Unavowed

[NANO]

Unavowed is an indie point-and-click adventure game developed and published by Wadjet Eye Games. It was released on August 8, 2018.

The game features uses 2D pixel art visuals and gameplay reminiscent of classic adventure games combined with an interaction system commonly featured in modern adventure games, especially those developed by BioWare. The player chooses to control a male or female protagonist who after a series of supernatural events teams up with the titular group, an ancient team of paranormal investigators. On their quest to find out what happened to them, they must solve a number of quests and puzzles in a variety of locations of a fictionalized version of New York City.

The first new intellectual property created by Wadjet Eye since 2006, Unavowed was first announced in 2016. Initially planned as a project with 3D visuals built on Unity, the developer decided on using the Adventure Game Studio engine again with 2D visuals due to a lack of programmers familiar with the Unity engine and a lack of resources to create 3D graphics.

Unavowed received generally favorable reviews by critics, with most of them lauding the story and writing in particular. Many also praised the art design for its ability to paint a believable world where the supernatural exists and the background art was positively compared to classical adventure games such as Sam & Max Hit the Road or the Discworld game. Some reviewers however criticized the difficulty as too easy and some characters as underdeveloped.

Unavowed features a classic point-and-click style of gameplay reminiscent of the Monkey Island series or the various Quest games by Sierra Entertainment.In addition, the game offers more modern elements, such as choosing teammates for certain missions and a story that is influenced by the player's choices.Players can choose to play as a male or female character and must choose one of three backgrounds: actor, bartender or cop.Each background alters the interaction with other characters and the dialogue noticeably.The game plays out in an episodic fashion similar to television shows with the player choosing which site to visit and which characters to bring with them at the beginning of each mission.In the mission, non-player characters have to be talked to and clues analyzed, culminating in a confrontation in which the player must decide the fate of a character or being, often with moral and lasting consequences.Then the team returns to their headquarters to start a new mission.All characters feature full voice-acting,except the protagonist, who remains mute throughout the game except when not controlled by the player.Instead of engaging in combat, players are tasked to defend themselves against enemies by solving puzzles that range from deciphering code to releasing creatures before they can cause more harm.While there are some actions that lead to failure, the player cannot die or reach a game over; making mistakes merely resets the game to the state before the mistake.The game allows saving outside of dialogue but limits the amount of save files to 50.

Depending on the choice of companions, the dialogue and choices within the mission will be altered as will the puzzles, with each area providing different solutions based on the companions' abilities.For example, a mission with Logan as a companion will feature ghosts that can be talked to and used to help solve puzzles but those ghosts will not be in the same mission if Logan is not chosen to accompany the protagonist.During each mission, one or more flashbacks of the possessed protagonist's actions will happen, allowing the player to extrapolate their next actions based on their vision of the past.