The Unfinished Swan

[h2]Beautifully Unfinished, Rather Too Literally[/h2] The Unfinished Swan begins with one of those ideas that makes you think somebody has actually been creative instead of merely rearranging the standard box of video-game furniture. You explore an initially white world by throwing paint at it, gradually revealing your surroundings. It is clever, unusual and genuinely intriguing. The puzzles are varied without becoming particularly difficult, and for a while they provide enough substance to support the rather thin story. Then, after more than 90 minutes, the game appears to develop the same problem I have: neither of us knows what The Unfinished Swan is supposed to be. Narrative adventure? Exploration game? Walking simulator? Puzzle game? It wanders cheerfully between all of them like a committee that has agreed unanimously to postpone the decision until the next meeting. Unfortunately, "having several interesting ideas" is not quite the same thing as turning them into a compelling whole. A stronger story would have helped considerably. There are fragments of one, certainly, but not enough to keep pulling me forward once the novelty starts wearing off. I have now stopped playing…

Yawn. There are some interesting ideas here, but my god is everything so slow and boring. The game shows its best hand immediately, and that's ultimately its downfall. The opening introduces a unique gameplay mechanic that's actually pretty fun to interact with. Sadly, when you reach chapter 2, this gets replaced with a similar but different, and less fun, mechanic. Then chapter 3 replaces that with a mechanic that's downright terrible. And then it ends. The story is somewhat interesting, but not interesting enough to carry a completion that took me 90 minutes. It also crashed twice during those 90 minutes. Nothing special.

Beautiful game with a good story and fun puzzles.

Short but sweet :) There's a game mechanic introduced for one part of a chapter toward the end and it's good enough to warrant its own game to be honest.

What an amazing game! enjoyed it so much 10/10

The main idea is interesting for the first 15 minutes, then it gets tedious and annoying. The game takes about three hours to beat, yet less than 40% of players has finished it. Maybe I too should have left it ... unfinished.