This is one of those special Indy games that comes around sparingly. It's more of an interactive novel than conventional game, like most point and click adventures. What this adventure does well is in writing, voice acting and art design. It breathes the intricate world and characters to life with a minimalist approach. Each member of the Unavowed has their own motivation and tragic backstory, whether due to the PC or other events surrounding them. The backstories of these characters are gradually unfolded across the missions as you build rapport with them.

The world building is top notch and expanded upon in each mission by introducing new creatures or lore. This makes each mission feel unique despite the typical point and click adventure trappings. You encounter a Dryad, a Dragon, Merfolks, a Fire elemental, Demons, Ghosts and more. My personal favorite was the Brooklyn mission involving the Muse.

Each area feels meticulously and lovingly built. The music does a great job of supporting the atmosphere and tone. You can rightfully critique that most of the music is kinda samey; it is basically melancholy jazz for a majority of the game, but there are a few moments where it shifts to dissonant tension which helps give the dramatic moments more punch.

The issues I have with the game is the lack of impact from player choice and the depth of the puzzles. While it's a cool concept that you can tackle any mission with any combination of companions, it ends up drastically retraining the game play ultimately not making it worth it. The puzzles are never complicated and I rarely felt clever for figuring out the solution. This is because each level had to accommodate any combination of companions and there are limited screens to explore in each mission. It's a shame, because there was potential for a ton of replay ability if each combination of companions could lead to multiple solutions, different areas or complete pivots in mission progression. Instead, the impact of companions feels marginalized. Another issue with this structure is you never know which companions will be best suited for a given mission (ultimately it's irrelevant since most missions pan out the same way regardless of companions) since you need to make a decision before departing on said mission.

While you are given multiple response options in dialogue, you are pigeonholed down a 'good' path, further attenuating any sense of player choice. While I get the reasoning from a narrative standpoint, to role play a more evil character could have lead to more nuanced decisions towards the end of the game. While each origin story is interesting, there is little impact on the narrative or mission progression as a result. You will periodically get a dialogue option based on your profession, but I never found these to be impactful.

This also led to a contrived moment in the plot if you chose a cop profession. Vicki is nearly killed by you at the start of the game and while there is tension between the two of you when you first meet, it feels like a tame response given what happened. She also drops the whole issue before the end of the mission. I think more could have been done by expanding their tension across multiple missions, ultimately leading to her accepting you. It's not poorly written as is, but could have been improved. There isn't a moment like this for the actor profession and I never played the bartender past the prologue.

Overall, while the puzzles may lack depth and feel very similar to any point and click adventure, the game excels with it's writing, acting and art design. It's a shame that player choice didn't have a larger impact on the plot, but it's at least well written and worth experiencing.

I'm certainly not as devout a player of point and click adventure games as some people, but I like them and have played a decent amount at this point that at least includes all the monkey island games. I'm sure I'm missing plenty that people say are the greatest ever, but for where I'm at now in my experience of the genre this is in my top five, and that's down to both it's general quality and how more subjectively it seems to have been made to perfectly cater to my interests.

In a more general sense it has:

• great voice acting
• great art
• a compelling story
• great character writing/banter
• two different ways to end each case
• 4 different endings

In a more subjective sense it seems to take massive influence from the urban fantasy book series The Dresden Files, which is one of my all time favorites. It also has an incredibly meta twist in the back half that plays with adventure game conventions, and I adore when video games go meta. I was streaming my playthrough to a friend over parsec and it's safe to say that twist blew both of our minds and many holy shits were exclaimed. Can't really think of any other point and click I've played that would have had that effect on us. I'm sure he would've enjoyed seeing the monkey island games but they wouldn't have us both yelling like we're watching the one for all vs all for one fight.

Perhaps the only negative that can be leveled at this game are the puzzles, which definitely were not as difficult, intricate, or abstruse as those I've experienced in point and clicks in the past. For me, that's more of a positive than a negative, to be perfectly honest. Abstruse puzzles aren't really the draw of the genre to me, so I'm perfectly fine with something a bit more light that takes you through the story at a faster pace. My only real disappointment in the puzzle realm is that there's a very cool mechanic where you go between the real world and the ghost world by touching a reflective object. You get it halfway through a case, and it arbitrarily wears off by the end, so you only get to use it on like three or four puzzles. I don't see why they couldn't have let you keep that and worked it into the end of the game a little bit.

Really enjoyed this one too. Dave Gilbert and WadjetEye are definitely among my favorite developers of all time at this point.

The puzzles were all pretty trivial. I only had to slow down a couple of time over the course of the game to figure things out, and I never needed any sort of outside help. I'm 100% ok with that since I'm not a huge fan of point and click game puzzles in most cases. I mostly see Point and Click as a vehicle to give players a bit more involvement in a narrative, rather than a genre I enjoy on its own.

The background and character portraits are all gorgeous and go a long way to setting the mood. Unfortunately, the character sprite work aren't quite up to snuff. The walking animations are in particular very wooden and awkward.

The voice acting was generally good, but there were some lines here and there that didn't land quite right. The audio quality seemed a little uneven throughout, but I'm not enough of an audiophile to really be able to say why or how.

It was very well written. Great characters and great overall plot and twists, with plenty of foreshadowing and logical conclusions to the decisions you make along the way. It never quite had the emotional impact of the best portions of the Blackwell Series for me. I think it's the grittier, gorier, grimmer writing. That said, there definitely were well written emotional scenes, and the twists and overall plot were top notch. I really loved the callbacks to Blackwell, as well. Tastefully handled.

Definitely worth a playthrough if Point and Click isn't a major turn off and you want a well-written urban fantasy adventure.