Quick Look: Unravel

It might be relevant that in Swedish "a red thread" means "a common thread" or a theme.

Everyone's an expert when they're not on camera, lol.
There's always one.

Most brutal video game deaths of 2016 thus far. I feel so bad when Yarny drowns or falls off a big tree :(

I think the problem is that the devs had an idea about the character and the mechanics that comes with it and didn't really have any ideas beyond that. =/

Doesn't seem as blah as the QL made it seem. There is definitely puzzle-solving going on. Is it not intricate enough, or should the physics have been different? Or are the types of puzzles aren't clicking with them? Dunno. It's like how there are various puzzle types in Professor Layton, but despite most of them being logic puzzles, players usually dislike one or some types of em.

I'll definitely buy and try for myself. I don't think yarnie is as much of a "character in a story" type character as he is a "metaphor/vessel for a story," sorts like what you guys said as yarnie representing a "thread" of connections/memories of someone's life.

Definitely agree on the art though. Those mushrooms look so bouncy.

@jo_magpie: The level hub house was particularly great like that, it's pretty much spot on for an old person living in the countryside. Felt like I had visited there.

man i am so yarnied right now bruh

The comparisons to LBP and the statements about not feeling very satisfied about finishing the puzzles/section (other than the feeling of being happy you no longer have to play that puzzle/section) is giving me terrible Tearaway Unfolded flashbacks. I straight-up hated that game by the time I completed it, after having a real sense of wonder about it at the start.

Gorgeous visuals, though - I get a real Kooky Ce Vraci feeling (Jakub Dzorsky from Amanita Design [Machinarium, Samarost] did the visual design in that) from it!

@jo_magpie: Have you played many Amanita Design games? The Samorost series in particular might give you that same feeling (though Amanita is a Czech studio if I recall correctly).

This game just looks super-swedish. Quintessential Swedish fauna and flora, from the sea-side to the lingonberry and mushroom-filled mires.

There were two (what seemed to be) unintentional Wire references back to back.

"What up Bird"

I think he was talking about the floating buoy (or fishing bob or whatever) from The Sea. You can be in water as long as it's not over Yarny's head, just have to be on top of the buoy before the wave rolls in again.

The log in Berry Mire, though, (which I think is what you mean) was just on a current so all you had to do was wait for it to carry you across.

The controls can be a little finicky true. Complaining about not knowing how to move a kite up and down? Youve played games for decades and feel it didnt tutoriallize that enough? Wow.

These indie side scrollers just don't do it for me. Braid, Limbo... I just don't get it. I thought Fez would do it for me but I didn't get too deep in. Dust however was great. Maybe I only like my sidescrollers to be of the Igavania mold.

"You can find Yarnies in any nearby table mountain pines..."

Looks amazing but there seems to be very little beyond that.

It also doesn't look particularly challenging. Between streams and this QL I've seen a good slice and it has all been fairly straight-forward. Maybe the controls really are a lot more finicky than they look and perhaps the puzzles and timing ramps up at the very end. Barring that, though, the core challenge I'm seeing is avoiding overthinking.

It's like the game is trying to force you to chill out and keep it simple. The more convoluted a solution you come up with, the more challenging it becomes. So you end up wasting all your yarn on unnecessary shit or struggling to shimmy a floating log around when all you actually have to do is stand on one side of it.

In that way, it's almost quietly brilliant. But I dunno if "Keep It Simple, Stupid: The Game" could hold my interest long.

@drewbert Yarn.Create.Push.The beginning of a new game design. what if you had to use donuts instead of yarn?

@assinass: brothers is great, but for me it's more like a history lesson then my actual childhood. The scenery of brothers looks like how my hometown might have looked like 400+ years ago.

@eloj: Ye, picked the game up after watching the QL and the game just oozes traditional Scandinavian culture. It's like someone made a videogame about my childhood. Although actually it's about their childhood, which makes the game sorta strange. It feels like the game was made for its creators, not its audience.

Cute. As for Brad's "fiddly" complaint, i'm not seeing it here. I would have to play it myself but Brad's tendency to completely miss the most obvious things gives me the impression it isn't as bad as he is making it out to be. You really need a tutorial pop-up to figure out that pressing up and down on the stick moves the kite?

