‘Unavowed’ begins with an exorcism
Recently released for the Nintendo Switch, “Unavowed” is likely to have slipped most people’s radars, but if you’re a fan of the old-school, point-and-click, puzzle-adventure games with excellent narratives, it’s a title worth checking out.
“Unavowed” is a game that revolves around a supernatural detective agency in the same vein as the book and TV series “The Dresden Files.”
The game starts in the midst of a flashback and apparently during the exorcism of a demon. Bad news: You’re the one being exorcised.
Dialogue prompts during the ritual will create your character, which includes choosing a name, gender and profession. Your choices are police officer, actor or bartender, and the choice will determine your character’s origin and influence some of his or her abilities throughout the game. For example, choosing police officer will let you use police training (and the badge) to get more information; and being a bartender will get people to open up to you more.
The man exorcising you keeps hitting you with lightning, and then we enter a flashback scene, to one year earlier. Each origin story has its own introductory chapter — in the police officer origin, you are investigating a disturbance in a goth nightclub. There’s something fishy going on, as people’s memories seem to be getting messed with, and it turns out another police officer has been using the power of some book to influence people into thinking he’s a hero cop.
You take the book, but unfor
tunately that’s when a demon possesses you, and apparently this sets off a yearlong, bloody, murder-filled rampage across the city.
Flashback ends. The mysterious guy exorcising you turns out to be a fire mage named Eli, with a partner who is half-Jinn (think Genie from Aladdin — the partner lives in a bottle and everything).
From there, the game starts in earnest. Exorcism complete, you’re invited to join the ranks of the Unavowed, a group dedicated to protecting normal humans from the supernatural. Your old life is over, so now it’s time to find a new path, while hopefully tracking down the demon, which escaped during the exorcism.
As you investigate various supernatural disturbances around New York, you’ll take two partners with you, each of whom also has a unique set of skills. Every mission can be completed using any combination of companions, but each will accomplish it in different ways, or have different dialogue choices. For example, one companion, Logan, is a spiritual medium who can talk to ghosts and help them move on to their afterlife. But if Logan isn’t in your group, that whole aspect will be skipped, as no one else can see the ghosts.
Puzzles are also an integral part of the adventure game genre, and “Unavowed” is no exception. Hovering the cursor over the background will reveal information at the bottom of the screen, and sometimes, that background can be interacted with, such as grabbing a pair of scissors or a pipe, or messing with cables, cords and locks. Items can be collected in your inventory to be used later.
This leads to lots of close examination of the backgrounds, but that’s not a bad thing, because the pixel artwork is gorgeous, with high levels of detail.
The game is also fully (and competently) voice acted, with several hours of dialogue. While it’s a narrative-heavy genre, it’s also not necessarily a story on rails. “Unavowed” is great at making your choices matter — one of your first narrative choices early in the game has far-reaching consequences for the final chapter, for example, and the game is filled with times when characters will react in a way that’s been influenced by your earlier decisions.
The heyday of the adventure game was long ago, and it can be easy to overlook these kinds of games in an era when megastudios crank out slick titles that cost hundreds of millions to make every year.
Meanwhile, “Unavowed’s” creator, Wadjet Eye Games (based in New York, just like the game), is mostly a momand-pop operation. And if this game had come out in a different time, there’s no doubt it would hold a special place in game history, because it takes full advantage of the genre’s capabilities to tell a story that has heart and consequences.
A play-through of “Unavowed” will take about 10 hours — more if you want to experience the various dialogue, background and companion choices.