Unavowed Points and Clicks Its Way to Comfort and Realistic Friendships

Unavowed starts strong and doesn’t really stop. Or, it starts as strong as any point-and-click adventure game can, with a high-stakes dialogue interaction followed by some tense puzzle solving. And even for WadjetEye, the studio behind the game who’ve been working on authentic, ‘90s-style point-and-click adventure games for the past twelve years, it’s an impressive feat of an opening. There’s lightning, and an otherworldly demon, and you get to flip a switch after setting up a short Rube Goldberg-style trap that fries your assailant. It’s everything you could want from a point-and-click opening, in other words.

The newest game by the studio, Unavowed is a masterful example of a classic genre taking cues from more modern games. The interactions between crew members and the game’s mission structure feel more than a little influenced by Bioware (especially Mass Effect and Dragon Age), but not too copycat in their approach. In many ways, it feels like a deconstruction of a design that is most often seen in huge-budget AAA games down to its most essential components: The missions, the crew, and the interactions between them.

The game follows you, the player, a new recruit of the Unavowed, a team of supernatural defenders out to defend New York City from whatever forces may threaten it. It’s a small, tight-knit group, and the game is simplistic enough in its design that it makes interacting with them between missions into part of the game’s overall experience.

I found myself spending as much time as I could between missions weeding out every bit of dialogue I could from my crewmates. There’s Eli, the reluctant fire mage, whose great-grandfather was so powerful he inspired an entire counter-force of fae just to stop him; and Mandana, the half-jinn whose father serves as the New York Unavowed chapter leader, and whose mother was a pirate queen in the golden age of swashbuckling.

It genuinely feels like the members of the team (and the few more who you meet as the game progresses) have a history, and connections between them that come before and during gameplay. Each mission requires you to pick two of your team members to accompany you, and while this first was anxiety-inducing (in the way that all “pick your squad” designs are—what if I miss some content? What if I pick wrong?) it quickly became clear that WadjetEye has some interesting, unique bits of gameplay and story for each possible combination of Unavowed squadmates. I began to worry less about who I picked and think more of each mission as a chance to try out a new combination of teammates—maybe this one would know the area, but this one would have contacts that we could call on to help solve puzzles.