Man, Drew seemed really [unnecessarily] down on it in this QL. Only played a couple hours so far, but it reminds me heavily of a beautiful & heartfelt Limbo - what's not to love about that?

Yarnie don't play and Yarnie don't care.

A gorgeous-looking physics-based puzzle platformer that is almost zero fun to play? Yeah, Drew, the Trine comparison was incredibly apt.

Maybe he isnt this genre at all - so it is understandable - none of us get very excited to play a genre we have little interest in

livboi

It just made me want to listen to some better quasi-ambient music, so I found the Braid soundtrack on Spotify.

I think I'm in the "it looks fantastic but I don't think I want to play it" camp. Something about the jumping looks really off, not sure if it feels that way, though.

Looks abysmal. I mean... it looks nice, but also like no fun at all. It's also no fun at all to watch. Really grueling.

As many people have said, no real interest in this game, but I do wish I could give the nervous dev who was on stage for this thing a hug.

"You have to push up and down to control the kite, but the game didn't tell me so it took me six tries to even attempt to control it."

How far we've fallen...

everything except the art style?

This game is pure style over substance and Drew outright saying he would only buy it to look at it is the perfect way to describe it. It just yet another physics based puzzle platformer with fiddly controls.

Kirby, Yoshi or Yarny? Who wore it better?

When he started pushing the acorn, I said aloud, "ohhhh, a physics platformer!"

Edit: this game *looks* stunning, but the visual density also leads to a whole bunch of extraneous stuff getting in the way of seeing what you're meant to be working with when you're solving a puzzle. Part of the brilliance of LIMBO is that everything you were meant to interact with was immediately identifiable.

Also seems like there's one too many ways to interact with stuff.

Ah, that's interesting. Thanks. Makes sense as Brothers is a fantasy tale so set much further back than Unravel which seems contemporary.

Thank god you ended the QL there because it only gets more aggravating after that point.

As we strive to expand the reach of games, we will continue to have more and more varied experiences, much like cinema.

This appears to be the game equivalent of a sappy, shallow, sentimental film. Like The Notebook maybe? I don't really remember the film.

Maybe the game equivalent of youtube cat videos? HD cat videos?

Good ol' Swedish outdoors. Gotta say, as a swede, they really catch the feeling of swedish nature. It fills me with nostalgia of exploring woods and cliffs as a child. Might accually buy it and play it just for that. I can survive some a bit floatly controls for a bit of that feeling.

@drpotato: Fan det här tar mig tillbaka till när jag plockade svamp med farmor i skogen när jag var liten. Otroligt hur bra de lyckats pricka svensk natur.

Good on you Brad sticking through to the end. I get beutiful mindsoothing platformers aint the prefered game for everyone but it would have been a really bad quicklookending just abandoning the first new "puzzle" you get to after shitting on the game for 30min. I was worried there for a few sec.

Best looking "2.5D" game I have ever seen.

@olodus: Det är något speciellt med tallar, flugsvamp och lingon som känns så väldigt svenskt.

A game about an inside out cat-thing ripping out its intestines, tying them around things, climbing and swinging with them and stuffing them back inside itself?

This looks hella adorable

never forget

This really reminds me of summer (Norwegian here). Seagulls, the ocean, the vegetation.. It captures it beautifully.

Love the soundtrack. Puts me in mind of Howling Fjord from WoW, never a bad thing.

I don't get why Brad says it's not a bad game but can't say anything good about it other than "it looks amazing". Being constantly dismissive of everything makes it sound like a bad game to me.

I can't believe this is from the same developers that made The Fight: Lights Out. They've come a long way. This looks great!

Yeah, that really shocked me. You really need a prompt to tell you that pressing up and down moves you up and down? Jesus christ. Also at two levels in for Brad to claim unequivocally that there is no story is ridiculous.

Game looks good, Brad just seems bad at it.

The game looks absolutely gorgeous but the puzzles lead me to believe that I would likely just fluke them by accident and be easily stumped by them.