#original article

Player Puppet

Like I’m sure we all have, I’ve played a fair handful of games where the main character is more or less the player themselves.  Some are completely customizable, others start out with a character but turn into a blank slate for the player to manipulate and form through dialogue trees.  More often than not, these kinds of mechanics end up really clunky or cringey.  That character can feel disproportionally important to the rest of the cast, the dialogue won’t flow as smoothly as it could, and most importantly, the biggest draw is in individual choices and paths rather than telling a story with a goal.

But Dave Gilbert managed to use his incredible storytelling skills to make all of those problems simply disappear when it came to Unavowed.  And the fact that this kind of gameplay was completely new for Gilbert only makes the end result that much more satisfying.  

Yes, it can be argued that the player character is a blank slate sometimes, but the fact that they’ve almost completely lost their memory of the past year justifies this well.  The character is just as stupid as the player!  

And then when the big twist happens in the third act - that you’ve been playing as Melkhiresa all along and the evildoer you’ve been chasing was actually the human you thought you were - everything just gets blown out of the water.  It gives a sense of a lack of control to the player, where almost everything they’ve been building in the game up to this point is turned against them.  And oddly, that’s a really good feeling.  Because it shows you that the worst is yet to come.  That you don’t have everything figured out yet.  And in a game where you make impactful choices, fear of messing up is important.  Not just getting the “bad ending” for a certain character, but of messing up the story as a whole.

Dave Gilbert’s New York

I know one thing often praised about Gilbert’s dev work is how he uses real world settings, but can we just appreciate that his New York is so different compared to the thousand and one other stories set in New York.  (I say all of this as a small town pleb who only visits big cities on vacation and has never been to New York.)  Put on a cop drama or rom-com movie or anything else, and their New York is only a pretty backdrop and an excuse for a lot of interesting people to live in the same radius.  The characters could easily be dropped in any other big city, and things would play out exactly the same.

Dave Gilbert doesn’t pull that crap, especially with Unavowed.  He uses his setting with purpose.  The locations are chosen with purpose to reflect the characters who inhabit them and to give a certain flavor to each different mission.  It does have some sights that are more recognizable to non-natives than his other games (Lady Liberty as seen above, Wall Street, etc.), but I chalk that up to the fact that Unavowed focuses more on neighborhoods rather than specific addresses.  Even still, I think they fit the more grandiose adventure of Unavowed rather than the smaller, quieter stories told in the Blackwell games.

Sharing a Universe

Speaking of Gilbert’s other work, the fact that Unavowed exists in the same universe as Blackwell and The Shivah is just the icing on this beautifully crafted supernatural cake.  Though I can’t expect every game reviewer out there to play every game in existence and have eloquent, comprehensive thoughts about them, I am surprised at the number of people who have played Unavowed without playing the Blackwell series.  Because playing Blackwell definitely adds a lot more weight to the story overall.  Not so much that it detracts the story without that knowledge, but enough that it makes the world feel more rich and whole, rather than patchworking a bunch of supernatural elements together and seeing what it makes.  We’re simply seeing this world from a different point of view in Unavowed.

As an achingly enthusiastic Blackwell fan, it is devilishly clever and simultaneously frustrating how Dave Gilbert has crafted this story to reference Blackwell and even bring back a couple small characters, while reinforcing that anything resembling a crossover is impossible.  While the role of a Bestower/medium is a very important element of Unavowed, Rosa and Joey are never directly referenced.  The Blackwell series is done, but the universe where it happened did not live happily ever after and there is still work to do.  Stories to tell.  Ghosts to save, albeit in a completely watered down way.  (I still feel a little cheated we didn’t get the return of the ghost wind.)

Story time!  When I played Unavowed for the very first time, I went with the cop origin story, which I personally think is the best way to play as a Blackwell fan (or just in general).  “But the bartender!” I hear you cry.  “You get to be friends with Logan!”  Yes, yes, but hear me out.  As much as I love Vicki, she’s definitely got the smallest personal stake in this whole story.  Eli, Mandana, and Logan are already dealing with the supernatural.  They know their jobs in the balance of the universe at large.  Vicki just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  And playing the route that gives you an established relationship with her really helps why she joins the Unavowed in the first place make a lot more sense.  (Okay, maybe I just really love Vicki Santina.  Get off my case.)