Game reviews

Unavowed: the haunting changes with the company you keep

Unavowed makes choosing companions a choice about how to understand a haunted city. Its occult adventure is strongest when a useful ability also gives someone a reason to matter.

Whimsical Woes editorial ·

Unavowed makes a useful supernatural power feel like a way of knowing somebody. Choosing who accompanies you changes how you obtain information, so a companion can matter before a dramatic speech tells you why. The result is an occult adventure where agency lives partly in the company you keep. A haunted city has several stories to tell, and your team determines which conversations become possible.

This review concerns Wadjet Eye’s original 2018 PC release. After a year of demonic possession and violence through New York, the protagonist is freed and joins the organization that intervened. The premise supplies an uncomfortable starting point: being released from the demon does not restore the life it wrecked. Joining a group gives rebuilding a life a practical shape, with other people involved from the start.

Who can ask the question?

The four potential companions have distinct abilities and backgrounds. Logan is a medium who can speak with ghosts; Vicki is a police officer whose connections can open a different channel. That is an appealingly uneven idea of expertise. The supernatural world rewards a magical gift, while the ordinary city still runs on who recognizes you. Knowing the right person remains a power even when somebody else can talk to the dead.

Gilbert’s design interview explains a useful decision: ghosts remain visible without Logan. The unavailable conversation stays in the player’s awareness. A possibility can exist without the person who can pursue it. That gives the city some independence from the selected party, and makes another way of knowing it imaginable.

A relationship can carry the world-building

In a separate Articy interview, Gilbert described developing the world through conversations between characters, asking what sat underneath their reactions to each other. That approach suits the party structure. Lore has a reason to arrive because people disagree, remember, or need to explain themselves. An invented society becomes more convincing when its history has consequences for a relationship, rather than existing only as a beautifully organized collection of names.

There is an artistic lesson in that for character-driven horror. Give each person a different way to investigate the same problem. You can reveal a setting through their methods: the person who seeks testimony, the person who trusts an institution, the person who can hear something nobody else can. Distinction then comes from what people do with a room, as well as how dramatically they look while standing inside it.

Different routes are not endless freedom

The routes still lead toward information needed for progress. Their differences can feel like alternate witnesses within a shared investigation. Gilbert also acknowledges the light puzzle emphasis. Players wanting long deductions or a separate campaign for every team should take that limit seriously. Perspective is the system’s stronger promise.

Choose Unavowed for supernatural investigation with companions who participate in understanding the mess. Its group structure supports a warmer kind of unease than complete isolation: people can help, but help has a personality and a particular reach. Our OXENFREE and I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream reviews offer other ways to think about conversation and constrained choices. Here, the most compelling question is who gets to help you ask the next one.

Questions from the crypt

Is Unavowed a combat-focused role-playing game?

It is a point-and-click adventure with party and origin choices. Gilbert described adapting the companion-focused parts of BioWare-style games while removing combat. This review concerns the 2018 PC game’s narrative and puzzle structure, not later port controls or performance.

Is there one correct companion choice for every investigation?

Gilbert describes designing routes for the valid party combinations so players can progress through different abilities and information sources. Companions change what you learn and how. That supports choosing for curiosity about characters rather than treating one team as the universal answer.

Do you need to play the Blackwell games before Unavowed?

No. In the Articy interview, Gilbert says Unavowed shares a world and includes references, but does not require Blackwell knowledge. A newcomer can approach this story without completing the earlier series.

Sources & further reading

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