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

[fantadomat]

Can't speak to political tastes, and I haven't played Shardlight. Everyone seems to like Blackwell though!

Blackwell are really good games,well written with great art. Technobabylon is pretty good also Gemini Rue is good. Should try them out if you haven't.

 

[MRY]

Yep, played them. Technobabylon is another writer/designer (James Dearden) as is Gemini Rue (Joshua Nuernberg). It seems like if TB's politics didn't bother you, Unavowed shouldn't either.

 

[fantadomat]

Yep, played them. Technobabylon is another writer/designer (James Dearden) as is Gemini Rue (Joshua Nuernberg). It seems like if TB's politics didn't bother you, Unavowed shouldn't either.

Politics don't bother me if they are well made and written in the game. They bother me when they are hamfisted and onesided. Seeing how shit the current political situation is,i would wager that they will be shit in the game too.

 

[Boleskine]

 

[Cromwell]

I just realized I will have my days off when it comes out.

 

[bertram_tung]

5 days bitches

Dave, can you send me an early copy for this weekend? I'll send you some good wine

 

[Boleskine]

 

[Cromwell]

Does anybody know when this will release, as in Midnight 7/8.8 or sometime on the 8.?

 

[DaveGilbert]

Sometime in the morning EST. Probably around 9:30am.

 

[Cromwell]

Sometime in the morning EST. Probably around 9:30am.

Dammit Thats about 4 pm where Im from. All my hopes for a nightly nerding session tomorrow vanished.

 

[Anthedon]

I'll probably get this on GoG since that's where all my other Wadjet Eye games are housed. Does GoG release at the same time as Steam?

 

[Anthedon]

It's out:

https://af.gog.com/game/unavowed?as=1649904300

 

[HoboForEternity]

installing

cant play tonight, but will tomorrow after werkz

 

[visions]

Does this still use AGS or some other engine?

 

[MRY]

Still in AGS.

I will let DaveGilbert come in and share the specifics himself, but reviews are off-the-charts positive. RPS says it's one of the best point-and-clicks of all time and Adventure Gamers calls it an instant classic.

For laughs, though, I will share the end of the COG Gamer review: "Unavowed is worth a play if you’re interested in the genre, and Wadjet Eye Studios might just be a team worth watching for the future."

 

[HoboForEternity]

Still in AGS.

I will let DaveGilbert come in and share the specifics himself, but reviews are off-the-charts positive. RPS says it's one of the best point-and-clicks of all time and Adventure Gamers calls it an instant classic.

For laughs, though, I will share the end of the COG Gamer review: "Unavowed is worth a play if you’re interested in the genre, and Wadjet Eye Studios might just be a team worth watching for the future."

terrific news. Kinda makes me feel guilty for not trying ot immediately :D

But i need those REM else i dont function at work. Kinda afraid if i just dive in tonight i wont be able to stop till late in the morning hahaha

 

[Trash]

Just played through the introduction. Artwork is awesome. Animation is less but functional. Story is intriguing so far and starts out quite heavy. Atmosphere and all. Curious to see what else there is there to see. Especially as it seems like there might be some real reactivity here. Voice acting is, well, okayish. Music so far is nice. Anyway, game costs less than a halfway decent meal. It obviously lacks the production values of the great Lucasarts adventures of the past. It does however seem to have a genuine soul. Get it and see for yourself.

And did I just went through an actual character creation scene?

 

[MRY]

By the way, I feel like this is a real "passing of the torch" moment when you consider that Unavowed has launched to huge and overwhelmingly favorable press coverage, and Hero-U hardly registered. If the player numbers bear out, I suspect we'll see many more people playing Unavowed than played Hero-U. Five years ago, I would've talked about the Coles bringing Dave onto a project; today, it would be the opposite. (As with Phoenix Online lifting up Jane Jensen with Moebius.) I think it's fair to say that the indie/AGS adventure scene big figures like Dave now loom larger than the once-famed Sierra developers. Lucas Arts is still probably ahead of WEG, but I don't know -- I'm curious to see how Unavowed (a forward-looking game helmed by a new generation developer) does in comparison to Thimbleweed Park (a retro game helmed by an old generation developer).

