Sew much more than your average platformer
The word ‘charm’ is horribly overused when it comes to indie games. It’s almost as bad as ‘quirky’. (Don’t even get us started on ‘whimsical’.) Yet when it comes to describing the adorable Yarny, a knitted character who leaves a trail of wool behind him, there just aren’t many words that suit Unravel better. Charm positively seeps out the screen during our extended hands-on. We’re immediately powerless to resist feelings of distinct fuzziness as we trot through a garden filled with fluttering butterflies and surprisingly satisfying Limbo-esque physics puzzles.
Yarny is all about, well, yarn. He leaves behind a trail of the red stuff as he wanders through the world, literally unwinding his own body in order to explore. To stop yourself from fully unravelling, you need to collect more yarn as you progress and that means puzzling your way towards knots of extra string scattered around the delightful countryside of northern Sweden. It might layer on the cute – awww, he’s rubbing his head where it got hit by a tumbling apple! – but Unravel’s mind exercises are suitably crunchy from the start. You can throw yarn like a lasso to snag pointy objects in levels to pull yourself up, and attach string to two points to use as a bridge or even a trampoline to bounce to inaccessible areas.
The controls are pleasantly intuitive, too. Swinging on a piece of yarn but want to make it shorter? The left trigger will gather your yarn back to your body, while the right will unravel a little more to give you a bit of extra leverage. Add in the fact that you can drag items, and things get significantly more complex. We fall out of a tree with some apples, before ignoring the fruit altogether and wandering further through the level. Pulling a lever fills a pool with water, only for us to make the unfortunate discovery that Yarny deals with the wet stuff about as well as the Wicked Witch of the West. It takes a few minutes before the lightbulb goes off and we realise we need to create a bridge of string to bounce the apples over to the pool, then use them as flotation devices.
Coldwood Interactive is focusing on emotion and the beauty of the world around us as Yarny embraces a mission to let a grandmother see her children again – but there’s plenty of challenging game here, too. We clamber up a tree with some complex trampolining and swinging, only to find a kite at the top. Grabbing on lets us float through the treetops but it takes some precise dodging and juggling of the string’s length. Add in the fact that Yarny is just so appealing to watch and it’s horribly disturbing to let him die. A beautiful art style and the instant attachment to Yarny means this will be tugging at your heart strings far faster than you’d like. Knot bad at all. Louise Blain