Unavowed (2018)

Interested to see how much RPG Dave put in his adventure and how many Blackwell references there are. 

Okay, played through the opening and the first mission. There's some cool stuff in here - it looks great as always, the music is good if you like New York jazz, and the voice acting is solid too. Also, the opening is nice and dramatic, starting with you waking up to find yourself having a demon exorcised and then flashing back to when you got possessed and killed a bunch of your friends. Then you help the exorcists (the Unavowed, a league of supernatural do-gooders) defeat a Void Realm creature and join their team. After that, you're off on your first mission to investigate some Void activity, figure out what happened and help people if possible - quite a Blackwelly set-up. There are some effectively creepy and shocking moments in there. RPG stuff is pretty light, just making a few decisions about how to deal with various beings, and conversation choices that may or may not do very much. And there's already been some ghost lore talk with an oblique reference to Rosa! Probably smart to get that done early so Wadjet nerds can relax and enjoy the game.
There is some clunkiness, though. Portraits still flicker in and out between dialogue lines and have odd placement at times - even aside from that, they're even less necessary with the increased resolution, imo, they just block the drama and spectacle. The separate sound levels of VO, music and sound effects vary quite a bit from scene to scene (or conversation to conversation) and so I had to lower the latter two down to 10% and keep VO at 100% just to make sure I could always hear dialogue. Plus there's still the occasional pop or blowout. And some little UI quirks like how when characters are doing background dialogue, subtitles come up even though I've turned them off, and when a character pauses between lines, a little "..." comes up in a text window. And the game doesn't always keep track of what characters already know. Walk animations are slow and stiff and characters do some very unnatural synchronised pathfinding, all suddenly walking at the exact same pace in the exact same direction at the exact same time!
Puzzle-wise, there's a lot of the Blackwells here too - lots of finding passwords on sticky notes, replacing broken fuses and swinging back and forth between dialogue trees. You defeat the void creature by rummaging through bins and putting cloths up drainpipes while he and the Unavowed stand in an infinite pre-battle shit-talk loop. Hopefully I get to do some magic soon! I do at least have my teammates, a djinn (who uses her sword to open doors) and a mage (who handles fire to provide light and melt stuff), so I can indirectly do some stuff there, though mission 1 was a bit of a milk run. 

Played through a couple more missions. My main takeaway is that this is, essentially, more Blackwell. I had got the impression (probably from a mix of interviews and critical reactions) that the RPG elements were mechanically more deep than they are, that there would be turn-based combat and what have you. I wasn't sure I'd like it, but I was curious how it would work. In reality, it seems that the only things that change are incidental lines of dialogue and some puzzle paths. So, say you choose at the start to be a female actor rather than a male cop, when you need to persuade an NPC to let you do something, your dialogue option is 'pretend to be a journalist' rather than 'say you're a cop'. You can choose two team members per mission (though you make everyone get on the metro before picking where you're going to go or whom you're going to take, for some reason, which is pretty funny!) and if, say, you pick the fire mage rather than the ghost whisperer, when you need to find the keypad combo to get in somewhere then you ignore the ghost hovering next to it and instead read the memory of the burnt piece of paper. You also get variations on conversations depending on which characters are there, of course. But yeah, otherwise, it's 'show up to a New York street and try to figure out what happened by wandering around unlocking dialogue tree branches and finding an anniversary date to unlock a door' or whatever.
In his review for RPS, John Walker said that the puzzles pick up a bit later, but I'm not confident I'd agree. Honestly, I'm a bit burnt out on these after having played five of them, so I'm giving up on this, at least for now, Maybe some day I'll come back to it.