Released on my birthday, Unravel is some kind of miraculous cosmic gift. Rarely is there a work of art so tailor-made for me, so informed by my own passions and imagination, so uncanny in the way that it keenly reflects the inner workings of my heart.
On paper, Unravel
is a physics-based puzzle-platformer that stars Yarny, a tiny sentient creature
made out of a single strand of red yarn, but to me it’s an incarnation of my
inner childhood. As a child, one of my favorite games to play was “little
character explores big world”* (*unofficial name I just came up with). Using
some kind of avatar, usually a small plastic toy of some sort (the character
was never really important; it could have been anything from a tiny plastic triceratops
to Hamm, the piggy bank from Toy Story),
I would use my imagination to transform the ordinary world around me into
something extraordinary; or perhaps even more accurately, into “levels”
informed by my video game-fueled brain. The Christmas tree would turn into a
labyrinthine forest, the snow bank into a great mountain, the gravel walkway of
my grandfather’s house into...something. It’s one of the prime reasons I loved
Playmobil as a kid and making construction sites with it in my living room and
backyard. It’s why I love Toy Story, The Borrowers, Pikmin, and The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap. For as long as I can remember, I have been
completely infatuated with the idea of little people inhabiting our big world,
and with transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Unravel is all
that. Like, that’s what this game is. It’s the epitome of that theme and it’s
my childhood imagination turned into a game. It’s me. But there’s more. This is
a game made by people who not only understand the beauty of nature, but the
beauty of detail. Nature is not just beautiful in the obvious ways, the sunsets
and the distant mountain ranges, but in so many other more subtle ways: the
puddle nestled in a dirt road, the hidden grottoes full of spiders and critters
beneath mossy tree stumps, the way grass grows around a forgotten boot…Unravel puts a magnifying glass on our
world to find the wonders that we take for granted lying right under our noses,
all around us.
It’s not just nature that Unravel and I find beautiful though, but rust and metal as well; even the “ugly” parts of the world are beautiful. I was surprised by the amount of industrial locales in the game, something that I feel the Pikmin series is lacking in. One level has Yarny traversing an old railroad bridge on a cliffside, its fence clamped with locks inscribed with the initials of lovers. Another sees them visiting a snow-covered junkyard filled with overturned rusted hunks of automobiles. This latter area is probably one of the most beautiful environments I’ve ever seen in a game. Wait, no, that’s not accurate…this whole game is one of the most beautiful environments I’ve ever seen in a game. The photorealistic visuals are so lifelike at times that I often had to sit back and marvel at the fact that I was interacting with this world. Yarny themselves only heightens this believability, as watching the lovingly crafted little character’s detailed animations and the way they interact with the world around them makes Unravel often feel less like a video game and more like a window into Yarny’s world. Every single location is also crammed with detail: a hedgehog bumbling through the tall grass in the background, a snake slithering through Yarny’s path, some deer grazing in the distance; the tiniest weed and mushroom is brought to life in loving detail. Then there are the grander moments, like a moose suddenly stomping through a marsh, its comparative immenseness giving the whole proceeding a delightful and magnificent sense of place and scale. Complementing all this is a beautiful dynamic soundtrack that smoothly transitions throughout a level, from slower pieces in more relaxing scenarios to higher tempo ones in tense, frantic moments.
Thematically, atmospherically, and tonally Unravel hits all the right notes, but
its level design also speaks to me as well. Unravel
is a side-scrolling platformer, one of my favorite genres. Something that many
of my favorite platformers share in common is great context, a world that feels
like a living, breathing place, that has reasons for its obstacles and goes to
painstaking detail to tell a story of sorts through its level design. Unravel’s level design is borderline
poetic in this regard. These aren’t levels; they’re real environments that
Yarny has to travel through. The “puzzles” in the game are all merely a means
to an end and they are all made of components that occur naturally in the
world. They merely involve using yarn to manipulate the environment in some way
so Yarny can move forward. The way Unravel
turns apples bobbing in a puddle, waves rolling beneath a wooden pier, and
snow-covered tree branches into level design is utter genius. Nothing feels out
of place here. The game’s singular yarn mechanic is novel, creative, and put to
excellent use throughout the journey, and puzzles often have a logic to them
that requires real-world thinking instead of abstract “video gamey” thinking.
My other favorite video game genre is adventure, and first
and foremost that is exactly what Unravel
is. It starts out as a peaceful stroll through nature, but Yarny soon finds themselves
leaping through tree branches, stumbling down into caves, being chased by
guinea pigs, lassoing fish in a miniature boat, and running through a
frost-covered field while crows try to carry them off. The game displays not
only the beautiful, joyful side of life, but the dark and gruesome side as well
when peaceful meadows transition into rainy toxic wastes. The amount of
horrific ways Yarny can lose their life really surprised me, from falling into
a trash compactor to being mauled by cockroaches. This is another reason why I
love the numerous industrial areas in the game, as the construction sites and
machines that Yarny is forced to tumble through provide an interesting contrast
to the more pristine natural locales. I love industrial themes almost as much
as natural ones, and Unravel delivers
on both fronts. The ever-present danger and tradeoff between calm moments and
harrowing ones makes Unravel a well-rounded
journey, an odyssey of sorts, and one that could take place in your backyard.
Does Unravel have flaws? Yes. For one thing, while I love
the minimalist approach to narrative and think it was absolutely the right way
to go for this game, I do think some narrative context could have been better
weaved into the experience. Each level plays out like a separate vignette of
sorts and while there might be an overarching narrative I’m just not really
seeing here, the narrative seems a bit disconnected and scattered. I like the
idea of Yarny encountering the memories of humans throughout the places they
travel in and piecing those memories together, but I question whether a more
focused, personal story would have worked better than the game seemingly being a
story of humanity as a whole. The chapters involving environmental decay by
human hands particularly stuck out, not because a man vs. nature theme doesn’t seem
appropriate here, but because it just came out of nowhere and doesn’t fit in
with the more family and relationship-driven stories that Yarny encounters in
the other levels. What I appreciate about Unravel
though is that, similar to other minimalist masterpieces like Shadow of the Colossus and Journey, it never falls into
pretentious, heavy-handed territory. The focus here is on the experience and
the narrative is really whatever you make of it; but even open-ended narrative
can have some kind of focus and I think Unravel’s
lack of one does hurt the game’s emotional punch and keeps it from striking the
same kind of sublime balance that those aforementioned works achieve. In other
words, the level designs in Unravel have
great context, but the context of Yarny’s journey itself is unclear.
