Category: Video Games

Trisha’s Take: Unavowed

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The four main characters of Unavowed: a male medium, a female swordswoman, a male mage, and a female police detective.
Are you strong enough, smart enough, or powerful enough to join the Unavowed? © Wadjet Eye Games

Unavowed

Created, Designed, and Published by Wadjet Eye Games
Written by Dave Gilbert
Starring (from left to right): Logan Cunningham, Sandra Espinoza, Frank Todaro, Arielle Siegel, SungWon Cho (not pictured), and more
Art by Ben Chandler and Ivan Ulyanov
Music by Thomas Regin
Rating: Mature adolescents and above (adult language, gun violence, supernatural elements)

Official Blurb: For one year, crime-torn New York City has been at the mercy of someone hell-bent on destruction and chaos. Waking up on a stormy rooftop, you learn that this someone was you. At least, the heinous acts were carried out by your body, possessed by an angry demon that’s now loose in the city that never sleeps. The only force that can stop it is the Unavowed, a centuries old supernatural crime-fighting troupe that takes down evil in the shadows—and you are their newest member.

Pros: Voice acting is top-notch and all of the diverse characters have depth and are more than just stereotypes.

Cons: Some of the puzzles require a pixel hunt, and that can really take you out of the story.

It’s been a while since I’ve played a video game which did not involve mana, either land-generated or crystal-generated). As such, it took me a while to get into Unavowed, the latest adventure published by Wadjet Eye Games. However, after playing my review copy for approximately 32 hours with two player characters and experiencing four different endings, I can say that I’m definitely not going to wait that long before playing another one.

Unavowed takes place within the universe conceived within the partially-finished Bestowers of Eternity (2003) and then introduced by Blackwell Legacy (2007), also created by Dave Gilbert and published by Wadjet Eye Games. However, you don’t need to have played either of those games or the four other games within the Blackwell series to understand the world that’s been built. Because there is an already-established universe for its characters, the story that’s been built for Unavowed is very strong.

As a mystery, Unavowed does very well at dribbling out hints as to what has befallen the player-character (whose name and gender but not facial features can be chosen during the first scene) during the previous year. It is revealed that not only have you murdered your friends and colleagues, but you’ve also wreaked havoc over New York City by influencing or causing other strange deaths and disappearances. Joining the Unavowed is the only way you’re able to find out what happened to you which is done through investigating sources of demonic energy you (or the demon within you) has left all over the city. I found myself taking a lot of time to read through all of the dialogue, even some of the brilliant “idle stance” dialogue that Gilbert wrote for this non-player characters (NPCs), just so I could figure out more of the mystery and also so that I could unlock the next bit of story which could be uncovered when you speak to certain characters are certain times.

One of the big complaints that I’ve often read about point-and-click adventure games is that sometimes a puzzle isn’t intuitive enough for a player to figure it out without a hint. Some hidden object games have chosen to get around that by instituting a rechargeable “hint” bar where if you wait for long enough (or make an in-app purchase) you can get a clue on how to solve a puzzle. Unavowed does no such thing, but instead allows you to ask the other two members of your party what they think you should do next. Their dialogue responses often helped me figure out the next room or person I had to visit. I will state, however, that there were at least five times where I had to resort to performing a “pixel hunt” or consulting the provided walkthrough to figure things out. Whenever I did that, it pulled me out of the story and reminded me that not only was I playing a game, I wasn’t being very smart about it either.

And speaking of the dialogue, not only is it written well, it’s also performed very well. In an interview with me, Gilbert said that many of the voice actors he works with have an improv theater background and that professionality shines through. My favorite characters were Mandana and Vicki, not just because they were fully-fleshed out characters and not stereotypes but also because of the personality which Sandra Espinoza (Mandana) and Arielle Siegel (Vicki) brought to their lines. In fact, I love all of the characters in this game because their diversity and diverse personalities are so true to the New York City I called my home for over eight years.

It’s also due to the portrait art by Ivan Ulyanov that I was able to empathize with the NPCs so well. Almost every line of dialogue was accompanied by a change in the character portrait that emphasized the emotion being conveyed through the tone in their voices. Best of all, even if you’re a person who has a problem hearing spoken dialogue, the characters’ expressions accurately conveyed the mood contained within the writing.

It’s because of this that you can tell that Gilbert spent a lot of time thinking about every line of dialogue. Much of this is due to one trick which he says in the interview was borrowed liberally from Bioware (Mass Effect, Dragon Age) where what you choose as your character’s dialogue has an effect on the NPC’s response back to you. As I was playing the game, I found inventing a personality for both of my player characters based solely on how I thought either of them would respond to a statement or ask a question. This, in addition to the mechanic of being able to pick two NPCs to make up a party help make Unavowed more than just another adventure game.

If this kind of adventure game is going to be part of the way forward for Wadjet Eye Games, then not only do I look forward to seeing more games like Unavowed from this publisher, I’m going to expect other adventure game designers to follow suit in their own way. And that, I think, is not a bad thing at all.

Desert Bus for Hope 4 rolls out… for the children!

