At first glance Unravel seems like it has all the makings of
the next great indie sleeper hit. It
looks great, has a “cute” mascot character, and promises interesting puzzle
gameplay and an emotional story. Then
you actually start playing it and realize it is extremely shallow and not
actually all that fun to play. What
could have been a GOTY contender based on pre-release hype turned out to be
just another mediocre indie game with lots of potential squandered on so-so
execution. See our review for all of
the details.
Game Details
- Publisher: Electronic Arts
- Developer: Coldwood Interactive
- ESRB Rating: “E” for Everyone
- Genre: 2D Puzzle Platformer
- Pros: Amazing graphics; some decent puzzles
- Cons: Sub-par gameplay; story falls flat
- MSRP: $20
Unravel stars a little creature made of red yarn named Yarny
who uses its yarn body to swing around levels, build bridges, and more as it
explores realistic worlds made of normal everyday objects that seem like
impassable mountains to something as small as Yarny. The story of the game follows Yarny as it is “born” out of an old
woman’s knitting kit, but you get the feeling something bad has happened
recently. The game’s 12 levels take
place in memories that you access through pictures located around the house
(kind of like Super Mario 64). The
memories start out pleasant enough, but soon turn dark as you slowly learn
about the tragedy that struck this family.
The only problem is that, while the game desperately wants
to tell a mature story and elicit an emotional response from you, it flubs the
storytelling so badly that you don’t ever actually get emotionally invested in
anything that is going on. You only
ever see the story as brief flashes of memories that pop up for a couple of
seconds in each level, and then you’re left to try to put the actual story
together yourself. Everything is so
brief and ambiguous, however, that you can only ever draw the most basic and
obvious of conclusions, which isn’t a very satisfying way to experience a story
and does nothing to justify the storytelling method used here. Not only does the story fail to draw you in,
but Yarny itself isn’t very interesting either as it never really does anything
to make you care about it.
Likewise, the gameplay starts off promising but quickly
proves to be as shallow and uninteresting as the story. Unravel is a 2D puzzle / platformer where
you use Yarny’s yarn to lasso hooks to swing around or make trampoline jumps by
tying two objects together. Yarny only
has a limited amount of string, however, so you have to either backtrack to
untangle the string and get some slack, or find balls of new string scattered
around the levels. Puzzles are
generally limited to simply figuring out how to get past obstacles, but
sometimes you have to do something more interesting like figure out how to make
Yarny start a boat motor or operate heavy machinery or something.
The gameplay sounds interesting enough, but the execution
leaves something to be desired because it is extremely inconsistent. Sometimes Yarny’s string lasts significantly
longer, or shorter, or trampolines bounce you much higher, or Yarny can or
can’t move an identical object to something he could or couldn’t move
previously, or Yarny won’t grab a ledge it looks every bit like he should be
able to. The game constantly changes
the rules on you with every new puzzle, and this inconsistency makes the game
frustrating to play. The puzzles are
never particularly difficult to figure out, but when the game is moving the
goal posts on you every other minute it just gets annoying to play more
than anything. Even worse, the game
just isn’t particularly fun to play.
Yarny is slow and sluggish and not fun to move around.
The presentation, at least, is one area where Unravel
doesn’t disappoint. The game looks
absolutely gorgeous and the environments you explore are borderline
photorealistic. I’m not really a fan of
Yarny’s design, though. I find it to be
kind of ugly and creepy and off-putting, like Sony’s Sackboy. While the environments look great,
foreground and background objects tend to blur together, which can make it hard
to tell what you can actually interact with.
The soundtrack is also extremely well done, though perhaps a bit too heavy-handed
with its “you should feel this emotion now” music cues.
Ultimately, Unravel often feels like a game designed simply
to check all of the “Indie Darling” boxes rather than something built with
heart and love. There are moments where
a puzzle is particularly clever or you do something cool like fly on a kite or
see a giant moose in a meadow, but those moments are too few and far between to
make up for the inconsistencies and frustration present everywhere else. The utter failure of the storytelling is
also very disappointing here. Unravel
isn’t by any means a bad game, but it isn’t particularly special, either. I say skip it, as there are better indies
out there that are much more effective at everything Unravel wanted to do.
Disclosure: Review code provided by publisher.
