Dave Gilbert’s Wadjet Eye Games have come a very long way. Despite sticking to the Adventure Game Studio and its aged and hard to work with tools, they’ve managed to both create and help create some of the most refreshing and innovative point and click adventures over the past 12 years. And while they have published some good games, I always preferred Dave’s own approach to designing adventures, which often favored dialogue and good storytelling over puzzles. And Unavowed may be the most interesting take at adventure games I’ve seen since the “golden age”. Or ever.
Imagine mixing the best parts of a story focused point and click adventure game with the best parts of a story-driven RPG (most notably BioWare titles) and you can figure out what Unavowed wants to be. You can select your character gender and one of several backstories, which constantly come into play during the main story and affect several character interactions. You are constantly presented with choices that will affect the ending parts of the game. And you select 2 people, out of a growing team of companions with unique abilities, to join your “squad” when going on “missions”, which changes how you approach problems during the mission. If after reading this you need a better confirmation that Dragon Age: Origins influenced the design of the game, you probably haven’t played a BioWare game before. But hey, play Unavowed with developer commentary on and the confirmation will be there.
Most surprising of all – this feels so… natural. A perfect fit for an adventure game. Though, come to think of it, this should not be surprising, really, given how lots of these elements were originally taken from standout features of classic adventure titles (like the Three trials from Monkey Island 2, which BioWare constantly used in their design for a long time). It’s just shocking that no one has tried to do this before and “return” the adventure game concepts back into adventure games.
The flow of the game is wonderful. There’s always just enough necessary scenes and dialogue for you to understand what is happening and why, and lots of optional interactions to expand on that and help you get invested in the characters and the story further. There’s charming companion character banter which could only be better if it didn’t cut at scene transitions (a most likely technical limitation). There’s non-linear approach to most problems and a lot of “missions” can be taken in any order. Characters are fantastic and occasional little connections with the Blackwell series (this is the same universe) are welcome, yet not distracting. And missions themselves tend to run just the right amount of time to properly tell their stories and cover all the right points. Which, together with lots of variability in player choice, leads to replaying the game multiple times not growing boring. I did it 3 times and still saw a lot of little meaningful differences based on my choices each playthrough.
Even visually and sound-wise the game is solid, though here we start getting into some less exciting elements. Game does look good (and can run at 4K), and there are some terrific animated sequences. But even without listening to the commentary it’s obvious, that a lot of these little details and animations were very hard to achieve in AGS, hence why there aren’t as many of those as the game clearly wanted to have. They did really well with what they had, however. Which isn’t always true with the voice acting. While mostly really solid, it does have some low points, most notable of which is that some of the VAs clearly didn’t have a chance to record their lines in a proper recording environment so their sound quality is noticeably worse than that of the rest of the team. Apart from this, I can think of a puzzle that was presented in a bit unclear way and a few moments when game needed one too many actions to solve a simple issue. Also, just as with Blackwell games, while I do admire the tone of the writing in the game, it often borders the amateurish tone. I personally find this endearing, but wouldn’t be surprised at someone having some difficulty adjusting and taking the game seriously. Thankfully, the opening of the game is really well written, so it should be easy to get interested right away.
I highly recommend playing Unavowed, since as with Blackwell series, the more you play it, the more it grows on you. It’s a fantastic story driven adventure title that manages to reinvent adventure games without actually reinventing anything. Instead, it understands what works in adventure games and stories best and leaves everything that doesn’t work behind. And it knows how to channel the inspirations from other games into creating something new and exciting.