Reflector Entertainment's Christophe Rossignol on Unknown 9: Awakening
The upcoming action-adventure game that launches in two weeks belongs to a new transmedia franchise
It’s always a tricky business to attempt to explain a sci-fi or fantasy universe to a newcomer. This is a great deal trickier to try and do with a brand-new franchise. And that is the task that stands before Reflector Entertainment’s Christophe Rossignol, who happens to be the creative director on Unknown 9: Awakening.
Setting the scene
A fortnight before the game’s October 18 launch, I caught up with him for a brief chat about the game, the universe it inhabits and all that it contains. “Unknown 9 is about humanity, the search for knowledge, acquiring more knowledge, what we do with that knowledge and how we try to become better,” he says enigmatically and adds, “It’s also about optimism, because when you look at the news, for example, there’s just bad news everywhere. Unknown 9 takes the view that there is magic around us if we are willing to open our eyes and see it.”
Awakening will technically be the third part of what publisher Bandai Namco calls the ‘Unknown 9 Storyworld’ to see the light of day, with a couple of digital comics (see here and here) and a podcast (see here) having already been launched. Once fully assembled, the ‘storyworld’ is also expected to include a novel trilogy and a ‘mystery component’ teased on the website. But for now, let’s stick with the game. “As you’ve seen in the trailers and previews, this is a third-person action-adventure game that is set in a fantasy world — close to our reality but not exactly our reality,” Christophe explains.
In order to better prepare for what awaits us on October 18, there are four key parts of the Unknown 9 lore with which it’s important to acquaint oneself. The first of these is the Leap Year Society, an elusive secret society whose goal is to bring enlightenment to humankind. Its members are supposedly your allies on your journey. Then, there are the Ascendants — a breakaway faction of the Leap Year Society that is a fair bit more extreme in its methods, and its members appear to be your adversaries.
What are these two groups feuding about? Why, the Fold, of course. This ‘otherworldly realm is said to contain immense power and knowledge’. It’s also the source of our protagonist Haroona’s abilities. And who is she? A Quastor. Dubbed “the Unknown 9 universe’s most curious minds”, this is a bunch that seeks to uncover the lost wisdom of our collective past. Haroona is a Quaestor born with a connection to the Fold.
“At the start of the game, Haroona sets off with a very personal objective of revenge, but over time, she will discover that there are two secret societies in search of knowledge — one that seems good and one that seems bad,” Christophe says, “In order to prevent the occurrence of a certain disastrous event, she will have to take sides.” Aiding her in her quest are the powers that Haroona gains from the aforementioned Fold. These powers, incidentally, appear to be the most eye-catching aspect of the game thus far. Here’s a small sample of what she can do:
Stepping up
The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and Beyond: Two Souls are two of the first names that come to mind when I think of mind-control and bodysnatching in videogames. These are just a couple of the tricks in Haroona’s arsenal (as the video above demonstrates) that is known in Unknown 9: Awakening as ‘stepping’. Very simply, this entails using energy from the Fold to “project one’s mind into the consciousness of another”. The outcome is the power to take control of the target’s physical and sometimes mental abilities, and make them do a whole bunch of things.
“The game offers a bit of navigation, a bit of exploration and a few puzzles, but really the heart of the gameplay is combining stepping with the stealth approach,” says Christophe when I ask him about the gameplay loop he’s most excited about players discovering. As we’ve ascertained thus far, Unknown 9: Awakening intends to send quite a number of adversaries Haroona’s way. How she dispatches them is entirely upto the player though.
“Most of the time the player can decide, ‘Do I go stealth mode?’, ‘Do I try to do some action through stepping before the enemy detects me?’ or ‘Do I go in for melee combat?’,” the game’s creative director explains, “And in the middle of the melee fight, if the player is overwhelmed or wishes to maximise their attacks, they can step into enemies at any time.” One of my all-time favourite games remains Ion Storm’s 24-year-old classic Deus Ex, and a major reason for that is this flexibility in terms of dealing with situations that it also provided. A number of games since have attempted to do the same to varying effect, and it remains to see how Unknown 9: Awakening pulls it off, but from the video evidence so far, signs look promising.
“You can incapacitate up to three enemies — four, if you really master the game — using chain reactions with stepping; for instance, you step into one enemy, then attack an interactive object, which in turn affects other enemies, and then you can return to your body and admire the results of your action,” beams Christophe.
Interestingly, stepping also provided the biggest challenge to the team at Reflector Entertainment. “[It was tricky] finding that balance between stepping and other gameplay loops, because we want the fight to be interesting and we want the player to use the stepping, but we don’t want it to be overpowered. This might stop them from using stealth or combat.”
And does he believe they cracked that balance? “I think we found the sweet spot. But while I don’t think we were perfect, I’m eager to see the comments from anyone playing and do better, because we always want to learn,” he offers, adding, “I will say however that stepping was something that came in very early in the making of the game, and the version we have settled on is probably the fifth iteration of the concept.”
