Andraste

Today, I finished Unavowed and added a game to my top five adventure games ever. Given that the other four were released last millennium, that's a pretty big deal! I am not generally a person who believes that video games were better twenty years ago. In most genres, I think they've made great strides forward, and my top RPG list is a blend of things from the twenty-five years I've been playing them. Point-and-click adventures are in a different situation, though, as a type of game that was commercially popular in the nineties before almost dying off and spending some time as a sort of zombie genre until undergoing an indie Renaissance over the last decade or so. While I've loved plenty of those Renaissance games (and some from the zombie days, for that matter) before now I've never played one that I thought hit the heights of the best of the Golden Age. (The rest of my top five: Grim Fandango, Tex Murphy: The Pandora Directive, Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within and Day of the Tentacle.)

While Unavowed isn't a perfect puzzle box like Day of the Tentacle or as relentlessly inventive as Grim Fandango, it's a genuinely original take of the genre. A bit like if Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father and Dragon Age: Origins had a baby. (Probably no accident, since Jennifer Brandes Hepler worked on it.) From the adventure genre it takes its gameplay and charming pixel graphics, and from RPGs it takes the capacity to select your gender, origin story and dialogue and to make lots of in-game choices that eventually decide how things end up for the protagonist and everyone else. The puzzles aren't particularly tough, but they're always logical and engaging, and I'll take that approach over figuring out how to use an inflatable duck to get a key off some railway tracks any day. (No, really. That is a real puzzle in a real game. A game that is otherwise good, even.)

What I loved most about it was the story and the characters - like in any good BioWare game you assemble a crew of companions with different backgrounds and skills and get to decide who comes with you on missions. Half-jinn badass Mandana is my favourite, but I hope we get to see all of them again in a sequel or five. Alas, they did not follow BioWare's cue and include romances, but maybe that's what the sequels are for ...

And I loved the plot, which earned all of its twists. My favourite of which was ( spoilers. ) So that was very satisfying.

Anyway, if 'BioWare meets Wadjet Eye' sounds like fun to you and you like urban fantasy, you could find worse ways to spend $14.99 US on Steam.