Linear singleplayer adventures never left us.
Those who love linear, narrative-driven, set-piece laden videogames might wish time had paused in 2013 (and don’t we all, for lots of reasons). The era dominated by the Xbox 360 was a good time for people who like to play rollercoaster videogames with frequent QTEs, barely interactive but beautiful worlds, and fat-free twelve hour runtimes. From the Tomb Raider reboot through to deep cuts like Neverdead, big publishers don’t release many games in this style anymore (and when they do they tend to regret it).
But big publishers be damned, because the tradition is far from dead. Look at Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden as a recent example: that would have been a 7-out-of-10 THQ gem in 2009. Or indeed, Immortals of Aveum could probably be a «cult classic» now if Ubisoft had doled it out in 2011. In the same spirit, Unknown 9: Awakening feels like it should have been released over a decade ago, in a way that will please some and elicit glazed eyes from others.
All the hallmarks are here. There’s a lot of climbing up obviously climbable surfaces in this videogame, and quite a bit of balancing across narrow ledges. There’s an abundance of objects behind which it’s possible to crouch, and lots of uniform length grass that it’s possible to shuffle undetected through. There are some faintly novel approaches to stealth here, in greater proportion, thankfully, to the rather-too-scrappy hand-to-hand combat. While playing I felt like I could have been in a behind-closed-doors E3 demo for an unannounced Bandai Namco potboiler (scheduled for release in «holiday 2010») that would go on to get a 6/10 in Edge. I say all this fondly, rather than disparagingly, and it’s worth noting that Unknown 9 will be priced like a double A game.
The funny thing is that, despite its extremely double A vibe, Unknown 9: Awakening has some bold ambitions.
