When I first looked at Steam for this title, Unknown Number: A First Person Talker, I was a bit apprehensive as I have rarely encountered voice driven games. I had a bunch of questions. What would the game look like? How would the developers at Godolphin Games pull this off? What would the experience be like for the players? Could responses be diversified but still register as an acceptable answer for the story to progress? I appreciate Godolphin’s ambitiousness in this game as I quite enjoyed the story and testing out the new mechanics. As for this review, I’ll be splitting it into a few comprehensive parts.
Story
Climate change has been a super controversial topic. The conversation is almost unavoidable during elections, science classes, or after any large natural disaster. Books and movies will often hint at it, suggesting we take appropriate steps to stop it before there’s irreversible damage. However, I’ve never truly encountered the topic in a game – at least not the ones I seek out. Not until I played Unknown Number: A First Person Talker. While it doesn’t necessarily go in depth on climate change and its implications, I think the plot of the game is super cool.
You will play as someone named Casey who is assisting Ethan and Amanda on a heist over the phone. If you ever watched Money Heist (or its Korean spinoff), it’s sort of like that, except they’re stealing money for a good cause. The goal of the heist is to steal billions of dollars in crypto off an old oil rig owned by Sligoil (one of the biggest oil companies in this world). During the heist, you are tasked with completing several different puzzles so they can slowly acquire the money. Personally, I’m not that great at puzzles, and most of them were timed, so to say I was stressed would be a bit of an understatement. After the first few, I decided I needed my phone and the notes app, along with some pen and paper as assistance. Since the game takes place on a phone, it was funny but also embarrassing seeing how many times I had to call certain numbers because I kept failing the puzzle. Even worse, some of the puzzles I had to do while on the phone with Ethan and Amanda, and they were yelling at me for messing it up the whole time. I’d say if you’re super into that kind of thing, by that I mean the stressful puzzles, this game could be right up your alley. Though, I will have to admit that some of them are a bit tedious.
The story had lots of twists and turns toward the end of the game, which I definitely wasn’t expecting. I also wasn’t expecting different potential endings. During the end, I got the hint that there might have been different endings had I played with a little more common sense or I wasn’t so slow at completing the puzzles. However, I do appreciate the addition of multiple endings as I love replayability in games.
During my time playing, I actually felt like I was part of a heist. Kudos to Godolphin for the immersive experience.
Voice Acting
I knew the game was very much audio driven when I first downloaded it, but for some reason having good voice acting completely slipped my mind. The arguing between Ethan and Amanda, voice messages over the phone, demonic/slowed undertones with each puzzle call all really impressed me. I have nothing but praise for the voice actors in this game; I’m just super happy with it.
Game Mechanics
As I said before and as you probably read on Steam, this game is very audio/voice driven – meaning ALL the important parts of the game must be completed by using your voice. While this mechanic is really cool in theory and opens doors for what game developers can do, some parts of this feature can be buggy and a little disappointing. You’ll be saying “Yes” and “No” quite a few times in the game – which is to be expected – however I found that sometimes it has a hard time deciphering whether I said “Yes” or “No”. I’d say one or the other, and it would simply not pick it up or decide that I said “No” instead of “Yes”, forcing me to use a hint because they moved on and I didn’t pick up what they told me. My other issue with this is that you cannot diversify your answers. There’s no “Yep”, “Yeah”, “Mhm” or anything of that nature that you can say and the game will pick up. A lot of these answers come to me a lot easier, so I’d have to repeat myself for the game to understand me. Either that or Ethan and Amanda would get annoyed at me after having to repeat themselves (which they did a lot anyway because I could not, for the life of me, figure out some of those puzzles). Sometimes the voice detection also had trouble with pitches or loudness in my voice. I’m sure some of my issues could’ve been fixed with a better microphone, but the game didn’t allow for my headphone mic to be used.
With that being said, I did like the added use of the internet during the game. Although using the search engine in some cases was confusing, it really adds to the “I’m partaking in a heist from afar” vibe.
Overall
I really liked the story in the game; the effort Godolphin put into this title really showed. Although some of the mechanics in the game made it a bit frustrating and added to the game’s difficulty, I still found that it was fun for me to play – even if I did get a sadder ending. My overall rating would be 7.5 out of 10.
Unknown Number is available for Windows PC and Mac for $14.99 (plus a free demo) via Steam.
Related: Reviews by Maryanne Fadonougbo
"I've enjoyed gaming since I was little, playing games like Pokémon, Rayman, and Naruto every day. Besides that though, I've always had a love for writing. Now I am combining the two for the best of both worlds! My ultimate goal is to do narrative design for video games."
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