Game Reviews

The Unfinished Swan definitely fits into that category, first seeing the light of day at the Independent Games Festival in 2008, after which Sony took it under its wing. What made it stand out back then was how beautiful and stark it looked; it sets you in a brilliant white and apparently empty game world where your only interaction is to lob balls of paint. These splatter against the unseen geometry of the world, revealing the shapes around you.

It's an absolutely charming effect. The first stage finds you carefully picking your way through an invisible rural landscape rendered piece by piece in jet black splashes against a white canvas. It is, quite frankly, stunning - all the more so when you turn around and see the path you've splashed through the void. Benches, reeds, rocks and trees all emerge from the emptiness, delicately textured and hauntingly melancholy. You could take any screenshot from this introductory section and hang it in a gallery. It's that wonderful.

That was the conceit that attracted Sony's attention in 2008, but in the move from concept to game, more has been added. The black-on-white aesthetic is dropped before the end of the first of four chapters, as shadows and other details are filled in for you. You still have to throw paint to discern the way ahead, but with the edges picked out for you, it starts to feel more like colouring within the lines. More traditional puzzles make themselves apparent.

As the game continues, it plays around with different ways of throwing stuff to alter the environment. The second stage is the low point, as you navigate an eerie city with your black paint replaced with gobs of water. These are used to coax vines across the floor, up walls and over ceilings. You can then climb these vines - in a clumsy, floaty, 1990s-FPS kind of way - to progress. It's a nice idea, but one that doesn't really bear much gameplay fruit. The distracting and often glitchy climbing motion reminds you that you're just a virtual camera hovering through a fake world, and with just one gameplay mechanic to think about, the puzzles in this section are easily solved.

Things pick up as the game enters the final stretch. A journey through a dark storybook forest, keeping red-eyed spiders at bay by hitting lanterns to illuminate the path, is spooky and effective. Later puzzles require you to cross over into an alternate blueprint reality where your paint splats define the edges of platforms and boxes that you stretch into being. Back in the "real" world, you can then use them to reach areas that were previously out of bounds.

They're all interesting enough concepts on their own, but the relationship between them is awkward and apparently arbitrary. They're more like brainstormed ideas threaded together than a coherent vision, and while they mostly work in a gameplay sense, they lead to a fragmented and unsatisfying experience.

Nowhere is this more keenly felt than in the story, which follows a young boy called Monroe. Orphaned after the death of his artist mother, he is allowed to keep just one of her paintings when he's taken away to an orphanage. He chooses the one she never completed - the Unfinished Swan of the title. One night, he wakes up to discover the swan has left the painting. Following its inky orange footprints, we're led into the game.