Unknown 9 franchise cancelled as developer admits game “didn’t come near” expectations, series “didn’t warrant any further exploration”

The studio behind bold Assassin’s Creed-meets-Tomb Raider transmedia attempt Unknown 9 has signalled an end to the franchise, following the poor performance of last year’s initial video game.

Unknown 9: Awakening, a generic globe-trotting adventure starring The Witcher TV series’ Anya Chalotra, “didn’t come near the company’s expectations,” the boss of developer Reflector Entertainment Herve Hoerdt said in a statement today, “and didn’t warrant any further exploration in this universe”. Ouch.

One of the Reflector’s two future projects – presumably another Unknown 9 game which had been in the “conceptualisation phase” – has now been cancelled, Hoerdt added. This therefore means the studio was “terminating this development line”.

“This decision correlates directly with the failure of the studio’s ambitious and courageous first project, a new IP with a rich transmedia universe,” Hoerdt continued.

Reflector had ambitious plans for Unknown 9 as an ongoing series, supported by podcasts, comics, novels, and several web series. While many of these have now been released, some ahead of Awakening itself, following a lengthy delay to the video game, none appear to have made any real impression.

Reflector will now go through a second round of redundancies, following previous job losses reported back in November 2024, as the company shrinks to a “single project approach the studio will adopt for the imminent future”.

This project is an “existing Bandai Namco IP” and is “shaping up well”, Hoerdt concluded.