Unveiling the Unknown ended up being the latest game to get picked up from my endless backlog. It primarily caught my attention due to the fact that it has a futa protagonist, which is actually a lot more rare than most people realize when it comes to H-games specifically. (Regardless of how common it is or isn't in other forms of hentai.) Sadly, aside from the fact that Lily (default name for MC) is very cute, the game doesn't deliver that well on the whole futa thing. By that I mean that throughout the story and the various scenes, Lily takes on a wholly male role, and there's like 2 scenes in total where anyone else even touches her pussy.... So in that aspect, it was pretty disappointing tbh.
I really wish that the game did more with Lily being a fully functioning hermaphrodite... However, that's not what happens here.
Beyond that, it's perhaps worth noting that the game is extremely vanilla in terms of its H-scenes and the consequences of said H-scenes. The acts that are presented are all pretty basic and you don't even get anything like anal (except for exactly 1 scene). What? DP with Hazel wearing a strap-on or using a double-dildo? Naw fam, can't have that. Even though you'd think the game was going there with everything that was being set-up with Aurora. Beatrice's affection stat being labeled "corruption" might make one think that there's more going on there... but that one doesn't really deviate from the feel good feel of every other scene in the game. Sure, the situation and world-building has potential for corruption and some other stuff... but what little of it is present is very poorly implemented and seems forced at best even if you take the more dubious choices offered by the game.
What, the rape tag? There's exactly one scene with rape in it in the whole game... and it barely counts. That imp was all over that dick real fast... Pregnancy? 2 scenes in the post game.
Basically, don't pick this up expecting anything particularly crazy fetish-wise. Hell, even the whole thing with cucking the Legendary Hero is turned into non-issue by the fact that it turns out that Kane's gay, while the path of just plain killing him is so half-assed in terms of writing that it's not worth considering seriously.
I'm not saying that any of that stuff is explicitly bad, given all the different preferences out there, but it's fair to note that people that aren't into the limited content of the game won't really get much out of it, if anything. H-wise anyway.
The last thing I'll note about the H-stuff that's on the "your mileage will vary" category, is the fact that the game features two different art-styles. Twisted Scarlet's own art style and the works of mdf-an which apparently inspired this entire game. The problem is that said art-styles are not complimentary in the least, being extremely different in style and for me at least, the transition from one to the other was very jarring. It didn't help that mdf-an's stuff has an unfinished air to it that rubs me wrong, and overall I preferred the scenes that had only Twisted Scarlet's art. That's all subjective perception and preferences though, so anyone else's mileage will vary, as mentioned before.
Moving on from just the H... If I were to choose something that's genuinely negative about this game, it's the fact that it has some attempted branching in it, but said branching isn't implemented properly, nor is it played straight, likely due to the limited and specific art that was being worked with here. Basically, the intended flow is the one where Lily is a nice, cute, loving girl with great empathy and sympathy who generally makes things better for everyone, including her idiot brother and even the Demon Queen that cursed her. Especially since said curse wasn't that big of a deal for Lily in the long run.
While the game offers options like killing Kane and/or the Lilith, the Demon Queen, and then enslaving humanity and whatnot... the fact of the matter is that it just doesn't properly build up to any of these things and doesn't have the proper build-up scenes for them. You don't really have the structure for it all, even though the potential for such developments exists in the world-building and whatnot. Quite frankly, those developments feel half-assed and like they were thrown in to add some "edge" to the game or something, but it doesn't really feel like Twisted Scarlet really took them seriously, or even wanted to write them if how they flow is any indication. Hell, the game doesn't even have art for Lily going full on Lilim Queen, even though it has succubus variants for all the girls. That shows pretty clearly that Twisted Scarlet didn't put in any real effort into the whole "Lily goes evil" direction.
Of course, properly implementing branching that'd lead to those alternative developments and ending variants would have meant that you wouldn't be able to unlock literally all scenes in a single playthrough... but I don't think that'd have been such a bad thing? The game already has a NG+-esque mechanic... Would it have been that hard to properly implement full on NG+?
No idea tbh, I'm not a dev after all...
Still, I think the game would have been better without the dubiously implemented alternate developments, or if said developments were written in with the serious kind of branching and story development they needed to actually make internal sense and whatnot.
Leaving the alternatives aside, the story and world-building is nice enough. It starts off with your typical Hero vs Demon Queen shenanigans, but then it quickly deviates more and more from the typical flow of such stories. While the conflict looms in the background, most of the story's focus is on Lily's shenanigans around the mansion and flows from one H-event to the next with conversations with the various characters present in between, and of course dungeon diving if you want to do that too. Said dungeon diving is optional, but, tbh, you should totally do it (and cheat if you really have too...) because the story makes a lot more sense if you do that every day and properly progress the various character upgrades as well as the manor management.
If you follow the rather obviously intended path, the game is a pretty nice feel good type of story with a good ending for everyone.
Moving on, the gameplay elements for Unveiling the Unknown are overall fairly simple. You don't have particularly deep mechanics that you need to master and the whole thing is pretty laid back. I had almost everything maxed out around day 22 (everything except the Crit-Damage and Health upgrades in the Research tab and of course Lily's Core upgrade and Deep Dreamer along with the so far endlessly scaling weapon upgrades). I wasn't trying particularly hard to max out all that stuff tbh, but I ended up doing it anyway. At that point, everything turns into a one-shot fest, and the only things that ended dungeon runs were either me not paying attention and getting got by a counter (which bypasses even stored evades) or building up so much heat that the attack stat couldn't keep building up fast enough to keep one-shotting enemies, at which point the first exchange that isn't evaded leads to death.
That said, it's weird how the game lets you reach 100% crit rate in the dungeon (or higher), but it seems impossible to reach 100% evade... (At the very least, I don't think I've ever seen the slime girl offer the succubus cloak with evade more than once per run even when running into her 10+ times using potions). It's weird because between Sniper being a thing and counters bypassing evade, it's not like 100+% evade would make you invincible either... Not to mention that there's no real point in endlessly diving either...
OH well, no point in thinking about it too hard.
The dungeon diving bit mixed in with the management bits was reasonably fun, but not amazing.
All in all, subjective enjoyment and narrative flaws aside, Unveiling the Unknown is a pretty good game. I can't call it an amazing one, but it's pretty good. If I were to bother with ratings, I'd probably push it up to 4 stars, though I'd say that it's difficult to really put a singular number on the whole thing due to how certain elements aren't as connected as you'd expect. (Eg. You can completely skip both the dungeon diving and stuff in town.) It's still not in "amazing" territory, but amazing territory comes with a lot of subjective assessment too, so not much stuff makes it that far in my book. Too bad that the game only seems available on Steam...