I really can't say enough how impressive it is that Dave built WEG from scratch, has released like a dozen games selling millions of copies, and now has Unavowed -- all in a genre that everyone insisted was dead. Kind of mind-boggling. I would maybe put Jeff Vogel in the same category, but not sure who else.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/08/08/wot-i-think-unavowed/

Wot I Think: Unavowed

Unavowed is unquestionably one of the most impressive point and click adventures made in many, many years. It’s of a scale I wasn’t at all expecting, with layer upon layer of complexity and variety in a way the genre has genuinely never seen before. It’s also a darned fine yarn of demonic battling across the streets of New York, that tells its story in a way that owes as much to BioWare RPGs as it does traditional adventure gaming.

The Unavowed are a team of human and non-human people who, for hundreds of years, have fought behind the scenes to control demonic and other-realmly activity. In recent times such naughtiness has calmed, and the Unavowed has all but disappeared from public consciousness, their own numbers dwindling. Until recently. It seems that all sorts of trouble is brewing in New York City, and, well, it might be all your fault.



Things begin with an immediate abundance of choice. During a yelled interrogatory exorcism on a rooftop, you are given choices as part of your struggle to be saved from whatever is going on. Here you can choose to play as male or female, and while this decision has no impact on what your character does or is treated, your chosen background certainly does. You can be an actor, police officer or bartender, and which you choose not only gives you a unique introduction, but affects how you can approach various incidents throughout the game, and indeed locations available at key moments. It goes even further, impacting your relationships with other main characters, changing how people react to your past actions, and on and on.

The career you choose shows you one of three possible beginnings, each a unique detailed story, but each showing how your character, a year ago, came to be possessed by a demonic force. This complete, you jump back to the present day and the exorcism is completed – you’re freed of the demon. But unfortunately not of the consequences. Over the last year, you and your host have done… terrible things. Really shockingly terrible, in some cases. And now, joining forces with the Unavowed who just saved you, it’s time to start trying to put things back to as close as right as you can. And on the way, you make very many more choices that continue to have a significant impact on how the tale plays out.



The key to all this variety is companionship. Unavowed’s sole writer, Dave Gilbert (known for the Blackwell series), announced that he was intending to liberally borrow ideas from BioWare’s RPGs, which at the time I thought sounded like a nice idea, but, you know, not actually possible. BioWare has a team of 400 billion people making their games. One guy, as talented as he might be, wasn’t going to be able to pull off the same, even in a much more limited fashion. Well, he showed me.

At the start of each of Unavowed’s chapters, numbers of them playable in your chosen order, you select two companions from a pool of four. And the two you choose really quite significantly changes how you approach the elaborate and lengthy subplots. If you take Logan for instance, a “bestower” with the ability to see and communicate with ghosts, you’ll be able to – well, see and communicate with ghosts. If instead you choose Vicki, a cop, then you’ll simply never know there were ghosts in the story, never learn information from them, and definitely not free them from whatever it is that ties them to this realm. Because instead you’ll have access to a whole load of other puzzles and approaches that you’d never have known about if you’d picked Logan. The same goes for lacking Mandana’s athleticism and very sharp sword, or Eli’s fire mage abilities. But this goes even further!



Oftentimes characters will have personal connections to the particular story, and while on occasion it will force a particular plot beat to be seen by making narrative excuses to switch in a companion, oftentimes it won’t, meaning the emotional impact of a chapter can be significantly affected by who’s with you.

And then, good gravy, what you choose to do in each subplot goes on to affect things further! Alongside the companions, Unavowed also learns a lot from BioWare’s ethical quandaries, facing you with incredibly difficulty decisions to make to resolve complicated situations. And very pleasingly, these aren’t choices that are throw a dilemma at you out of nowhere, but rather are influenced by the conversations you’ve had, the companions you have with you at the time, and indeed your own personal proclivities. Sometimes there’s no choice that feels even close to right, and making them feels genuinely important. An import that bears fruit as things progress.



So, I should say, I wouldn’t have voiced all this enthusiasm after what one could call the mid-point. (It’s actually about a third of the way in, because the second act is hugely longer than the first.) It’s immediately brilliant with its writing, its superb story, its outrageously beautiful artwork, voice acting from a huge cast, and the neat idea of having “look at” be just a mouseover, with the description at the bottom of the screen. But when it comes to the adventuring, it’s… simplistic is a generous term. A little too often it’s more about changing location and having the conversations, rather than solving any actual puzzles, and those that are there are very easy. I was thoroughly enjoying playing, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was lacking the ingenuity the genre really requires.