And it was this idea of stepping that would go on to transcend the various media that this franchise straddles. “When we start dealing with this concept, we began to see possibilities beyond just the game. That’s where we start seeing all the possibilities,” he expands, “And then it was a balance, where sometimes the game was influencing the rules of the [broader world of the franchise], sometimes the opposite, and then we start expanding that with creative ideas coming from different media — some of which would be more interesting in the comic book or in the novel, and we tried to build strong foundations to develop this big new IP.”
Building a new IP
A veteran of such franchises such as Ubisoft’s Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed series, Christophe was one of the first people hired at Reflector Entertainment. “The studio was founded in 2016. I joined in early 2017, because I was looking for a different kind of project,” he recalls, “A project with a smaller scope where you could connect with everyone on the team, because I used to work on very big projects.” While on the human level this was important to him, there was another factor that drove him to Reflector Entertainment: A project that would go beyond the game.
“The transmedia project was something that was very interesting to me, because I love films, comic books, podcasts and novels,” he says, “Now, here was a way to work with creative people involved in the broader universe and mix our experiences to see what we could learn from each other. So that was very appealing to me.” And as you’d expect, the process of turning all these ideas into reality was a bit more complicated than if they’d been just building a game.
“At the start, we looked at what we believed were successful transmedia IPs or brands, and what they’d done right and wrong,” Christophe states, “We needed to build a Bible of rules basically that every medium in the universe must follow. And as we were building that, we were brainstorming ideas for the game. Obviously, when you make a game, the most important thing is to find the fun: Where is the fun?” We’ve already covered stepping, so we’ll move swiftly on.
Striking a balance between building a game and crafting a larger universe (with its contained lore) around it surely can’t be easy, right? “I would say that it’s not difficult, it’s challenging,” he clarifies, “We had an IP team that was in charge of collecting all the knowledge and making sure everything is cohesive. So it was a case of ‘Oh, we have that idea, does that break the rules?’ and then going back to the rules.” This is where that Bible of rules alluded to earlier truly underlines its status. “We established the rules, they are there and they are supposed to be canon,” Christophe adds.
His team had an interesting way of interpreting the rules. “Sometimes we have new ideas that may challenge the rules, and then there is the notion of ‘constraint in art’. And we embrace these two concepts,” he elaborates, “We don’t see the constraints as a block against doing something; instead we look at how we can challenge ourselves within those rules to find a better solution.”
In working with transmedia, one of the decisions taken early on in the Unknown 9 journey was to keep things easy to follow for audiences by ensuring that each medium told its own story with clear beginnings and ends. “You can start with any of the products in the IP, with the game being the centrepiece, but you're not forced to consume everything else. That was very important to us,” admits Christophe, “But where we try to do a little twist is that if you start playing the game, love it and the universe, and then decide to look at the comic book, the novels or the podcast, you will see connections. You will also realise there’s an overarching story linking all the media.”
T minus 14 days
One of the aspects that jumped out of the early trailers and teasers for Unknown 9: Awakening is that a section of the game is set in India and the protagonist is Indian (mo-capped and voiced by British-Asian actress Anya Chalotra). “We are a new studio building a fantasy world, and this is our first game so we tried to find an edge — something fresh that may interest new players to look at our games,” begins Christophe, “And very early on, we decided to avoid the common spaces that most videogames explore, and to pay homage to our source material (the Unknown 9 lore): ‘Let’s have someone from India leading that adventure’. It was not a big discussion.”
Noting that the team didn’t really anticipate any pushback for the setting and the protagonist, he adds, “This is a fictional adventure in a fictional world and we have many maps for different continents across the world.” At stages in the development cycle, the team conducted focus tests to ensure that no one was offended. “But we are not historical by any means and this is not a [historically] accurate representation. Our game is more of an homage, just as we pay homage to different countries in the world,” says Christophe before adding, “If players are interested and they want to know more, they can go through the resource material, or they can visit the country. They are grown up, you know, they are not stupid. That’s what I believe.”
This brings us to the elephant in the room, and one who has been gaining a lot of weight in a very short period of time: The supposed DEI agenda that’s coming to kill us all in our sleep. Apparently. “[The choice of location and protagonist] was nothing to do with looking for more inclusion. It was just what made sense for the story and the universe,” the veteran game developer says candidly, “Unknown 9 is a worldwide IP and there are characters from all over the world. Yes, the main character is from India, but we have characters from Great Britain, the US, Scandinavia, Mongolia and so on. As I said at the start, the game is about humanity and becoming better as humanity.”
As we near the end of our interaction, I ask whether there are any sequels in the pipeline. “[Launch date] is almost here, only two weeks to go. Then we’ll see what the reception is like, what we did well and what we did badly. I’ll talk with me bosses and then we’ll see what we do next,” he says, and adds, “We know we are not a AAA studio — we are a medium-sized studio, and we are making a AA game experience. So yes, we have an idea of what we’d like to do beyond this, but we have to like stop ourselves.”
Pointing to the game’s price point (Rs 2,999 for the base game), he continues, “It’s a midpoint price positioning, because this is the game we are. Right now our approach is to make a really fun first game. Hopefully, the players out there will enjoy it, they will want more, and then we can slowly try to become better and better and better.”
Unknown 9: Awakening launches on October 18th on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and PC.