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The Unfinished Swan (PS4/3/Vita) review

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    The Unfinished Swan (PS4/3/Vita) review

    Another indie darling that you might have snaffled recently via PS+. Well, is it worth playing?

    Visually it's quite striking, it's main selling point being the minimalist black-and white 'paint in the world as you go' mechanic. Attractive and novel as this initially is, however, it's much less enjoyable to use than you might think, and the developers seem to agree as you barely see it after the first chapter. Instead you get a mixture of other gameplay mechanics, including squirting water to make vines grow (climbable), shooting magic plants to light them up and stop spiders attacking you (quite surprisingly horrible and unexpected, these, providing lots of jump scares), and tracing out 3-D shapes to climb up (finicky as hell). Gameplay-wise it's a bit of a mish-mash, then, but it always looks very pretty. The other thing holding this together is the storyline, and indeed the whole game is presented as chapters in a children's storybook. You find storybook panels as you go and these are narrated beautifully. The story itself starts as a melancholy but quite delightful children's fairytale adventure, then degenerates awfully and pointlessly (in my view) when it's revealed

    that the whole narrative artifice is basically an extended metaphor for a child coming to terms with broken home and parental neglect from both sides. You are the swan that is left unfinished by crummy parenting, etc., etc.

    I felt this was forced as hell and much preferred those early sections, such as the wonderful

    imperial city

    , when it all felt like a simple fantasy as this is a real rarity in games, whereas heavy-handed 'dark undertones' are commonplace.

    EDIT: Will take you about 3-4 hours to blast through if you're curious, by the way. More if you go back to collect up the balloons to unlock concept art and 'toys', which you probably won't.
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    #2
    i dont remember hateing it as much as it seems i did in this thread, but yeah it looses its way pretty quickly.

    Friendly Import video game discussion forum, informative reviews, NTSC (Japan / US) and PAL - BordersDown (previously known as NTSC-uk)

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      #3
      I never got as far as any narrative...15 minutes of randomly blasting paintballs about made me delete it.

      It was so bad that I turned off my VITA and discussed the weather with an old lady sat next to me on the plane I was on.

      Looks great though.

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        #4
        Originally posted by Lebowski View Post
        i dont remember hateing it as much as it seems i did in this thread, but yeah it looses its way pretty quickly.

        http://www.bordersdown.net/threads/1...nfinished+Swan
        Drat, sorry! Didn't realize there was already a firstplay thread - had a quick check but missed it...

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          #5
          Picked up the PS3 version a few months back when it was on sale really enjoyed what I played of it, very different to a lot of other games on the market and it's always nice to play something new and original.

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