Unravel Reviews
Unravel is a unique piece of art in a gaming world filled with first-person shooters and epic AAA titles. It's not perfect, but it does a great job challenging one's brain, while delivering some visually stunning scenery to make you forget you're working hard to progress and push through. Certainly a must-have for 2016.
Yarny heads a fantastic 2D platformer that suffers from one or two issues, but ultimately becomes one of the more enjoyable experiences in recent memory. The music is peaceful, challenges are introduced intelligently, and the visual design is stunning. Unravel is an absolute delight of a video game.
A simple, emotional journey that is also simple to play, Unravel works at endearing you despite the mundane mechanics behind the journey.
If Unravel gains strength from its single-mindedness, it also never succeeds at becoming more than what it seems: a modest, melancholic but ultimately heartwarming effort.
That being said, fans of great visuals, physics-based puzzles and cute characters can overlook the game's ‘basis’ and jump in and enjoy a game that truly delivers in its core elements.
Oozing charm and sentimentality, it won't just pull at your heartstrings, it'll tie them up in great big wooly knots, attach them to a boulder and drop them off the edge of a cliff.
Cloying adorability is Unravel's saving grace. Propped up on a crutch constructed from mawkish sentimentality, it gets away with a fair few missteps and manages to claw together a smattering of memorable moments. This pretty shell, however, is undeniably a shell, and no amount of pretty little animations can make up for a total drought of engaging game design.
Unravel wowed us when it was first announced and its safe to save the loving man of yarn has brought a heartfelt story to the next gen. While its puzzles slowly lose and sense of challenge, the stunning environments more than make up for it.
Unravel succeeds by coupling together a thoughtful, moving story with challenging platforming scenarios and a gorgeous presentation that brings out the best from EA's "indie" side. It may leave you stuck in a few places, but this is one of those games that certainly won't, ahem, string you along.
This year's most beautiful game so far, Unravel doesn't quite display the design prowess to match its wonderful visuals, but it's nevertheless an enjoyable, charming experience. And in Yarny, EA has an adorable new mascot.
As a metaphor for the ties that bind a family together, Yarny and Unravel are exceptional; beautiful, and invoking a quiet contemplation, It's just hard not to wish it was a better game.
Coldwood did put their hearts into Unravel and I can definitely feel that when I play. But despite his woollen charm, Yarny stayed well away from my own heart strings.
Yarny's journey might have its ups and downs, but it's brief and beautiful. It is a mostly wordless message of love.
Despite some flaws, Unravel is an injection of warmth and love, providing an incredible storybook adventure that's filled with wondrous memories that people can relate to.
Unravel liefert eine packende Geschichte in einer wunderbar verpackten optischen Präsentation, schafft es aber das gesamte Spiel über nicht wirklich den Spieler wirklich zu integrieren bzw. zu fordern. Die diversen Rätsel und Gegner lassen zwar große Herausforderung und spielerisches Geschick vermuten, sind aber immer wieder viel zu simpel gestrickt und wirken (wie der großteils des Spiels) nur wie eine schöne Kulisse die euch auf der Reise begleiten soll.
Review in German | Read full review
When everything comes together, there’s a beautiful flow to Unravel; there’s a tranquillity to moving through these stunning environments and exploring its past. Sadly, the game design and platforming interrupts this flow and breaks the immersion, weakening the impact of what is a relatively strong game conceptually and thematically.
Unravel isn't a bad game on any level but it can be frustrating and the margin of error is not very forgiving for some of the puzzles. Nonetheless, it does have its moments of glory which did keep me interested and motivated to finish the game. Graphically, it's a beautiful looking title on the PlayStation 4 but at times it is hampered by the puzzle mechanics but its story without words is a combination of melancholia and hope.
Stunningly rendered close-ups of nature make Unravel's somber fable and irritating death traps just worth surviving.
The game earns its beauty, though the narrative isn't always as tightly knitted together as it needs to be.
Unravel is artistic to its core; it makes up for its limited complexity by shaping an atmosphere that draws you in and makes you see Yarny as more than just a cute mascot, with music that's both mood appropriate to the game and a relaxing soundtrack outside of it.