Unknown 9: Awakening Aims to Fuse Body-Snatching Gameplay With a Strong Narrative

New IP fans, rejoice! Unknown 9: Awakening, the debut project from developer Reflector, is coming this year. You might remember the teaser trailer from Gamescom a few years ago that turned some heads, and after taking a first look at an hour of gameplay, I left eager to get some hands-on time with it and dive deeper. Any day we get to take a break from playing sequels and explore uncharted territory is a good day, and with some serious thought put into an all-new universe and a psychically souped-up protagonist with some interesting combat abilities, this third-person action-adventure definitely has potential.

With a plethora of fantastic action-adventure games likely already in your games library, Unknown 9 hopes to set itself apart with its killer feature: the ability to briefly possess your enemies, called “stepping.” By stepping, you can command one enemy to take lethal fire at his ally, before jumping into another enemy and compelling him to blow himself up by attacking an explosive piece of machinery, then safely leap back into your own body and watch your violent schemes unfold. In the demo I saw, this cheeky tactic accounted for most of the action, and made for some interesting shenanigans, like one encounter where snipers on a ledge were possessed and made to shoot at their own comrades below. Interestingly, you’re also given free rein to use any of the abilities of the troops you’re controlling, like the powerful ground pound ability of the tanky bruiser enemy, or the forward dash attack of the spear-wielding footsoldiers.

If you’d rather not play puppeteer, Unknown 9: Awakenings also has some stealth options, where you can use your powers to become invisible for a time and take down enemies from darkness or lure enemies away with ethereal projectiles summoned from thin air. Sneaking up behind enemies to take them out has your kindly lady snatch the soul from her victim’s body and tear it asunder, which is honestly kinda alarming – but hey, that’s what you get for taking up arms against a magic ninja. If subtlety isn’t your thing, just go full brawler on those baddies with a whole slew of abilities that let you pull and push enemies like a Jedi or block bullets with a magical “umbric shield”. There’s even a perfect parry mechanic for those looking to get sweaty with timing. Each of these approaches has their own skill trees too, so you can level up the playstyle you prefer and become the ultimate goon-killing wizard. The section I was shown was only 90 minutes or so into the adventure, so one can only imagine the interesting abilities that might make themselves known at higher levels.

That said, I didn’t get to go hands-on with Awakening myself, and until I do it’s hard to say if some of these unique concepts, like stepping, will be enough to differentiate itself from similar third-person adventures. At first glance, they certainly seem to do some pretty novel things I haven’t seen before, and that’s without even having seen the whole skill tree yet, but I’m still a tad concerned that making fools out of enemies by possessing them and setting them up for failure might not have legs after the twentieth time you’ve done it. Here’s hoping our hero has some tricks up her sleeve that I didn’t get to see just yet.

Beating up bad guys aside, though, there’s also something to be said about Unknown 9’s ambitious worldbuilding and story, which already includes digital comics, a podcast audio drama, and novels, all as a means of fleshing out the universe that Awakening will occupy. As a young woman from India named Haroona, you discover your psychic abilities and begin to investigate a paranormal parallel reality known as the Fold, from which your powers are presumably derived, and that all plays into the existing lore that’s being set up in the supplemental content, including laying the groundwork for various factions you’ll encounter in the game, like the enigmatic and knowledge-hungry organization known as The Leap Year Society. Having now read the comics and listened to some of the scripted podcast content, that groundwork seems to have a lot of promise, and if it can be weaved into the story that seems to be front and center in Unknown 9: Awakening, that could be a major reason to keep an eye on this one.