I'm not sure if it's encroaching burnout or the ongoing national mood or what, but there's been some perfectly genial Indie games of the past few months that immediately started rubbing me the wrong way because of one asinine design quirk or another. Coldwood's first Unravel game, which stretches the definition of Indie given EA's involvement, is a 2D puzzle-platformer that revolves around its central character's yarn-like properties, and how they can use a yarn trail that follows them everywhere to swing on hooks, use them as temporary anchors to rappel, or create bridges between multiple points which can also act as trampolines. The game's not lacking for ideas, tossing in various hazards - the protagonist Yarny is a tiny knitted figure, so pretty much anything omnivorous is a threat - and set-pieces across each of its dozen levels.

However, it is heavily dependent on physics that don't always want to play nice or produce reliable results. Couple this with a trophy - again, inessential but nonetheless a design decision someone somewhere thought was a good idea - for completing every level without deaths, and you have a recipe for consternation. Yarny can die at any moment from an unexpected trap (deliberate), physics going nuts (not deliberate), or right at the end of the level after fifteen minutes of progress because you spent a little too long in the water or fell into soft snow and died somehow. I gave up on the Platinum almost immediately due to this, and being the completionist braincase that I am it cast a pall over the rest of the game. I've scattered a few screenshots in this review to highlight these physics-y instances of pure irritation.

Outside of all that though, Unravel is banking on its charm. Some of that is due to the cute central character, who tries to tap into the wholesomeness of the various Yoshi and Kirby games that also followed the knitting and crocheting recipe sheets, and then surrounds it with a slightly more melancholy story about an old lady and her photo album. The specifics of this incidental story escaped me since I was too busy getting mad at the wonky physics, but it appeared to go through many stages of this woman's life as a child playing on the slopes of her Scandinavian home, a brief tryst with another woman (I may have completely missed what that stage was about), and then a long and fulfilling marriage with some guy that appeared to lead to children and grandchildren before the husband passed away. The seasons change also, getting more wintry as the game progresses, which in turn allowed the developers to set up all manner of seasonal weather puzzles/obstacles such as spring showers and winter snowstorms. The micro-sized environments are gorgeously rendered, as close to lifelike as I ever tend to see in games barring some of the animals involved and the incongruously cartoonish Yarny itself, and the orchestral score does the usual thing of picking up in moments of dramatic action and then dropping the tempo or disappearing entirely during the game's more serene and moody moments. Definitely can't fault the game for its presentation.

But yeah, once a game's first impression loses you it's hard to recover, and I found myself just trudging through the game's procession of occasionally annoying puzzles and obfuscated darker environments out of a sense of grim determination. If I was meant to be lost in a bubble of quiet awe or whimsy throughout this time, that illusory enchantment had completely failed to take hold and I just found it to be another physics platformer that, like the rest, was simply too arbritrary to feel all that rewarding or pleasant. Establishing a flow in platformers is a major component of their enjoyment factor, and there's no flow if a swing is slightly mistimed and the physics decide to throw you into a wall, or a rock rolls the wrong direction when you're trying to set it up as a stepping stone, or you get accidentally smushed rolling that same rock some three minutes after you last found a checkpoint. It tries to go for some nuance with how much yarn Yarny can use at any one time, becoming distressingly emaciated as it literally approaches the end of its rope, and build some puzzles around the most efficient use of string, but lacking a more obvious way of telling how much yarn Yarny has left (maybe an on-screen gauge, getting off this "no UI it'll break the immersion" high horse in the process) it's not always the most intuitive approach, especially as most of the time Yarny seems to have an infinite amount of string and can jog across entire fields and mountains without issue. One scenario even had me restarting the whole level because I hit a checkpoint and then went back to an earlier checkpoint because I was checking to see if I missed any secret collectibles (each level has five); at that point there was no way to reach the third checkpoint along in the series due to an insufficient amount of yarn. Most of the game's more clever touches had drawbacks like this. If anything, I'd say the floaty platforming and the way you just slip off many of the more rounded objects reminded me a lot of LittleBigPlanet, and that is not a compliment by any stretch.

Safe to say I was wholly underwhelmed by Unravel and spent most of the playing time in a state of vexation due to random little quirks of misfortune. The funny part is that I bought it in a bundle with its sequel - which doubles down on its no death trophies by creating several of them, and then adds time trials as an extra dollop of obnoxiousness on top - so I'm doubtful I'll ever get my money's worth out of that decision. I'll keep trying these physics-based puzzle-platformers because the Indie industry seems to want to produce a whole lot of them per annum, but their track record certainly hasn't been great so far.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

This game probably deserves more attention than what it got and I also remember the graphics looked great but I fell off the difficulty hard.

Jeff G. complained on Beastcast 304 that Limbo and Inside were floaty and slow but at least that made them forgiving games that I could complete.