Gone North Games - 2014 - PC
A Story About My Uncle is the first game from Gone North Games, a small indie studio based in Sweeden. According to their website, Gone North Games was founded by 9 students who have a passion for making games. Since it's advertised all over their website and apparently important to the developers, I'll repeat it here - A Story About My Uncle is a completely non-violent video game. This isn't really an entirely novel concept for a game, but it is unusual I suppose. For better or worse, most games do rely on some sort of violent combat as their main game mechanic. I do think it's cool that games like Gone Home or To The Moon are using video games purely as a story telling medium. But unfortunately, A Story About My Uncle doesn't tell a very interesting story. It is a pretty fun platformer though which is really what this game stands on
The game begins as you, the narrator, are reading your daughter a bedtime story. The entire rest of the game is played out as a flashback as the narrator recounts how he, as a boy, used to play with his uncle at his uncle's house. One day, the narrator's uncle went missing and you soon find out that he was transported to a distant magical world through some transporter device that the narrator's uncle invented. The game is a little vague on the details of how exactly this transporter was invented or how it works, but the narrator of course uses it to travel to this other world in search of his uncle. That's pretty much all the exposition you get. I mean that's it for the rest of the game. You meet some other characters and go to new locations, but the story never really progresses at all. You're just searching for your uncle the whole game. That's it. And then (spoiler alert) the game just kind of ends abruptly at a certain point and the credits roll. Nothing is really resolved and nothing really changes, just "The End". It was very anti-climactic and disappointing. It almost seemed rushed, like they might have been trying to go somewhere with the story, but had to cut a lot of it to meet deadlines or something like that. In any case, I somewhat ironically found the story in A Story About My Uncle to be underdeveloped and uninteresting.
Near the beginning of the game, the narrator discovers some magical super-bouncy boots and some magical grappling tether thing which serve as the game's platforming mechanics. I can't remember what the game actually called the boots and grapple device and I'm too lazy to look it up, but these definitely are what make this game fun and interesting. The boots allow you to jump crazy high and crazy far and the tether allows you to pull yourself closer towards certain parts of the terrain. Most of the terrain in the game is made up of small chunks of floating rock as shown in the cover art above, so the platforming can be kind of challenging in certain areas. Quick props to the graphic artists for this game, I found a lot of the floating terrain and world design to be really interesting from an artistic point of view. Very cool and imaginative artwork.
I prefer to play games laying down in my couch with a controller as opposed to sitting forward with a mouse and keyboard, even while playing PC games. So I'm not sure if it was just because I was playing with a controller, but there were some parts of this game that were really tricky to pull off. And I'm usually quite good at platformers. And that's fine, I enjoy a good challenge, but the difficulty curve with this game was a little wonky. There was one particular section near the end of the game that was insanely difficult, it probably took me 30-40 attempts to finally do it right. And then the rest of the game was mind-numbingly easy. My only other complaint, from a gameplay perspective, was with the level design. It was quite often not very clear where the game wanted me to go next, especially in the later levels where the terrain is separated by great distances. I had to jump around and try to grapple to things trail-and-error style until I finally found something that worked. The difficulty curve is forgivable, but in a linear platformer like this I feel like the player should always have a pretty good idea of where the game wants them to go next.
Summary:
It is definitely a flawed game, but if you like 3D platformers, you could do worse than A Story About My Uncle. It's got some really cool art design and fun platforming, but it has some design issues and the actual story might as well not even exist. It was also kind of short, I finished it in about 5 hours, but I found that length to be appropriate. All in all, not too bad for a small team making their first game. And as its developers insist, it's completely non-violent, if that's a selling point for you.
The game begins as you, the narrator, are reading your daughter a bedtime story. The entire rest of the game is played out as a flashback as the narrator recounts how he, as a boy, used to play with his uncle at his uncle's house. One day, the narrator's uncle went missing and you soon find out that he was transported to a distant magical world through some transporter device that the narrator's uncle invented. The game is a little vague on the details of how exactly this transporter was invented or how it works, but the narrator of course uses it to travel to this other world in search of his uncle. That's pretty much all the exposition you get. I mean that's it for the rest of the game. You meet some other characters and go to new locations, but the story never really progresses at all. You're just searching for your uncle the whole game. That's it. And then (spoiler alert) the game just kind of ends abruptly at a certain point and the credits roll. Nothing is really resolved and nothing really changes, just "The End". It was very anti-climactic and disappointing. It almost seemed rushed, like they might have been trying to go somewhere with the story, but had to cut a lot of it to meet deadlines or something like that. In any case, I somewhat ironically found the story in A Story About My Uncle to be underdeveloped and uninteresting.
Near the beginning of the game, the narrator discovers some magical super-bouncy boots and some magical grappling tether thing which serve as the game's platforming mechanics. I can't remember what the game actually called the boots and grapple device and I'm too lazy to look it up, but these definitely are what make this game fun and interesting. The boots allow you to jump crazy high and crazy far and the tether allows you to pull yourself closer towards certain parts of the terrain. Most of the terrain in the game is made up of small chunks of floating rock as shown in the cover art above, so the platforming can be kind of challenging in certain areas. Quick props to the graphic artists for this game, I found a lot of the floating terrain and world design to be really interesting from an artistic point of view. Very cool and imaginative artwork.
I prefer to play games laying down in my couch with a controller as opposed to sitting forward with a mouse and keyboard, even while playing PC games. So I'm not sure if it was just because I was playing with a controller, but there were some parts of this game that were really tricky to pull off. And I'm usually quite good at platformers. And that's fine, I enjoy a good challenge, but the difficulty curve with this game was a little wonky. There was one particular section near the end of the game that was insanely difficult, it probably took me 30-40 attempts to finally do it right. And then the rest of the game was mind-numbingly easy. My only other complaint, from a gameplay perspective, was with the level design. It was quite often not very clear where the game wanted me to go next, especially in the later levels where the terrain is separated by great distances. I had to jump around and try to grapple to things trail-and-error style until I finally found something that worked. The difficulty curve is forgivable, but in a linear platformer like this I feel like the player should always have a pretty good idea of where the game wants them to go next.
Summary:
It is definitely a flawed game, but if you like 3D platformers, you could do worse than A Story About My Uncle. It's got some really cool art design and fun platforming, but it has some design issues and the actual story might as well not even exist. It was also kind of short, I finished it in about 5 hours, but I found that length to be appropriate. All in all, not too bad for a small team making their first game. And as its developers insist, it's completely non-violent, if that's a selling point for you.
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