Blackwell Unbound
The year is 1973. The sound of a lone, ethereal saxophone drifts over the Roosevelt Island promenade, while a series of accidents plague a midtown construction site. The citizens of Manhattan take no notice of these events, let alone think they are connected.
Blackwell Unbound is a point & click, adventure and indie game
developed and published by Wadjet Eye Games.
Released on January 13th 2012 is available in English on Windows, MacOS and Linux.
It has received 701 reviews of which 659 were positive and 42 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.8 out of 10. 😎
The game is currently priced at 1.79€ on Steam and has a 60% discount.
The Steam community has classified Blackwell Unbound into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at Blackwell Unbound through various videos and screenshots.
Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS:Windows ME or higher
- Processor:Pentium or higher
- Memory:64 MB RAM
- Graphics:640x400, 32-bit colour: 700 Mhz system minimum
- DirectX®:5.0
- Hard Drive:200 MB HD space
- Sound:All DirectX-compatible sound cards
MacOS
- OS Version: 10.11
- Architecture: 64bit
- Memory: 2 GB
- Storage: 1.5 GB
Linux
- OS Version: Ubuntu, Debian, Arch - (64 bit)
- Processor: Pentium or higher processor
- Memory: 2 GB
- Graphics: OpenGL
- Storage: 1.5 GB
- Sound Card: Alsa/PulseAudio/DSP
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
It is shorter than the first game, but my god this feels like even more of a realized story and a really solid prequel. Like, just like the first game the locations are minimal, but the vibes it gives from its art is just....vibes man, you know what i mean. Once you play it, you'll catch them vibes too. Not gonna, i could've done with a separate trilogy of Lauren Blackwell cases herself, because she is such a fascinating character. And I mean....Rosa is good and all, but a big booby chainsmoker 70s private investigator girlfriend is something we all desire for man. But yeah, amazing game, no doubt about it.
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Pretty fun, just as good as the previous entry in the series. Once again, the voice acting was mixed but the gameplay and writing were fantastic. I especially loved the music, which is just as well since there's a focus on music in the story.
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I've played this game multiple times and each time I enjoy every moment of it. I love this series so much and I just love coming back and revisiting the stories. Also, it's very fun to go back and try to get all the achievements. Another point towards solid replayability. It's just a fun cozy mystery game.
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"Blackwell Unbound" is a very short (ca. 2h) point-and-click adventure with a "paranormal investigation" theme. It is the second game in the "Blackwell" franchise and acts as a prequel to the first one. While it is overall a better game than its predecessor, it does share some of its problems. 1. Story & Setting You play Lauren, the aunt of the first game's protagonist, in a 1973 New York setting - several decades before the first game, which started with Lauren's death. You're a medium and work together with your spirit guardian (the ghost Joey who already featured in the first game) to help confused spirits pass into the afterlife. The game starts with two seemingly unrelated potential ghost sightings that warrant investigation. You then gather more information about these two ghosts and their prior lives. Since the two cases run in parallel, you can switch between them when you get stuck, and return to the problematic one once you got a new idea, which is nice. Contrary to the first game, the ghost (Joey) is now also a playable character. You can (and have to) switch between Joey and Lauren to solve many puzzles, as each character has limitations that don't apply to the other. While the game's premise isn't particularly original (at least not anymore in 2024), I found the cases and stories more interesting than in the first game, whose "young students play around with an Ouija board" theme felt terribly cliché. The stories in "Unbound" were fresh enough to capture my curiosity and make me care for the characters. They hold together pretty well, until the logic unfortunately breaks down at the end of the game: There is a culprit who had no plausible way of getting the information they required, unless you assume specific supernatural powers that were neither indicated nor even hinted at in either of the two games, and which wouldn't mesh well with the established lore. The ending also includes yet another callous and unnecessarily cruel act while ignoring very obvious, less violent, alternative solutions. One detail that I appreciated a lot, was the reference to Joseph Mitchell, a real-life reporter with a bit of a mystery around him. Look it up, it's an intriguing story, but perhaps do so after completing this game, as the details are slightly spoilerish. 