Unavowed features a classic point-and-click style of gameplay reminiscent of the Monkey Island series or the various Quest games (such as King's Quest, Police Quest etc.) by Sierra Entertainment. In addition, the game offers more modern elements, such as choosing teammates for certain missions and a story that is influenced by the player's choices. Players can choose to play as a male or female character and must choose one of three backgrounds: actor, bartender or cop. Each background alters the interaction with other characters and the dialogue noticeably. The game plays out in an episodic fashion similar to television shows with the player choosing which site to visit and which characters to bring with them at the beginning of each mission. In the mission, non-player characters have to be talked to and clues analyzed, culminating in a confrontation in which the player must decide the fate of a character or being, often with moral and lasting consequences. Then the team returns to their headquarters to start a new mission. All characters feature full voice-acting, except the protagonist, who remains mute throughout the game except when not controlled by the player. Instead of engaging in combat, players are tasked to defend themselves against enemies by solving puzzles that range from deciphering code to releasing creatures before they can cause more harm. While there are some actions that lead to failure, the player cannot die or reach a game over; making mistakes merely resets the game to the state before the mistake. The game allows saving outside of dialogue but limits the amount of save files to 50.
Depending on the choice of companions, the dialogue and choices within the mission will be altered as will the puzzles, with each area providing different solutions based on the companions' abilities. For example, a mission with Logan as a companion will feature ghosts that can be talked to and used to help solve puzzles but those ghosts will not be in the same mission if Logan is not chosen to accompany the protagonist. During each mission, one or more flashbacks of the possessed protagonist's actions will happen, allowing the player to extrapolate their next actions based on their vision of the past.
Synopsis
Setting and characters
As with Wadjet Eye's previous Blackwell series, the game is set in a fictionalized version of contemporary New York City where magic and demons are real and takes place in various New York settings, such as Chinatown, Brooklyn, Staten Island and Wall Street. The protagonist apparently had been possessed by a demon and ran amok in New York City for a year before the events of the game. How the demon came to possess the body differs based on the chosen backstory. Unavowed begins with the protagonist being exorcised by Eli, a sorcerer belonging to Unavowed, a group of supernatural investigators. Unable to return to their old life, they join Unavowed to reconstruct the events of the previous year.
Aside from the protagonist, the New York chapter of Unavowed consists of Kalash, a jinn and the chapter's leader and founder, Mandana, Kalash's half-jinn daughter and Eli, a fire mage who discovered his talents during the Nixon administration and has not aged since. During the events of the game, Logan, a recovering alcoholic and medium who travels with KayKay, the spirit of a dead ten-year old who helps him connect with other ghosts, and Vicki, a former police officer who also was the protagonist's former partner if they chose the cop background, join Unavowed.
Plot
After the exorcism, the player's character joins Unavowed's New York branch and learns that supernatural threats have increased exponentially within the last year. The team visits the places where supernatural occurrences have been reported. When researching on Staten Island, the team encounters Vicki Santana who was suspended after questioning supernatural occurrences within the NYPD's 120th precinct. On a mission in the Bronx, they meet Logan who, together with his spirit guide KayKay, tries to calm three poltergeists. Once both problems are solved, Logan and Vicki join Unavowed. When reexamining the first site the team investigated with Logan and Vicki, the team encounters Galene, a dryad Kalash banished 400 years earlier, with whom the protagonist had made a pact and learns the demon's name, Melkhiresa. Galene captures one of the team members and challenges Kalash to fight her in a battle to the death. The player's character is forced to kill Kalash to defeat Galene.
With the demon's name, Eli is able to determine that they had returned to the place of the first possession: the Under The Bricks theater (actor background), Sammy's Bar (barkeeper background) or the Eternox Nightclub (cop background). There the team finds a closed portal and notes previously written by the protagonist indicating three more sites to investigate on Wall Street, in Manhattan Chinatown and near Prospect Park in Brooklyn. On Wall Street, the team discovers that the protagonist conspired with fae folk to kidnap Eli's great-grandson and manage to rescue him. In Prospect Park, they encounter Calliope, a muse who lost her talents to a local artist who used them to "inspire" an artist to set himself aflame and a baker to use his own blood in his products.
