

 

[Daedalos]

dis worth getting?

 

[V_K]

Depends. If you just want some nice interactive story to click through - sure. If you want gameplay, no.

 

[taxalot]

Play the Blackwell series if you haven't.
Unavowed is inferior in every regards.

 

[Tigranes]

No. There's not much of an adventure game or any kind of game. The Codex LP is basically the playing experience.

 

[fantadomat]

dis worth getting?

It depends,if you feel like gay raping men....sure.

 

[Darkozric]

My honest opinion on wadjet eye games is that they're overrated as fuck... Heavy emphasis on dialogue/story, poor gameplay and brain-dead puzzles. (hell, even the stories are boring). It is well known that Dave Gilbert is the leader of the storyfag crowd (I used to call him fake Ron Gilbert). Plus, you know when a developer is a butthurt when he's crying on his page for some negative criticism.

His games are very bad and tasteless poor imitations of Lucas Arts games without the spark/soul of the good old diamonds... The irony here is that his retarded fanbase consider him the "savior of adventure genre"...LOL
The only game I liked is Resonance.

 

[Daedalos]

Well I'm a massive storyfag so.. maybe its for me

 

[Darth Roxor]

its a game for people who like shit games so maybe its for you indeed

 

[Daedalos]

its a game for people who like shit games so maybe its for you indeed

I'm coming to Poland right now, and you can say that to my face.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

I replayed this recently, and I have to say that my impression of it was significantly more negative than when I played it at release. I think I called it a 7.5 earlier in this thread, but I would amend that to a 4 after the second playthrough. As I've said earlier in the thread the game has a lot going for it for me: Nice art and atmosphere, very high production values for a modern PnC, and I quite like the setting (and urban fantasy in general), but the game has, as wiser Codexers before me have noted, two major problems: Puzzle Design and Writing.
The Puzzle Design I knew going in for a second playthrough was very basic, but I came into it this time after having just replayed DotT, and the gap between the two was so stark that it basically made me realize that Unavowed just fundamentally doesn't have any gameplay. Ostensibly the two share similarities: Both use the UI of classic PnC (DoTT being in the Lucasarts vein, Unavowed using the more simplified late Sierra UI), both feature multiple controllable characters, and both tout themselves as having a large degree of non-linearity (which is... kind of a total lie in Unavowed's case), but whereas DotT has actual puzzles that require thought and experimentation, Unavowed plays like a Visual Novel with almost no C&C wrapped in a PnC UI. Edit: There was actually one puzzle that I thought was decent (finding the battery from the hula doll) at first. It had been lightly foreshadowed by Vicky before I needed to find it, and while I thought the solution was fairly obvious, it was a step up from the previous puzzles. Then Vicky immediately told me I should go get the battery from the hula doll. I facepalmed.
The other problem is with the writing, and I'm not sure why this wasn't more glaring to me on my initial playthrough. Most of the game is actually fairly decently scripted. I liked Elliot and Mandana fine. Downtown and Chinatown are decent. Sure, there's some cringey stuff here and there (Vicky, the sex scene), but whatever, I could forgive that if the rest of the game was solid. The big problem here is the twist. It's fucking awful. It doesn't make any sense, and it actively makes the game dumber than it would be if it didn't exist. It turns the villain into a cartoonishly evil mustache twirler while simultaneously turning their plan into an overly-complicated nonsensical "I'm going to make an evil place by doing evil things because I'm evil and I like evil and I want a place where I can do evil and be evil." Most Bond villains have more coherent thought-through plans. It's so fucking dumb, and I don't understand how even people playing the game solely for its narrative can derive satisfaction from it. The twist just reeks of someone of unexceptional talent thinking they're far more clever than they are and deciding they're going to make grandiose insights about the nature of mankind. I repeat: the game would more narratively satisfying if the twist just didn't happen and the story played out the same as for the first half of the game. Blech.

 

[HorribleHombre]

I think this game does an excellent job of making it seem like there's variety based on choices, but when you actually go back and replay it, it becomes pretty obvious that there aren't any significant changes beyond the origins and some of the puzzles. Slightly more variety than a Telltale game, but only slightly.

That's why most positive reviews always say they want to go back and replay it, but you very rarely hear from anyone who actually has.