And then came the second “half”, and everything came together. Suddenly it was far more involved, with some really great puzzles in there, many of them extended set-pieces unique to a situation. I especially enjoyed a single-mission conceit where I could, at a certain point, transfer between the ethereal ghost world, and the regular one, to solve a series of challenges. And I especially loved that the ghost accompanying me on this had quite so many unique lines of dialogue to respond to my forgetting I couldn’t open doors while in the spirit world. (I wish I could claim I just kept deliberately clicking to see if I could exhaust them, but, no, I did just keep forgetting, making her exasperation with me all the funnier.)



I didn’t like every character. But then, that’s how life works, I suppose. I found Logan insufferably simpering and one-note, even though I would often want to bring him along to play out the ghost angles. And I think Vicki is a little under-realised when compared to the rest of the cast. But honestly, that it’s possible to pick at the game like this raises it above the average adventure in the first place.

There are, undeniably, a couple of dud puzzles in there. (Once you’ve played it you can come back and agree with me about how terrible “LEGS” was as a clue.) But in the main your companions will prompt you if you ask them to, and I never found myself resorting to “click everything on everything”, or anything close. Where there are other issues with the game, there really only because of the scope of its ambition.

For instance, companions have conversations between themselves, which add a lot of colour and detail, alongside personality. Again, thank you BioWare. The issue is they don’t continue their chats after a non-significant screen change, meaning to hear them you’re mostly required to sit still and do nothing in a scene until they’re done. Just going through a door, or walking down the street, sees them cut off, and you’ll never hear it again. It’s a bit of a shame, and means they’re too frequently skipped. Also, occasionally you can see the workings a little overtly – something on the screen that you mysteriously can’t interact with, which you know would be a plot device if you’d another companion with you. Tiny details. The bigger thought that plagued me as I played this utterly superb game was slightly more esoteric…



If Unavowed had been released in the early ’90s, it would be remembered today as one of the all-time classics of the adventure genre, lauded for its innovations with the form, referenced as an inspiration for games still being made today. Unavowed, however, was released today, looking like and feeling like a hark back to the glorious past of the genre, and that makes for a very different reception. A contradiction I find very fascinating.

Gilbert’s chosen medium of Adventure Game Studio, and its 1990s-strewn aesthetics, means that while his games have consistently been of an enormously high standard, they’re also semiotically weighed down with a sense of nostalgia and artifice. They look like games that were made 30 years ago, and whether that’s because of a preference for the art style, a belief that budget restraints demand it, a fondness for cherished memories, whatever, it makes it incredibly difficult for them to be received and indeed perceived as brand new creations.

No matter how many brilliant innovations Gilbert has included here, no matter how much he’s taken the point and click adventure into spaces that absolutely no one else has ever tried or managed before, it still feels like a throwback to the past, rather than a step forward into the future. Which is why, I contend, this won’t be recognised as the all-time genre classic that it definitely is!



Such musings aside, Unavowed is a remarkable thing. It’s not exactly common that one finishes a narrative-driven adventure game and thinks, “I want to play that again straight away!” But I’m absolutely dying to set off again with a different career, pick different companions for missions, make different moral choices (wrong ones, clearly), and experience the vast swathes of voiced dialogue, the perspectives on the smaller and larger stories, I won’t have heard my first time through. Ghosts I never met, buildings I never saw climbed, consequences I never knew. I think this is testament to the extraordinary work of a one-man writing team – it’s quite the incredible feat.

Which is not to omit mentioning Ben Chandler’s art and animation, which is his finest yet – quite the accolade for anyone who’s followed his pixel artistry over the years. Then there’s the portrait art by Ivan Ulyanov, and the atmosphere-completing music by Thomas Regin. With some extra programming from Janet Gilbert, somehow that’s the entire production team namechecked.



This is an epic. A huge, ridiculously detailed adventure, that successfully borrows one of the most complex and complicating features of BioWare RPGs without screwing it up! In fact, it makes the character detail in every other adventure look sorely lacking, and raises the bar so much I expect most others will just pretend Wadjet Eye didn’t do it. Absolutely get your hands on this, and if you’re hesitating because the whole “retro” approach puts you off, make the exception in this case. It’s worth it.

Unavowed is out today on Windows and Mac, via GOG and Steam

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/unavowed-review/

UNAVOWED REVIEW

If you’ve ever woken up after a wild night out and cringed as a friend recounted every embarrassing thing you did, you’ll resonate with Unavowed. Except the main character didn’t drink too many Caipirinhas at happy hour and get thrown out of a club for being sick on the dancefloor: they were possessed by a demon who used their body to go on a murderous rampage across New York City.

