Unknown 9: Awakening developed by Reflector Entertainment Ltd and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment launched without fanfare last weekend. The game which features a female protagonist called Haroona peaked at 285 concurrent players on Steam with more negative reviews than positive.
“You are Haroona, a Quaestor born with the ability to venture into a mysterious dimension: the Fold,” read the official game blurb. “On her quest for powerful hidden knowledge, she must learn to master the powers of the Fold to fight a secret society with a hostile agenda.”
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According to SteamDB, only 45 people were playing Unknown 9 on Steam at the time of writing. The negative sentiments around Unknown 9 were also evident in its Metacritic reviews. It received an average of 65 Metascore on Xbox Series X and 62 on PS5.
Also noticed at the time of writing is that the game had received less than 300 reviews. A massive 204 of the reviews were negative while only 83 were positive. However, recent reviews have been mixed.
“Wow, just wow. I got this game for free with an AMD GPU purchase, and even then, I feel like I want a game refund,” wrote one reviewer.
Different reviewers faulted varying aspects of the game—with sometimes opposing views. For example, Gamereactor UK said, “The experience is also muddled by bad combat, clumsy directing and several problems of the technical and visual kind” while But Why Tho? said, “Unknown 9: Awakening boasts great combat and an ambitious story, but performance issues are too many to look past”. As they say, different strokes for different folks.
The opinion that remained consistent was that the game was saddled with numerous technical glitches which Gamereactor UK believes would have been fixed with better budget and polishing.
Unknown 9: Awakening is another victim of DEI?
There is a growing call for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the game industry. However, the drive has faced two major problems. Firstly, there is a pushback from those who want to maintain the status quo and secondly from those who genuinely believe that companies are going about the DEI thing wrongly.
Those on either side of the fence have strong opinions to backup their stance. Some argue that companies pushing for DEI use the opportunity to cut costs and hope to ride on sentiments to sell poorly made games.
On the other hand, there are those who want only games with characters that look like them. Anything outside that is simply not for them—especially when the protagonist is a female of color.
For this category of gamers, no matter how good the game is, they will rate it poorly as long it doesn’t include characters that look like them. They are easy to spot because they usually make general comments about the game without pointing out a particular feature of the game that sucked.
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Earlier this year, Sweet Baby Inc., one of the companies promoting DEI in video games was harshly criticized for ruining gameplay experience by wrongly advising developers and publishers on DEI.
At that time, one Steam user started a curator page where they identified all games affiliated to Sweet Baby Inc. and asked gamers to avoid them—including those yet to be released. Sadly, these sentiments hurt not only the companies involved but also the team of developers who poured their heart and energy into the game.
Our advice to gamers remains the same; never make conclusions on a game based on reviews. Watch the trailers, play the demos when available, and if you find them appealing, go for it!
