Watching The Unfinished Swan makes you think a bit about the nature of play, as well as the nature of games. They’re such various things, video games. They can be sandboxes, stories, battlegrounds, toys, tools, experiments; one person’s open-ended toybox is another’s pointless diversion, one person’s cinematic blockbuster is another’s restrictive tunnel-shooter. The Unfinished Swan is an adventure game, but it’s also an experiment in play that invites you to approach it in a way that feels natural to you.
The Unfinished Swan initially gives you a blank white screen and an invisible paint gun and asks you to explore what’s around you by splattering it with inky black colour, revealing previously-invisible walls, bridges and furniture. The Unfinished Swan is built around this mechanic, and it’s a fascinating process to watch the world reveal itself; it’s also really fun to make a mess. As the game develops into an adventure, you’re lead through by splashes of colour that draw the eye: a golden grown that turns out to sit atop a statue of a king, bright red balloons that seem to hang in nothingness until you cover the railing it’s attached to with paint, and trails of webbed footprints.
The premise is that you, the protagonist, an orphaned boy, are drawn into this canvas world by following a swan from one of your late mother’s unfinished paintings into an alternate reality. The swan’s footprints guide you gently through the blank whiteness of the first levels, but over the game’s four chapters, the environment changes from a blank white space to something a little more defined. Later on, towards the middle of the game, there’s an empty, pristine white city, visible without the help of black paint, where your paintballs are replaced by light-blue waterballs whose colour fades from walls and disappears as it seeps into the ground.
But the water also grows vines that spread out over the city’s structures, letting you paint a path for yourself up walls and across gaps. It spreads grass and foliage, letting you turn a barren city into a verdant one, growing withered hedges into impressive leafy sculptures of whales or animals.
What’s interesting is the unpredictable reactions that different players have to this open-ended play setup. Some people throw paint straight ahead of them, picking out and following a straight path; others paint everywhere, wanting to see every detail. Kids under ten who’ve tried out the game have become so obsessed with covering every single millimetre of blank space with paint that they’ve been unable to make it out of the first room. The developer, Giant Sparrow, has worked in regular opportunities to survey your work, leading you up through a garden of statues to spiral staircase leading to a vantage point that lets you see the path you’ve made through the white space on your way.
Because of this huge variation in the way people play the game, claims Giant Sparrow, there’s a lot in this game that many players will never see. The Unfinished Swan favours exploration except for exploration’s sake; you’re driven off-track by your own curiosity and inquisitive nature rather than in-game rewards. This world isn’t an entirely safe place; creatures lurk in the grass and in the water, and I caught a glimpse of a silhouetted sea monster making its sinister way through the wide river that runs through the centre of the white city. There’s a sense of subtle danger – the danger of the unknown, more than anything – that imbues The Unfinished Swan with a sense of trepidation that stimulates the will to explore.
The game’s minimalism also means that every tiny detail is magnified in significance. The game tells its story sparsely, in few words, via storybook-like murals; because there’s so little exposition or explanation, you pay a lot of attention to what little there is.
Sony is so, so good at identifying and supporting this kind of experimental attitude in developers. The company has a nurturing attitude to quality and creativity that’s resulted in games like Heavy Rain, LittleBigPlanet and Journey as PlayStation exclusives. The Unfinished Swan isn’t as ambitious as those three games – at least, not in the same way – but it’s another super example of Sony’s willingness to invest in the new.
Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN’s games coverage in the UK. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter.
Source : ign[dot]com
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