Unleaving Review (PC)

There’s a circus elephant trapped inside a small transport wagon, clearly unhappy with his situation. The red-haired protagonist that I control clearly wants to set him free, both literally and metaphorically. She needs the creature to make progress in a puzzle, although she’s still working out exactly how to do that. The elephant moves through the exact same routine each time and its fury destroys part of the level.

On a deeper level, she seems to be haunted by an incident at the circus, presumably involving the elephant and her mother. The game isn’t giving me a lot of clues to work with, but it seems that it’s something about being caged or over-protected. Or maybe she was simply in the audience when an elephant acted violently and she is still afraid of the memory.

The creature is just one part of this puzzle, which also involves a rocket ship held up by balloons and a Ferris wheel. It takes a few deaths, which are grisly in an existential way, to get a clear idea of how everything interacts with the world and the main character. I have a relatively clear idea of what I have to do and I suspect I will die five to ten more times before the execution is good enough to get to the lone balloon waiting on the right side of the screen.

Unleaving is both developed and published by orangutan matter. The game is only offered on the PC and I played it using Steam. The title uses classic platforming and puzzle mechanics, with an impressive presentation and a lyrical approach to storytelling.

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The entire narrative is centered on one little girl with bright red hair and shoes to match. She exists in a fantasy world or possibly exploring her own memories. There’s not much context to draw out a coherent story from. The main character is not named. But the game is impressive when it comes to creating singular moments filled with emotion.

The developer says it drew inspiration from “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child”, a poem written by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The amount of writing in the game isn't high, but all of it is poetic, posing questions and provoking the player to link what’s happening to the main character with his own beliefs and experiences.

At first, I found Unleaving to be a little pretentious, if emotional, mainly because of its ambiguous nature. But as I got closer to its end, I understood that it aims to give players space to project their own fears and hopes. Think of Unleaving as a poem, whereas most video games are extensive prose pieces.

The gameplay is built around a series of puzzles. Our heroine can jump and grab, and she does not acquire any sort of new powers as she makes progress. Using these simple actions, players need to engage with a variety of challenges. Initially, the challenge level is low, and it only takes a couple of minutes to understand what needs doing and then implement the plan.

The complexity level steadily increases. The elephant situation took me a while to solve, mainly because it takes careful execution to get through it. There were three moments where the heroine could die and even when I nailed the timing for the first two, a final one constantly sent me back to the beginning.

It doesn’t help that the game’s physics are a little wonky and led to some puzzles bugging out. The fact that animations don’t perfectly line up with the environment at times isn’t a big problem. But, on two occasions, I had to restart a puzzle because my character got wedged between two objects in an impossible.

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Unleaving features a good autosave system, allowing players to always return to the start of a puzzle sequence. It also has a hint system, which gives players a small idea of how they need to engage with a situation, although only once they have failed to solve it for a while. Both work well to ensure that frustration does not become a reason for players to quit playing.

The game is short enough to be completed in one sitting by a player who knows the puzzle genre and is not afraid to experiment. There’s even an achievement encouraging players to do so. But it works equally well in short sessions, moving through one puzzle at a time, taking the time to enjoy each section, and engaging with the themes and questions they present. I still believe the experience would have benefited from some extra narrative context, but this remains an impressive indie experience even without it.

Unleaving is one of the most beautiful video games I have played recently, with expressive tableaux designed to evoke emotions and even encourage soul searching. The developer says every frame was drawn and painted by hand. The level of quality, even given the limited number of scenes, is incredible. Van Gogh is a clear reference point but there’s a ton of variety. I wanted to see more of this world, created using the same unique style. Our heroine’s look is simple but effective, with great strategic use of vibrant red.

The title’s sound design isn’t as impressive. There’s no voice acting and for long sections there’s no music. This gives gamers space to take in the visual spectacle and to focus on getting through the puzzles. There’s one sequence that I played through enough times for the featured animal sounds to become profoundly annoying.

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The Good

The Bad

Conclusion