Bottom Line: Wadjet Eye Games has crafted the smartest point-and-click adventure in a decade—a party-based, choice-driven urban fantasy that treats you like an adult and rewards you for playing it more than once. The puzzles are a touch soft, but the writing is razor-sharp.
The Gameplay Loop
Unavowed runs on a loop that feels closer to a tactical RPG than a traditional adventure. You return to the Unavowed's headquarters—a bar, naturally—between missions. You take the subway to a borough. You investigate a supernatural incident, solve it, make choices, and come home changed. The subway rides are the connective tissue, and they're one of the game's quiet masterstrokes: your two chosen companions banter, argue, and reveal themselves during the commute. It's characterization smuggled inside a loading screen, and it works far better than it has any right to.
The companion system is the real innovation, and it deserves specific praise. Most adventure games hand you a single protagonist and a single correct solution. Unavowed hands you a two-person toolkit that changes every mission. Bring Eli, the half-jinn, and you can melt a lock or torch an obstacle. Bring Mandana, the immortal warrior, and brute force becomes an option. Bring a spirit medium and you can interrogate a corpse for information the living won't give up. Because you choose your pair before each mission, the same scenario has multiple valid resolutions—and the game never punishes you for bringing the "wrong" team. It simply adapts.
That design philosophy—multiple paths, no dead ends—is where Unavowed quietly reinvents what a point-and-click can be. The old genre trained players to hoard every item and try every combination out of paranoia. Wadjet Eye trusts you instead. Solutions flow from who you brought and who you are, not from pixel-hunting a screen for a hidden rusty key.
The Writing
Let's be direct: the writing is the reason to play this. The dialogue is sharp, the characters are specific, and the moral dilemmas refuse easy answers. You will make a call that saves one person and dooms another, and the game will not tell you whether you were right. Companions have full arcs. NPCs remember your origin. A conversation you have as a Cop plays out differently than the same beat as an Actor. This is branching done with intent, not spectacle.
Where It Softens
Here's the honest knock. The puzzles are easy. If you come to adventure games hungry for the throat-grabbing difficulty of a Monkey Island or a Myst, you'll find Unavowed's obstacles gentle—more narrative speed bumps than genuine walls. The party system creates flexibility, not challenge. You rarely feel stuck; you feel guided. For some players that's a feature. For puzzle purists, it's the one place the game trades depth for flow. The overall difficulty curve stays low throughout, and the mystery, while compelling, never asks you to sweat.
That's a deliberate choice, and it's the right one for the story Wadjet Eye is telling. But it's worth naming plainly: this is an adventure game you play for its characters and consequences, not its brain-teasers.