As the games maker continues to get flooded with massive AAA experiences that demand dozens upon dozens of hours of your time, it’s always refreshing to cross paths with a linear, focused, story-driven AA experience- and that’s exactly what Bandai Namco and developer Reflector Entertainment’s upcoming Unknown 9: Awakening is promising. Announced quite a while back, the action-adventure title is finally approaching its release, ahead of which, here, we’ll be going over some key details you should know to prepare you for what the game will have in store.
UNKNOWN 9 UNIVERSE
Unknown 9: Awakening is technically a new IP, of course, but as Bandai Namco and Reflector Entertainment have stressed on a number of occasions, it’s also part of a larger multimedia franchise, spanning books, comics, and more. The game itself is, however, going to tell a standalone story, focusing on protagonist Haroona, played by Anya Chalotra of The Witcher fame. Haroona possesses unique supernatural abilities that allow her to tap and venture into the Fold, a mysterious dimension that overlaps the real world. That sets her on a path to uncover hidden, long lost knowledge, though not, as it turns out, without consequences.
STORY DETAILS
In Unknown 9: Awakening, Haroona is going to have to contend with a villainous group known as the Ascendants, a splinter faction of the Leap Year Society, which itself is a group that aims to uncover forbidden knowledge to help hasten human advancement and progress. The Ascendants, however, have nefarious goals of their own, with plans of using knowledge taken from the Fold for the purposes of altering human history, and in doing so, messing with powers that they do not understand. Haroona, who has the ability to tap into the Fold, catches the Ascendants’ attention, kicking things into motion, while she and her companions also know that they are the only ones who can stop the Ascendants.
COMBAT DETAILS
Combat will take a couple of different forms in Unknown 9: Awakening, with players being given a few different options in how to approach situations. Your most basic, straightforward approach will be to engage in melee combat, using your fists to chip away at enemies’ health bars. Alternatively, you can also use abilities known as Umbric talents to fill up an enemy’s gauge, which, once filled, will leave them temporarily weak and vulnerable, following which you can unleash more powerful melee strikes to deal higher damage, or even finish them off. As for when you want to take a quieter approach…
STEALTH DETAILS
Unknown 9: Awakening give players a number of interesting options for when you want to deal with enemies quietly. Using her Fold abilities, Haroona can spot enemies in her vicinity even through walls, can lure them to specific spots to isolate them from their companions, and can attack them from distances- while the good old fashioned method of walking up behind someone and silently taking them out yourself will, of course, also always be an option. Meanwhile, Haroona always has access to an ability called Shroud, which lets her temporarily turn invisible, and can even be triggered in the middle of combat. As you might imagine, that’ll probably come in pretty handy when stealthing around.
Oh, and speaking of Haroona’s abilities…
STEPPING
Stepping is probably one of Haroona’s more high-flying and useful abilities (or seemingly useful, at the very least). Stepping allows you to step into the Fold, following which you can possess a number of enemies in turn, using them over short windows to set up all manner of explosive chain reactions. How far you can take things with Stepping will depend on how many Stepping tokens you have, which you gain by defeating enemies and performing successful takedowns. The more tokens you have, the more steps you can take while Stepping, letting you unleash more powerful attacks.
MORE ABILITIES
Stepping and Shroud aren’t the only abilities that Haroona has at her disposal. For instance, she can use Umbric abilities known as Push and Pull, which do exactly what the name implies, allowing you to telekinetically push or pull enemies towards or away from you. You can also use these abilities on objects in the environment to your advantage in a number of ways, like Pushing an enemy off a ledge, or Pulling an explosive barrel into an enemy’s back. On the stealth side of things, there’s the Ripple ability, which attracts the attention of nearby foes, drawing them to a specific point. So you can, for instance, use Ripple to drawn multiple enemies to an explosive, and then trigger that explosive while you’re a safe distance away yourself.
ENEMY TYPES
Unknown 9: Awakening will throw a number of different enemies at you as you make your way through its story, and each will present unique challenges in combat, from muscular brutes who dole out hard-hitting knuckle-breakers to those that like to keep their distance and attack you with ranged weapons, to those that come equipped with a variety of different melee weapons, and more. As you might imagine, not only will that be something that you have to contend with during combat and stealth sections, but on the flipside, while using your Stepping ability, you’ll also be able to use these different enemy types’ unique abilities to deadly effect yourself as well.
PROGRESSION
By its very nature, Unknown 9: Awakening is obviously not going to be this huge, sprawling RPG, but the game will make use of its own set of focused progression mechanics to allow Using rifts known as anomalies – which can be found scattered throughout the game – to invest in skill trees that allow you to both power up Haroona’s abilities, and also customize them in unique ways, letting you alter them (at least to some degree) to fit the way you want to play.
LOCATIONS
Unknown 9: Awakening is, as we’ve mentioned, going to be a linear experience, though there’s still going to be a fair bit of variety in the environments that you’ll traverse and explore. Over the course of Haroona’s journey, players will find themselves in all manner of locations, from 19th century Portugal and dense and overgrown jungles in India to gorgeous, sandy locales in Mauritania and more.
PC REQUIREMENTS
For those who’re looking to play Unknown 9: Awakening on PC, the game’s system requirements thankfully aren’t terribly demanding (which isn’t surprising, given that this is very much being billed as a smaller, AA experience). On minimum settings, the game will require any processor with either 4 or 6 cores and 8 threads at a base 3.6 Ghz, along with an 8 GB VRAM GPU, and 12 GB of RAM. On recommended settings, meanwhile, you’ll need a processor with 6 cores and 12 threads at a base 3.4 Ghz, along with 16 GB of RAM, though your GPU requirements remain the same. On either setting, you’ll also need an SSD and 55 GB of free storage space.
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