A Story About My Uncle Review

I have been craving some 1st person platforming for a while (still trying to find something as good as Mirror's Edge...) so A Story About My Uncle seemed like the game to play. Unfortunately I was quite disappointed by it. While the game looks nice visually, the shine of the crystals throughout and the wide open areas looking especially beautiful, the developers decided that it would be a great idea to add in a lot of NPCs, who, quite frankly, look terrible. They're a weird mix between frogs and salamanders and people and they look so off. Their limbs look weird, their hair looks weird (why do they have hair??) and their animations are really quite dreadful sometimes. Gameplay-wise the grapple mechanic is unique and fun and the final two areas make really fantastic use of them, as well as adding extra gimmicks (more on this later). The other main mechanic, a super-charged jump, felt weird a lot of the time, and I found it really hard to judge distance with the long jump feature. Another problem I had with the grapple was that sometimes it felt like I should have been able to grapple to something but the game said I was too far away. This was quite annoying. The game has a wonderful atmosphere, and the different locations are absolutely gorgeous and contrast well with each other. The caves and the two frog villages feel different from each other and the introduction of different mechanics in each area helps distinguish them further.

Now, the level design. The two beginning areas were fairly boring to me, which is understandable as they introduced the main mechanics to the player. However, the design really began to step up in the caves, with being able to interact with the environment to brighten the area more. The second village area was also quite fun, and added rocket boosters, which is automatically awesome. However I did feel a bit irritated sometimes as there were some big jumps here and it was difficult to judge distance with the rocket boots. The final area, the icy caves, was definitely my favourite. They had a very fittingly cold atmosphere and there were some beautiful open areas. I absolutely loved the large, cavernous levels here and the level design was at its most creative here. It introduced crystals that if you grappled would refill your grapple charges, ice that you couldn't grapple onto, and even stalactites that fell from the ceiling when used. I felt awesome, swinging around in these huge levels. I also loved the segments where you swung across the ceiling of the caves, with the help of stalagtites and crystals, that was definitely the highlight for me. The heart-warming narrated story was much better than the in-game story and really the frog people were just so stupid and a bit irritating. While I was disappointed with much of the game, the final area was fantastic, and left me desiring more challenging levels in this style.
6/10