Last month The Unfinished Swan was featured on PSN for free to Playstation Plus members. I thought the game looked interesting at the time of release, but as I don’t game as often as I used to so I decided to postpone buying it.
But now that I’ve gotten to play it I’d say it’s worth the $14.99. This is just a quick review of the game, as I’m not done playing through yet, and it’s 6:45 am. I just want to share some first thoughts about it.
Insert creative heading here.
OK, so the first level of the game is just a plain white screen. You can’t tell if your moving or not, because everything is just a giant blank. The developers thought out carefully about this scene too, as they made it pretty hard not to figure out how to throw your first blob of paint, without using a stupid looking tutorial. All 4 shoulder buttons throw paint – you’re bound to try and hit at least one!
So you throw your first blob of paint and Splat! The screen now has a blob of paint on it, and now you can tell if your moving or not, you also figure out – if you hadn’t known already- that this game is 3D, and you’re in the 3rd person.
As you throw paint and uncover the shape of the room you’re in you find a door way that leads you outside. After throwing more paint you start uncovering a pretty impressive looking world.
Paint Everything!
Awesome! So you start throwing more paint, which you realize is uncovering a square room. As you throw more paint you can see more of the world around you. But the paint is pitch black, so if you throw too much you end up with the same problem you had at the start of the game, only everything is black, not white.
This game made me think of the necessity for both darkness an light in our own world. With out both, we can’t see anything. It’s not until dark and light are in the same room dooking it out over shadows that we can see the amazing detail we see in our everyday life.
As you realize how important your white space is in this game you try being careful where you throw your paint. Aiming it just write to uncover your world, while keeping as much detail as you can. You start to seek for a fine balance of black and white, and your game starts to look a lot like a metaphor for Ying and Yang.
It’s a game of experiences and emotion.
Aside from just being thought provoking, this game takes you on a crazy journey of weird experiences and draws you in touch with the emotions you feel while going through these experiences.
The game does a great job at guiding you through the world, while never holding you by the hand to allow you to explore, and discover things on your own. By not being distracted by things like tutorials, or NPC’s you can feel things like joy, happiness, sadness, fear, and loneliness in this game.
This is were I left off.
The above scene is the last scene I saw last night before shutting it off. I really look forward to picking it up again – it’s one of the most interesting games I’ve played in a really long time.
There will be a more in-depth review of this game later on about how it’s a great game for people leading busy lives. So far this is a game that can be picked up for nice 30 min play sessions, but it’s also a game so captivating you can get lost in it for hours.
Happy gaming 
Cheers,
Dan
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