Unravel

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Every single level of this five- to six-hour adventure looks fantastic. Unravel creates the illusion of exploring each stage from the perspective of Yarny, our diminutive but charming protagonist. And by restricting the camera’s focus to the immediate foreground, it forces you to pay attention to the small details – tiny rocks, blades of grass, bright red berries, all of which are highly realistic and richly detailed. Playing Unravel feels like you’re looking at the world through a magnifying glass, and it’s wonderful to explore.

Whether he’s gaping at the beauty of the world around him or quietly shivering during a thunderstorm, Yarny’s adorable and relatable. While he has no facial features apart from two eyes, and his body is made up entirely of convincingly textured wool, he’s animated with such skill that he’s able to convey more of his inner joy and pain than many fully human characters.

But Yarny’s more than just expressive and cute – as a child’s homemade toy come to life, he’s the means by which I was able to return to a more innocent state of wonder, and more fully appreciate the natural world he explores. It all sounds rather grand, maybe a bit pretentious, yet in practice it’s a subtle and quietly effective device.

So much of what I love about Unravel is related to the emotional journey it took me on, but there’s also a strong gameplay experience to be found. Unravel features some fantastic environmental puzzles, which really come to life through Yarny’s wide range of special abilities.

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Like many whip-wielding platforming heroes, Yarney can swing across gaps, but being entirely made from wool, he can also rappel down walls, lasso distant objects, anchor platforms in place, tether objects to himself and each other, not to mention create high-wires, pulleys, and trampolines. While there are a few creatures capable of hurting Yarny, such as crabs and cockroaches, he possesses no combat moves, remaining a passive little guy throughout and maintaining his cuddly personality. To survive these situations, instead, he must hide or craftily find alternate routes around such dangers.

The sheer variety of Yarny’s skillset ensures that every solution is enjoyable to enact, even if they’re not perhaps the most challenging to figure out. The best puzzles come when the camera zooms out, and you must assess a much larger puzzle with multiple stages. These are much more difficult since Yarny is composed of a limited amount of wool, so if you perform unnecessary actions there’s a real danger of him unravelling before the puzzle is solved – if this happens, you must retrace Yarny’s steps and devise a more straightforward, less yarn-intensive solution. Sadly this mechanic isn’t used nearly often enough, despite its obvious potential for more challenging puzzles.

Relative to the strong puzzles, the pure platforming sections are more mixed in quality. In contrast to Unravel’s huggable appearance, there are sections where it’s almost impossible to avoid dying on your first attempt, no matter how sharp your reactions. I’m totally fine when this is related to puzzles that must be solved in order for Yarny to survive, but it sometimes feels like pure trial and error. For instance, in one particular section, you must scale a steep hill while avoiding falling rocks – a pretty standard platforming scenario, but here there aren’t enough tells for where the next rock was going to land that I felt I had a chance to avoid it without memorizing the pattern. I eventually reached the top, but it wasn’t at all satisfying; I felt like I got there through perseverance, not platforming ability.

It’s a shame, as the idea of challenge is well incorporated thematically. Unravel’s idyllic opening locations soon give way to much darker, sinister settings, where nature is overrun by litter, toxic chemicals, and heaps of rusted machinery. Even the scummier aspects of Unravel’s world look great – the garbage is detailed and textured, while the toxic waste possesses an eerie blue glow and violently fizzes should Yarny fall in. Within these darker sections, Yarny encounters fast-moving hazards, such as erratic piston-heads and gauntlets of vicious cogs. By upping the challenge, Unravel articulately conveys the menace of industrialisation, but the message comes at a cost: they’re some of the least enjoyable sections to play. Yarny’s movement speed isn’t well suited for this type of death trap, and sometimes he slips off platforms a bit too easily, or takes a touch too long to gather his own thread and climb to safety. This isn’t the intricate, precise platforming experience you’d find in Super Meat Boy or a good Super Mario Maker level.

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Initially Unravels appears to be an uplifting experience, but also there’s a real sadness to be uncovered. This melancholia springs from the way it plays with memory and explores our relationship to the past. To underscore this, Yarny accesses each level through a series of photographs displayed in a family home, where he becomes the literal thread which connects the present to the past, memories good and bad. Unravel leans heavily into this metaphor, and for the most part it works. Occasionally, during a stage, you’ll see a fuzzy apparition of Yarny’s family in the past. But by returning to these places, Yarny dispels the haziness of memory; with him present, everything is suddenly clear and connected.