Unknown 9 Awakening Receives Flaccid Reception
If the latest release from Bandai Namco has fallen under your radar, you wouldn’t be alone. ‘Unknown 9 Awakening’ has received little in the way of marketing push from the publisher and, now that the game has been released, we can see why. Much like its name suggests, not many people really know too much about this project. The action-adventure game stars Haroona who fights against a secret society who control humanity’s darkest secrets. This has drawn a lot of comparisons to Indiana Jones as you may expect. Unfortunately, this release seems to be more ‘Crystal Skull’ than ‘Lost Ark’.
Image by Bandai Namco
The game is currently sitting at a ‘mixed’ rating on Steam and a week 64 on Opencritic. Only 20% of critics recommend that you pick this up. Poor stealth mechanics, uninspired combat and a story that doesn’t live up to its potential has left most who played it underwhelmed. TheSixthAxis had the following write up for the release:
“Unknown 9: Awakening is just a bunch of gaming tropes loosely tied together with boring and uninspired NPCs lazily lurching from set piece to set piece, as the poorly designed game creaks and groans under the weight of expectation.”
Steam users were similarly not too enthused. User ‘nima’ writes the following:
‘I don’t even know where to begin with this game- everything about it feels fundamentally broken, like very little thought or effort went into its creation… it was clear that this was one of those games that probably came together over a weekend with someone idly messing around in Unreal Engine 5’
Image by Bandai Namco
Unknown 9 was meant to be the kick off for a new narrative universe spanning games, comics, novels and even a podcast. With the rather disappointing release of the game, however, this could be far shorter lived than Bandai Namco may have expected. A lot of these projects have already been completed and released but, unless the studio wants to double down on the game’s story, we may not see too many more entries in the ‘Unknown’ series.
Image by Bandai Namco
Unknown 9 doesn’t seem to be faring too well financially either. The game has less than 50 Steam reviews in 3 days and has peaked at a very poor 276 player count according to SteamCharts. For comparison, the abysmal ‘Gollum’ (which continues to be a point of reference for a game’s failure) managed to reach just over 500 concurrent players. Unknown 9 may not be as bad as Gollum but, by all metrics, it seems to be even more of a financial flop. If you’re interested, you can pick up this release on all major platforms now- but don’t hold your breath for an expansion of this universe just yet.
