We first – and last – saw Unknown 9: Awakening nearly four years ago, when the original action-adventure game from developers Reflector was revealed with a flashy cinematic trailer at Gamescom 2020. Since then, main character Haroona has aged from a young girl in India to an adult with the power to possess people and make them murder each other, if our first look at gameplay ahead of a release this summer is anything to go by.
Unknown 9: Awakening – Announcement Trailer | Xbox Partner Preview
Unknown 9 appears to be an action-adventure game in the Assassin’s Creed mould of things, as Haroona balances along convenient wooden beams, parkours over rooftops and sneaks between patches of long grass. (She also pulls down a very assassin-y hood at one point, if the comparison wasn’t clear enough.)
That’s then combined with what looks to be a loadout of telekinetic powers with roots in the wonderfully fun psychic chaos of Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy, as Haroona blocks bullets (fired by some kind of gasmasked World War I soldier?) using a glowy shield, temporarily hops into enemies’ bodies to set up a Rube Goldberg combo of gunshots and melee attacks, Force-pushes foes into collapsing structures, and does what I can only describe as sucking the soul out of someone before smashing it into ghost-dust.
There’s more than a bit of Assassin’s Creed in the game’s lore drop, too, which combines Haroona’s quest for revenge with a journey across the globe and encounters with a secret society trying to harness some kind of dangerous shadow dimension known as the Fold that threatens all of humanity.
That story spins out into the wider Unknown 9 shared universe, which Reflector ambitiously plans to explore across other media formats beyond games in the future. Along for the ride is Anya Chalotra, Yennefer of Vengerberg in Netflix’s The Witcher series, who portrays Haroona.
We’ll get a look at both Unknown 9: Awakening and its plans for a wider universe when it releases sometime this summer.