Unavowed begins as the demon is being forcibly extracted from you on a rain-lashed rooftop. In this dramatic intro you decide whether you’re playing as a man or a woman and choose from three backgrounds—actor, cop, or bartender—each of which has its own origin story and unlocks unique dialogue options later in the story.

This is one example of how Unavowed seasons its familiar point-and-click adventure template with light role-playing elements. I love it, because you rarely get to choose who you play as in these games, but it does take some getting used to. Whether it’s Guybrush Threepwood, George Stobbart, or Manny Calavera, graphic adventures are often defined by strong lead characters. Here the protagonist feels much more like a blank cipher for the player.

Shortly after the exorcism you join a secret paranormal police force called the Unavowed. For thousands of years they’ve been protecting the ‘mundanes’ (regular, non-magical people) from ghosts, demons, monsters, and other threats. Work had dried up lately, but your possession sparks a surge of supernatural events that give the Unavowed more work than they’ve had in decades.

In another example of genres colliding, you can choose which Unavowed members to take on a mission with you, essentially forming a party. They have conversations with each other and give you hints about what to do next, but more practically, you can use their powers to help you solve puzzles and bypass obstacles. Eli, for example, is a mage who can conjure up fire, while Mandana, a Jinn, wields a sword. I can’t give specific examples for fear of ruining puzzle solutions, but one involving a sprinkler system was particularly clever.

At first you don’t remember what you—or, rather, that pesky demon—did while you were possessed. But as you retrace your steps, meet survivors, and discover clues about your past, the blanks are filled in. The anthology-like structure works really well, because you’re never quite sure what kind of bizarre, paranormal weirdness each mission will throw at you, but there’s also a larger, well-told story connecting everything to give it some thematic consistency.

Unavowed is also incredibly atmospheric. The shadowy, rain-soaked streets of New York provide an evocative backdrop for its urban fantasy, and the marriage of the everyday with the supernatural is classily done. The detailed background art by Wadjet Eye regular Ben Chandler are the highlight, with tasteful, considered use of light and shadow making the city ooze dark mystery. Throw in a jazzy, downbeat film noir soundtrack and you have a world that’s very easy to get lost in.

Between missions you can explore the Unavowed’s headquarters and have long, revealing conversations with your companions, which reminds me a lot of Commander Shepard and their interactions with the crew of the Normandy in Mass Effect. There’s a lot of dialogue, all of which is voiced except for the protagonist, who remains mute throughout. The characters are nuanced and interesting, and have backstories that are genuinely worth uncovering.

Puzzles are mostly the usual point-and-click fare, but a bit smarter and less obtuse than I’ve come to expect from the genre. More than once I felt a surge of satisfaction for divining the solution to something that wasn’t immediately obvious, and any adventure game that gives me that feeling is doing something right. Some require slight leaps of logic that adventure-trained brains will be used to, but most of the time you just have to be observant, paying attention to clues and dialogue, which makes the cop origin story feel like a neat fit.

Unavowed is another fantastic adventure from Wadjet Eye, and it’s great to see studio founder Dave Gilbert back in the saddle. The humour didn’t always land for me and some of the voice acting is a little iffy, but otherwise this is a fine example of a modern point-and-click adventure. The addition of character customisation and companions doesn’t sound like much, but it massively changes the feel of the game, even if other aspects, such as the puzzles, are still steeped in the past. The next time you wake up with a sore head and no memory of the night before, be thankful you didn’t leave a trail of death in your wake.

THE VERDICT
80

UNAVOWED
An atmospheric, well-designed adventure elevated by borrowing elements from role-playing games.

 

[fantadomat]

Sooo how much sjw there is in the game? I see a lot of diversity in the screenshot. I skimmed trough the first 30 minutes on YT and the only white dude is a Swedish cuck.

 

[taxalot]

Fantadomat.

Stop posting.

All you ever say is shit.

 

[fantadomat]

LoL,ask a simple question about the game and butthurt faggots come in drive. Yeah,more power to you fags,enjoy sucking your diverse dicks while reading all those shill posts.

 

[moraes]

Installing my diverse dick sucking simulator!

 

[taxalot]

"wow there are non-white characters not portrayed as terrorists I guess this game appeals to SJW cucks"