When you come too, the people introduce themselves to you as Mandala and Eli. Roughly a year ago, the player character comes into contact with a mysterious book, and after touching it they are possessed and proceed to kill the people around them. After they complete this, one of them is struck by lightning, and the player flashes back to the day they got possessed. The game starts with your character having an exorcism performed on him by two mysterious strangers on the top of a building in New York City. This, combined with some well written, if a bit generic, characters, all come together to make a story that will draw the player in.

It manages to have a nice mix of dark and comedic moments without the two interfering with each other.

The story mixes themes of the supernatural and noir and manages to pull them off better than you would expect. The story of Unavowed is probably its strongest element. Unavowed is available on Steam and GOG for $14.99 Unavowed seems to put together the experiences of their past games and puts it all together to create an instant classic. Wadjet are no strangers to the genre, having created both the Blackwell series and Primordia. Ironically, this is also a game that - with its beautiful recreation of the natural world - might just drive you to pop down the controller once it’s over and go outside and make some of those moments for yourself.Unavowed is a point-and-click style adventure game developed and published by Wadjet Eye Games. Compared to the cold sterility of a puzzler like The Witness (opens in new tab), Unravel is where all the heart lives, and there’s nothing our futile cynicism can do about it. There’s a bittersweet edge from the get go but Yarny’s adventure continues, Journey-like in a way that’ll gnaw away at the soul you’ve hidden carefully away. They belong to all of us and almost effortlessly, with some help from a heart-wrenching soundtrack, Unravel manages to elicit far more emotion than I was ever expecting. These aren’t just emotions tied with string to a creature made of yarn. Childhood trips, walks in the woods, the choices we make as we grow older, the realisation that life isn’t as long as you want it to be. The joy - and sadness - of all this is the instant memories it drags up for you personally. A bridge that you crossed is the site where a love padlock was snapped closed. A plastic bag Yarny used as a parachute through the countryside is on the foot of man whose boot must be leaking. Flicking through the emotion-skewering real life images, you’ll find pieces of the level you just encountered. While it would be easy to cynically dismiss, these gently remind you of the fleeting nature of life’s little moments and the fact that the photographs you’re collecting are all that’s left of these memories. As Yarny collects each token and sticks it to the front of the album, a new story is unveiled, introduced by a small paragraph of text. It’s here, as you collect a unique knitted heirloom from each level, that Unravel gently begins to gnaw at your heart. The memories you unlock all centre around the rebuilding of the elderly woman’s photo album. While each level is almost staggeringly pretty, as snow gathers on Yarny’s little woollen legs and the boughs of trees bend gently under your weight, each one has an unshakeably bittersweet edge. A furious vole attacks when you venture into its hidey hole amidst the phosphorescent glow of underground mushrooms.Īnd then there’s dem feels. Crabs viciously snip at Yarny in a sea level as waves crash into the screen. And there’s no fighting back here, only the avoidance of eager and ever-present death. Like Limbo before it - but without the the same number of hair-tearing puzzles - Unravel wants to push you to die before you can learn to survive. You don’t have to go to space, you don’t have to go to a fairytale land because all you need to do is go into the woods and look at stuff.”

I wanted to make something that was just about basically appreciating the beauty that’s here outside your door. “I think there’s nothing wrong with video games being sort of fantastical but every game doesn’t have to be like that. “I wanted to share a piece of home I guess,” he said when I spoke to him at Gamescom last year. In a tale so indie it hurts, he built the character from wool and wire. Unravel creator Martin Sahlin actually crafted Yarny when he was on a camping trip in the Swedish countryside with his family.

Unavowed review gamesradar