Unknown 9: Awakening Review

ign.com:

It only took 10 minutes of playing Unknown 9: Awakening for me to feel a keen sense of deja vu. Taking out enemies in small arenas, watching an emotional story of personal growth, and squeezing between plenty of tight cracks in walls – it’s a formula that feels all too familiar, sticking to the well-established traditions of the "Crevice Crawler" genre. It does try out one or two unique ideas to set itself apart, like mind-control powers that let you play puppet master with your enemies, but the problem is that it executes on the fundamentals significantly worse than its contemporaries. There are certainly glimmers of hope within that new stuff, but any novelty quickly wears off, resulting in a generic and underwhelming slog full of performance issues and other jankiness to boot.

Set in an alternate-reality version of the early 20th century, you play as Haroona, a distrustful woman who loves spouting trite platitudes that has been imbued with the power to tap into an unseen dimension called the Fold. Her powers let you do typical magic stuff like go invisible for a brief period of time, Force push and pull baddies around like an off-brand Jedi, and enter a ghost form so you can walk around and solve the easiest puzzles ever conceived. You'll use them to worm your way through a series of small arenas separated by cutscenes clearly pining to be the next HBO adaptation – if you’ve played The Last of Us or God of War then you already get the idea, but instead of finely-tuned combat encounters and nail-biting stealth sections, Awakening offers sloppy fisticuffs and barebones crouch-fests.

Despite the extremely generic setup, the worldbuilding here is actually not half bad, and there’s clearly been a lot of time and effort put into establishing this universe’s timeline, lore, and supernatural rules. Like a knock-off Indiana Jones, this alternate version of Earth is home to mystical secrets and hidden histories kept just out of reach in parts unknown, including a mysterious