I played through The Unfinished Swan, and I have some mixed feelings about it. As a Cuter Shooter it definitely succeeds, however as a cohesive experience it fell a little short for me. It game is at a huge intersection of my interests and recent threads I’ve started – as a non-euclidean puzzle and walking sim about shooting bubbles… but I don’t think this game has the impact it had back on the PS3.
Visually the first area can look striking, but once you get past it, the shooter-ness of the game loses focus. The puzzles that follow are hit and miss… I like when the ink balls are used to create platforms, but I did not like sections where it’s there to move objects. The way the environments respond to your presence is great in some areas, but almost frustrating in others. They had a lot of creative gameplay ideas in its short 2 hour runtime, but I didn’t love the pacing or direction of the last couple zones. The story was a little shallow and failed to pull everything together for me personally.
The ending is delightful and imaginative, and I think the journey to get there is worth trying for yourself, even if some elements didn’t work for me.
…
…
…
And then I learned they added Hatsune Miku to Crypt of the Necrodancer, so naturally had to check that out!!! Now this is profound:
