Unavowed

Unavowed features a classic point-and-click style of gameplay reminiscent of the Monkey Island series or the various Quest games (such as King's Quest, Police Quest etc.) by Sierra Entertainment. In addition, the game offers more modern elements, such as choosing teammates for certain missions and a story that is influenced by the player's choices. Players can choose to play as a male or female character and must choose one of three backgrounds: actor, bartender or cop.

Each background alters the interaction with other characters and the dialogue noticeably. The game plays out in an episodic fashion similar to television shows with the player choosing which site to visit and which characters to bring with them at the beginning of each mission. In the mission, non-player characters have to be talked to and clues analyzed, culminating in a confrontation in which the player must decide the fate of a character or being, often with moral and lasting consequences. Then the team returns to their headquarters to start a new mission.

As with Wadjet Eye's previous Blackwell series, the game is set in a fictionalized version of contemporary New York City where magic and demons are real and takes place in various New York settings, such as Chinatown, Brooklyn, Staten Island and Wall Street. In an intro, the protagonist is shown to have been possessed by a demon and run amok in New York City for a year before the events of the game; how the demon came to possess the body differs based on the chosen backstory. Unavowed begins with the protagonist being exorcised by Eli, a sorcerer belonging to Unavowed, a group of supernatural investigators. Unable to return to their old life, they join Unavowed to reconstruct the events of the previous year.

Aside from the protagonist, the New York chapter of Unavowed consists of Kalash, a jinn and the chapter's leader and founder, Mandana, Kalash's half-jinn daughter and Eli, a fire mage who discovered his talents during the Nixon administration and has not aged since. During the events of the game, Logan, a recovering alcoholic and medium who travels with KayKay, the spirit of a dead ten-year old who helps him connect with other ghosts, and Vicki, a former police officer who also was the protagonist's former partner if they chose the cop background, join Unavowed.

The game was first announced by its designer Dave Gilbert in March 2016 on the Adventure Game Studio forums. It was the first game Gilbert wrote since 2014 and the first new intellectual property since 2006. Gilbert noted that he was inspired by remarks made by former BioWare senior writer Jennifer Hepler in a 2006 interview to develop a role-playing game which offers a branching, party-based narrative, but without combat mechanics or level progression of the player characters' abilities. Hepler is credited as story co-designer for Unavowed.

From the beginning, Gilbert planned to have the player character being mute, with the other characters responding to the text choices, akin to earlier games developed by BioWare which also featured mute protagonists. Gilbert explained this choice with the complexities of having two different genders and three backstories for the protagonist to choose from which would have forced the developers to record six different voice tracks. Unavowed was built using the Adventure Game Studio engine, modified to allow fully voiced dialogue and groups of characters appearing at once. According to Gilbert, he tried to develop Unavowed on Unity at the beginning because of how dated Adventure Game Studio already was but decided against it because the team had no experience with Unity and not enough time to learn.

Unavowed received a score of 87/100 on review aggregator Metacritic, indicating generally favorable reviews by critics. Commercially, it was an unexpected success: Wadjet Eye Games reported in April 2019 that the game had sold more than "everything we've done by far".

The game's visual design was praised by multiple reviewers as atmospheric and making good use of lighting and colors to paint a believable world where the supernatural exists. Critics also liked the higher resolution, allowing more details to be displayed. In a 2017 preview, PC World claimed that Ben Chandler, the game's artist, "has really outdone himself" and that the design helps to strengthen the idea of New York City "as this mystical place where the supernatural hides in the shadows". This sentiment was echoed by Rock, Paper, Shotgun, which concluded that the game features Chandler's best work to date. PC Gamer's Jody Macgregor wrote a separate feature article just focusing on the background art, positively comparing the artwork to scenes from classical adventures, such as the carnival in Sam & Max Hit the Road or the city of Ankh-Morpork from the Discworld game.