Unknown 9: Awakening Review - An Adventurer's Gamble

Bandai Namco has seen a number of successes by branching away from their usual fare. From Dark Pictures Anthology to Elden Ring, it’s clear the publisher has been trying to broaden their portfolio away from the anime-style Japanese games they’re known for.

That’s likely why they’ve teamed up with and acquired Canadian-based Reflector Entertainment for the release of Unknown 9: Awakening as part of a multimedia universe. Whilst the company is developing existing Bandai Namco IP, it was four years ago this specific game was announced as a new IP for the current generation.

At its core, Unknown 9: Awakening is a third-person action-adventure game – something we see a lot of these days. It has the benefit of being a new IP, but is that enough to prop it up against its contemporaries?

The answer to that question is a little complicated.

Unknown 9: Awakening kicks off with its protagonist Haroona – a world-weary girl with incredible powers who must learn to access another dimension known as the Fold. Her abilities brand her as a Quaestor, and as such puts her in the crosshairs of an undesirable group of people known as the Ascendants who plan to use the Fold to alter humanity’s path.

It’s a bit of a slow introduction, but it serves well to show us both Haroona, what she can do, and her mentor, who becomes someone important to the core of the story and the element of mystery throughout.

Haroona herself is curious but cautious, and she is a character who works best when paired with someone else she can bounce conversation off of. While Unknown 9: Awakening is undoubtedly her story, I found that it’s through her interactions with people she knows, or people she encounters on her journey are the parts that I enjoyed the most.

The overarching narrative isn’t necessarily original by any means, but the elements of the world and the world-building make up for some standard tropes and ideas – even if it does take some time to get going.

All of this is a wrapper for the action-adventure elements of Unknown 9: Awakening, which is the main course of gameplay here. You’ve got some basic combat options and abilities, but the big focus is on stealth mechanics.

Much of getting around is reliant on stealth unless you’d rather fight it out with the enemies scattered around, but in my experience, I found it best to avoid and trap them into defeat as much as I could.

Unknown 9: Awakening basically gives you the tools to mess around with enemies. Haroona can use her abilities to push them around from a distance using what’s known as Umbric energy, trigger explosive detonations, and even possess them for a limited amount of time with an ability called Stepping.

Many of these abilities stack up over time and have to be unlocked in the Skill Tree before you can access them. That’s all well and good, but it does feel a little vacant at the start for a good while and I found that aspect of the gameplay somewhat tedious.

Combat is a particular sticking point that doesn’t open up until you’ve expanded more of the Skill Tree, which happens over the course of the story. Upon spending those skill points, however, you can start to be more creative in Haroona’s approach to situations, including both stealth and combat scenarios.

The Skill Tree is a lot like it is in other games and here it’s accessed through breaches in the Fold known as Anomalies. Points known as Gnosis Points can be spent in three different categories: Stealth, Combat, and Umbric Abilities.

All three of these branches are important for Haroona’s growth, and once more possibilities are opened up to her, the gameplay feels a lot more fluid.

That said, I did feel like, even with those upgrades, the difficulty could ratchet up wildly depending on the situation. Normal enemies were mostly fine, but there are some tougher ones you can’t use certain abilities on, and then the difficulty curves even higher for the boss fights which require a lot of precision and use of all of Haroona’s skills to get past their gimmicks.

In that sense, there were a lot of frustrating moments, particularly with certain bosses that really could have stood to be tuned a bit more fairly.

The adventure aspect of Unknown 9: Awakening is a lot like your typical Uncharted game. Haroona spends a lot of time going through some linear paths, there’s some climbing, and inching along ledges. She can even use her abilities to down trees and create pathways.

There’s not that much in the way of exploration because of it. Yes, there are things like puzzles along the way, but they’re fairly straightforward.

There are also towns, but most of them just seem to serve as a backdrop for Haroona to get from point A to point B. She won’t be interacting with the people milling about unless they’re enemies.

On the presentation side of things, the visuals aren’t as spectacular as some rivals in the same genre, but Unknown 9: Awakening makes up for it with the variety of locations, architecture, colors, and overall art direction. The game has a lot of stunning vistas and there's a lot of enjoyment to be had from spending time taking them all in.

If I had one takeaway from my time with Unknown 9: Awakening, it’s that it largely feels like a game from 15 years ago. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and the developers have seemed to own that sentiment with everything they put together here.

While the game isn’t perfect, the difficulty has its issues and combat can be floaty at times, the mystery of the narrative and Haroona’s story and interactions with those around her give everything else enough agency to make up for those pitfalls. If anything, I’m now more interested to see what else they can get out of this expanded universe.

TechRaptor reviewed Unknown 9: Awakening on PlayStation 5 with a code provided by the developer over the course of 22 hours of gameplay. All screenshots were taken during the process of review.