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dkirschner's Unravel (PC)
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| [March 7, 2017 11:05:15 PM]
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I played for about 90 minutes and got bored, tried to pick it back up today, immediately got bored. Thought I'd enjoy this more, but it's much slower paced than I'd anticipated. Unravel is a 2d platformer with beautiful scenery steeped in natural environments (I played three levels: a rustic farm-type area, a beach, and some woods with apples and berries). You play as "Yarny," a yarn...creature. An old woman drops a ball of yarn from a basket, and Yarny materializes and enters a series of framed photographs in her home. I think the point is that Yarny serves as a symbol of the old woman's memory, as he (she..it..) traverses environments in photographs, he sees figments of children (presumably her family members) playing and doing whatever kids do. I heard it gets a little sad later on.
The yarn platforming gimmick is neat for a minute, but loses charm, much like the repetitive (if beautiful and soothing and emotionally appropriate) music. Yarny unravels as he moves, leaving behind a string of yarn. If he runs out, he can't move forward. So he has to find balls of yarn to continue forward. He uses the yarn to swing like a lasso and reach high places, to string together on pegs to create a little trampoline to jump, and so on. Yarny can also drag some objects. I found the controls a bit sluggish; Yarny regularly didn't do quite what I wanted him to, and objects would move as if I pushed them harder than I did. Stuff like that kills the quality of the platforming for me.
Ultimately, this seems like a neat idea that gets dull rather quickly because you realize that it's really nothing new. The yarn could be replaced by other platformers' movement tools and it would be no different except with the limitation that you can't move forward if Yarny unravels. In my play of the first three levels, this was never a big problem. If I did run out of yarn, there was always a spool nearby, and it was just a matter of backtracking to be a little more efficient, getting the spool, and continuing. I'm sure the puzzles get more difficult later, but I think that would detract further from the fun of the game because it would just take even longer to progress and you'd have more situations requiring precision and manipulating objects and all this stuff that just doesn't feel that great.
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dkirschner's Unravel (PC)
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Current Status: Stopped playing - Got Bored
GameLog started on: Monday 6 March, 2017
GameLog closed on: Tuesday 7 March, 2017 |
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This is the only GameLog for Unravel. |
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