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As a liberal-minded geek, I try and donate to charity whenever I can because I believe that helping other people and being altruistic is a pretty cool thing. Also as a kid, I spent almost an entire week strapped to a bed at the Childrens Hospital of Orange County in California after a kidney surgery.

As a result, every year since Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik from Penny Arcade started their annual toy drive called Child’s Play, I’ve tried to buy a toy from the list that I know will be used to help a kid just like the one I was. Whole groups of people have created satellite organizations to help raise more money for the charity, and my favorite out of all of them is Desert Bus.

Two years have passed since I originally blogged about their efforts, and I thought that this time, I could recap a little bit about the typical things you could see the Desert Bus Crew doing if you happen to tune into the live driver cam at 4:00 am local time in Victoria, B.C. for about an hour:

0400 – The crew is dancing along to an instrumental section of a song from the Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World soundtrack, to which they’ve been challenged to sing.

0408 – Jeremy “Jer” Petter narrates as everyone in the room comes up with their own very personalized types of dinosaur and walks across the room.

0411 – The chat room has been challenged to take the total from $15,839 to $16,000 in the next 10 minutes. If that happens, they will sing a Barry White song.

0421 – Matt Wiggins sings “Soft Kitty” from “The Big Bang Theory” while stroking the head of James Turner, who is driving the bus. Also, since the total is now only $15,914, the chat challenge failed.

0427 – Alex Steacy makes an appearance while dressed from head to toe in orange rain gear and a Flavor Flav-style clock around his neck. I do not immediately recall why. Afterwards, the group sings “Little Lion Man” by Mumford and Sons.

0433 – The official total is now $16,010, which they’ve confirmed took too long to get to in order for them to sing a Barry White song. However, they are now singing “Polka Power” by Weird Al because someone paid $50 for them to do so. Someone who is only being identified in the accompanying chatroom as “Red Bandana Man” is the most energetic. Afterwards, he identifies himself as Andre, he’s a member of the Loading Ready Run forums, and he decided to stop by and hang out.

0441 – Turner reminds everyone to send in drawings of him driving the bus with pants on his head for a challenge. Chat member lgladdy reminds the chat audience about the real-time graph he made which shows the donation totals.

0446 – Tally Heilke tortures Turner by hiding in their costume rack and pretending to be a monster in exchange for a donation. Afterward, in response to another $50 donation, the entire room chants “Hail C’thulu!” in a rising monotone crescendo, while reacting in terror as the Old One (played by Andre) rises. However, as the tentacled one rampages across the room, the controller gets unplugged from the Sega CD, resulting in a bus crash and the need to restart the game (and their point total) and start their run from Tucson to Las Vegas again. As a result, they update the overlay to read 1 point, 1 crash, and 6 Bothan spies who died to bring us this information.

0457 – Petter, Wiggins, and Turner re-enact the scene from Clerks 2 where Randall goes off on the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

As seen in the screen shot above, as of this writing $17,000 has been raised for Child’s Play, which brings their four-year total to $233,677. Judging from the aforementioned graph, the group is well on their way to being responsible for raising a quarter of a million dollars during year’s event.

I can’t wait until they do.

Trisha’s Link of the Day: Well played, Rob Liefeld

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When I was a nascent comics fan in the mid-1990s, one of the most important things I learned about the art was that Rob Liefeld can’t draw feet.

Since then, I’ve learned that the former Marvel Comics wunderkind who created X-Force and one of the founding members of Image Comics also can’t draw women, men, guns, pouches, and quite a few other things. In addition, by not fixing these kinds of errors, I always got the impression that he didn’t seem to care that he was a bad artist; one family friend of his told me back then that he was “laughing all the way to the bank.”

Even now, after all these years, my impression of Liefeld and his work has never been a positive one… until now.

Last week, the lads at Penny Arcade revealed that they’d been asked (or even possibly hired) to produce two pieces of art to promote a new Xbox game called Comic Jumper: The Adventures of Captain Smiley from indie game studio Twisted Pixel. The premise of the game is that you play a comic book character who has to battle villains through different genres and comic book styles.

The part that caught PA artist Mike Krahulik’s eye is that as the character jumps into another genre, the art style of the game changes as well. He agreed to do the artwork provided that he could choose the style he would illustrate and he chose the Modern era.

Krahulik has said before at PAX panels and elsewhere that he loved comic books when he was younger and wanted to create his own work. In the news post announcing the debut of the artwork and a subsequent contest to win the Xbox pictured at left, he wrote:

The result [of my work for Twisted Pixel] was a project heavily inspired by one Mr. Rob Liefeld. Obviously you can look back on that stuff now and it’s pretty silly but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being heavily inspired by it at the time. Rob may not have had the best grasp of anatomy, storytelling, perspective, or composition but his shit was fucking dynamic and as a young man I ate it up.

This isn’t the first time the guys have picked on Liefeld, either, as you can see from this comic from 2004, posted right after they’d returned from that year’s San Diego Comic Con.

When I returned to the PA website the day after the contest ended, in addition to the winning entry, we were greeted with Liefeld’s own entry into the contest:

Again… well played, Mr. Liefeld.