Bandai Namco has just released a brand new game, but if you had no idea, I wouldn’t blame you. That would be Unknown 9: Awakening,
You can’t really gauge its Steam reviews because there are only 13(!) total so far, reflective of a game that has launched with just a few hundred players. 224, as I’m writing this article. Sub-Concord levels. Yes. Concord is a unit of measurement now.
I follow gaming news pretty closely and I've never even heard of this one. Wouldn't be surprised if the low engagement, at least in part, comes down to poor marketing.
Same here, and frankly, what kind of title is “Unknown 9: Awakening” supposed to be? That reads like an internal Codename they forgot to change pre-release:
It's part of a transmedia push. It started with a podcast, and they were pushing out a video game, a comic book, and I think a TV show? So they're trying to keep everything a part of the same brand that hasn't had time to breathe yet, perhaps rushing out the video game.
I remember it from one of the recent game conferences, but basically only because of the actress that played in the Witcher show too. Pretty much forgot about it immediately.
From what I know Sweet Baby Inc. is involved. Which is a studio that focuses a lot on DEI when it comes to narratives/story in games.
They already did not have the greatest track record, some good games, but a lot of mediocre and even bad games. It doesn't necessarily mean that the game scores are related to DEI, but the fact it keeps happening to games they're involved with says at least something.
The good games they've worked on have included some of the most praised games in recent years. If you want to ask why this keeps happening, you have to have massive blinders on to ignore the likes of God of War: Ragnarok and Alan Wake II, both firmly in recent memory, and also realize that basically no writer on earth could save something like Suicide Squad from its criticisms.
Did you know about this game?
Did you buy and play this game?
Did you actually like this game?
Are you one of the ~220 people who bought this game and didn’t spread the word to their friends.
It sounds to me like this game sucks. Maybe it was rotten from the start. Maybe they were forced to hire a bunch of mentally ill people with a massive chip on their shoulder to ‘advise’ and change the game to tick some boxes on a list. ( don’t you just love having fun according to a list of prescribed requirements? ) I bet the people working on it like that. Talk about a soul sucking job without passion. We will probably never know the truth.
You're parroting the line of dumb conspiracy theories known as Gamergate 2 pushed by a bunch of grifters farming engagement on YouTube.
Narrative consultancy companies like SBI don't force you to hire them, and if you choose to hire them, you don't have to follow all of their advice.
If you're interesting in curing yourself of the mindworms the YouTube algorithm has planted in your brain, please check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGmESJM6BFQ
The article is tongue in cheek, but I'm not sure where you're getting "pretty decent AA game" from. It got scathing reviews and has a worse average score than Forespoken. It's currently mostly negative on Steam so from what it sounds, it seems like a bad game that got zero advertisements because the studio gave up on it.
Forespokens hatred train was beyond-the-pale ridiculous. If every game was judged / brigaded as harshly as Forspoken was, the AAA game industry would collapse.
And honestly, Forspoken was a really fun game if you focused on what you were doing 99% of the time, which was traversal and combat. The story, quest design and characters were lackluster, but it wasn't nearly as horrible as people made it out to be.
"Scathing" feels like too strong of a word for this game or Forspoken's reviews. The majority of them seem to be right around that 7/10 range, and even the 5s share similar language more often than not.
Just got this for free with my new GPU. This game runs like (and looks like) shit. The 2012 Tomb Raider reboot literally looks better with very similar mechanics and runs at a higher frame rate all while using 1/10th as much hardware.
Whenever I turn a corner, my whole system freezes for a few seconds, and this is a near top of the line system. Characters look super robotic, and the special superpowers look like they're running at 144p resolution.
Sorry, folks. We're still working on the browser plugin that automatically hides/downvotes all social media content that raises the topic of Sweet Baby Inc. You'll just have to do it manually for now.
I would be careful with such generalizations - not because I'd be downvoted into a hole (I've turned the scores off and just DGAF), but it's epistemologically a bad habit. However, whatever I've seen so far that SBI had their fingers in does have a certain fellow-kids, safe-edgy, corporate-approved, plushie-anarchist tone, the dialogues are atrociously bad and disjointed from their theme (Sable's postapocalypse, for instance). They can do a less funny version of Joss Whedon's relaxed banter and they tend to stick it everywhere. But what I really dislike about SBI is that it's obviously a grift, making developers cough protection money to add pronouns and hair colors to characters.