Unravel was an interesting game before I even pressed “start”, before I even downloaded it, and before it was even release. After stealing the EA E3 stage show for about 10 minutes and charming the pants of off a national audience, Unravel looked like an indie game that had gotten lost in Los Angeles and accidentally stumbled into the spotlight.
After years of making games that look like they’d be found in your local bargain bin, Coldwood Interactive’s most recent effort is part of a small but loud movement happening in games today as large publishers like Square Enix, Ubisoft, and EA look to model a few titles after the booming indie market with games like Child of Light, Life is Strange, Valiant Hearts, and now Unravel. While the results have been mixed, it’s fascinating to see these studios attempt games that are smaller in size, more honest in heart, and more thoughtful than your average big-budget offering. The circumstances alone make you root for a game like Unravel, a small fish swimming upstream in the high-pressure market of video game development. You can’t help but want it to succeed where it often falls flat – and that does happen on occasion.
The biggest problem with Unravel is that it makes a lot of promises to the player about the experience they’re about to have. At the start of the game the text tells players that Unravel is a game about what ties us together as people, promising messages of loss and love. That’s some heady stuff for a puzzle-platformer starring a character made of yarn named Yarny. The game seems at thematic odds with itself, trying to shove so much meaning and emotion into each level that I think it’s difficult to pick up on everything Coldwood is trying to lay down – especially in the relatively short six to eight hours they’re given.
Players begin the game watching the sad eyes of an old woman as she flips through a photo album. Once she has set the book down and left the frame – never to return – we assume the role of Yarny. The game’s central hub is this dining room where we first meet this intrepid yarn-creature and where the player returns after each stage is completed. Players explore a couple rooms connected to the aforementioned dining room, finding pictures that teleport Yarny to new locations where he must find a woven trinket that is added to the front of the photo album.
If you’re wondering how we went from wistful elderly woman to teleporting yarn-person explorer, don’t bother because that is just the kind of game Unravel is. Between the journey of Yarny, the past of the woman’s family, the strikingly beautiful worlds, the subtle warning of industrialization, and the vague titles of the levels, Unravel is asking a lot of questions and isn’t taking a lot of time to answer them. Thus, the easiest way to digest the game is to take everything at face value. You are this yarn creature and you’re finding these lost yarn trinkets because it will make an old woman happy. Trying to decipher anything more than that feels like you’re connecting the dots for Coldwood. And this might be the intention, Unravel may be simply filling its time with images, atmosphere, and ideas and hoping players will connect it back to the big-picture mission statement.
While the overarching themes and ideas in Unravel might be a little hard to decipher, it doesn’t make the game bad. In fact, when you just let all the ambitious themes go and enjoy the puzzles and platforming, there’s something almost zen-like about the way the game engages the player. Each world you visit in Unravel is beautiful, even the dark and scary ones. The attention to detail is striking and the atmosphere is so dense that you will likely be swept away in the rocky beaches, the quiet forests, and the frost-kissed fields. Much like the best atmospheric games, Unravel makes to you long to visit many of the places Yarny explores.
If you’re looking for the highlight of Unravel, look no further than composers Henrik Oja and Frida Johansson. Unravel boasts a score that is Jeremy Soule-like in it’s whimsical and inviting tone. While each world has been beautifully constructed, it still feels like Oja and Johansson’s notes are essential to what makes the game so indisputably gorgeous. This is a soundtrack I’m likely to keep in my rotation for a long time.
But what adds the most to Unravel’s warm blanket of gameplay is the design. For the most part, Coldwood constructs simple puzzles for the player to decipher, though as you get into the latter half of the game there are some more difficult moments that will likely give you a few minutes of pause. When the game gets into these trance-like stretches, it becomes something that you can lose yourself in, allowing Yarny’s journey through mountains, blizzards, and train yards to be something reflective and serene. Again, it’s not like the game manages to hit you with all of the themes and emotions it wanted, but it does leave time to let your brain to marinate in the aesthetics and messages Unravel throws at you.
Occasionally, this wonderful cocoon of tranquility is broken – and it’s usually an intentional shift. Unravel will throw chase sequences or other action set pieces into the level in an effort to change the pace of the game. Unfortunately, these efforts go against what makes Unravel so good. The controls are more well-suited to slow-pace puzzle solving than action platforming, meaning that they’ll likely betray you to your death more than once. Even the design of these sections themselves feel poorly constructed. Sometimes it can feel like random chance is your friend as much as the mechanics – obviously not a great feeling.
This doesn’t keep Unravel from being an overall enjoyable experience. Most of the game is spent in that wonderful head space I mentioned earlier, where you’re just so overcome with the impressive visuals and score that there’s little else you care about. This beauty adds to an infectious charm that makes Unravel an endearing package. But there isn’t much depth beyond that. The talk of that which binds us together and other ideas so ambitiously promised, never struck me as something Coldwood mined with much success. The most interesting introspective discoveries in Unravel come organically from its beauty and meditative gameplay. Sometimes, the simple things are the best. That seems to be the real message of Unravel.