2. Gameplay & Mechanics The game's main mechanics are puzzles (some inventory-based, others environmental or deductive), conversations with choices, and combining clues in your notebook. The puzzles make more sense and are generally better thought-out than in the previous game. Turning Joey into a second playable character enables unusual and original puzzles, though his abilities are used only sparingly. I never got stuck - even when I wasn't sure what to do, a simple "try everything" approach usually worked, partly because there aren't many interactable objects in the game (possibly even fewer than in the first one). This isn't great for immersion, but it does make the puzzles easy to brute-force if necessary. That said, the puzzles are not without problems. Right at the start, Joey sees information that Lauren has to use a bit later, but they never talk about it, so she can't actually have that information. Later, you have to enter an apartment number that consists of a letter and a digit, which are given to you separately. That leaves two ways to combine them, and if you do it in the way that the game doesn't expect, you get the response that you're "not even close" - which doesn't make sense considering that you got both the digit and the letter correct, you'd just need to switch their positions. The puzzles also require a lot of backtracking between various locations, which didn't bother me personally, but it's something that many players don't appreciate. The conversations are sometimes interesting, but hardly constitute puzzles. You can keep talking to people until you trigger the response that advances the story. The "clue combining" mechanic lets you select two clues from your notebook, and if they fit together, then Lauren may realize that and a new clue may become available. I found the implementation more intuitive and less frustrating than in the first game. I can't tell if this is because the clues are clearer, or because I understand the mechanic and the designer's thought processes better - I suspect that it might be both. 3. Graphics & Presentation The game uses AGS, a primitive tool for creating graphical adventure games that was frankly outdated even when this game first released. That said, "Unbound" does a better job than the first game at circumventing the engine's biggest weaknesses. Most environments fit on a single screen, so the atrociously slow and janky side-scrolling of AGS is less of a problem. Graphics are still very coarse at a base resolution of 320x240, there are still letterboxes on the sides of the screen, and the mouse cursor still has the size of my thumb on my 43" monitor. The graphics looked crisper and more aesthetically appealing than in the first game, though. I'm not sure if they are actually better, or if I just found better settings. There are barely any sound effects in the game, which feels weird considering that the game takes place in one of the world's busiest cities. There is some background music, which (in some scenes) features jazz tunes played with a saxophone or piano - I liked that much more than the music of the first game. All characters are fully and competently voice-acted, most of the dialogue feels natural and believable. The voice-acting continues to be a high point of this series. 4. Usability & Accessibility The game offers simple on/off toggles for speech, subtitles, and developer commentary. No other in-game options exist, not even a volume control. There is an external tool that lets you select some graphics options, but most of them made the image look worse. The game can be played exclusively with the mouse. Some functions can also be accessed via the keyboard, with no way of rebinding keys. You can save manually anytime outside of scripted scenes and conversations. I didn't notice a limit to the number of savegames you can have. Achievement Hunters may be interested in hearing that some of the game's achievements are relatively annoying to obtain. I did not encounter any bugs. 5. Conclusion While the game's engine definitely shows its age, and many better point-and-click adventures exist, I feel that "Blackwell Unbound" holds together well enough to recommend it to fans of adventure games and "paranormal investigation" stories. I would suggest getting it on a sale or in a bundle, though.
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The second title of the Blackwell pentalogy is a prequel, starred by Rosangela's aunt, Lauren _ who is way more cool than the niece, despite being so sad and a nasty chain-smoker. The story happens in only one night in 1973, but this time it concerns 2 different and seemingly unrelated simple cases. Also, now you control Joey too, and you'll need to swap between them (if playing with keyboard and mouse, the keys to make the switch are smart: J & L) to solve puzzles, which gives the game a little more complexity. But it's still an easy game to breeze through, which I did in little more than 3 hours (curiously, about 30 minutes less than it took me to finish the simpler "Legacy"). But, to not get stuck, you need to remember to use the phonebook and the telephone (welcome to the pre-internet days!), check all the photos and documents, take some pictures etc. (An important hint: besides going through walls, Joey can look at things that Lauren can't.) The game is fortunately very streamlined and it only gives you the tools you need, so you won't suffer from inventory overload or having to check every little thing in every new ambient. Also, there are quite a few easter eggs, and some of them trigger achievements. The extras the game provides are pretty cool, so check them out after things get real ugly . All in all, a better game than its predecessor.
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 19 November 2024 05:23 |
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| SteamSpy data | 18 December 2024 22:53 |
| Steam price | 23 December 2024 12:46 |
| Steam reviews | 23 December 2024 02:01 |
Online players
1
Developer
Wadjet Eye Games
Publisher
Wadjet Eye Games
Release
13 Jan 2012
Platforms