Unravel Deserves Your Unbridled Attention

This week fans of video games get to enjoy a crazy lineup of the biggest and best games that will be releasing over the next year and a half.  This E3 has been exciting, possibly more exciting than any E3 I've seen in the last 6 years. There have been so many announcements that are exciting to see, but also meaningful to me. 

In a show that officially announced the return of The Last Guardian and the long awaited Final Fantasy VII Remake, I'm amazed to say that neither of those or everything else huge at E3 is my favorite thing I've seen. Little did I know that a wonderful charming surprise lay in wait halfway through the EA press conference. Although I don't necessarily want to call EA's conference a disappointment, it certainly was the weakest of them all. There were high points, but overall I found myself unsatisfied with it. EA went on about sports games and certain features for far too long, and had a lackluster look at the new Mirrors Edge. Of course the ending footage of Star Wars Battlefront blew us all away, but there's one other thing that stirred something within me at the EA conference.

At about the halfway point EA pulled something completely unexpected out of their hat, an incredibly charming and emotional looking game called Unravel. This game completely broke the tone of the conference and the show in general, for a few minutes we changed gears from the violence and explosions, to a much more quiet and low-key adventure. It was this very change that was partly responsible for how incredible Unravel looks. 

You see, Unravel is a game about a small being entirely made of red yarn called Yarny. It's a 2D puzzle-platformer in which you use the yarn from your own body to keep progressing through the game and overcome obstacles to keep Yarny moving. What really drove home Unravel as my favorite new game of the entire show was just how sincere the entire experience felt. 

Our look at the game started with the creative director for the game, Martin Sahlin, coming out to talk about how the game came to fruition and what it meant to him and the team. I'll just let you watch it instead of explaining. 

The entire experience was incredibly sincere, and you could literally see Sahlin shaking on stage he was so nervous. This is where I really started to feel something about Unravel when Sahlin stated, "It was born out of the need to make something more personal, something with heart. The yarn it represents love and the bonds that we make, and it unravels because that's what happens when we are separated from what we love." That moment that we saw Unravel was so different from everything else we saw at the show, and made me feel emotional like I never thought I would when watching a stream of an E3 press conference. 

This brings me to the point of why I'm so excited about Unravel. Of course on one part it looks like an adorably fun platformer but Unravel looks like it could be so much more. If you've listened to my radio show Playing with Perspective, you know I have very strong feelings about what video games mean as art and what they can do for us. Video games have a very special unbounded potential to be incredibly immersive emotional experiences that stick with us, and teach us things about life and the nature of humanity. There are many games that have made me think and consider things more deeply, the first of which was Final Fantasy VII, a topic that I will be touching on very soon .

The point here is that video games have the potential to show the best and worst of humanity, on comment on the very nature of life. Unravel was something that fitted this feeling exactly. Among the flashing lights and in your face trailers, Unravel was a fantastic breath of fresh air. Now a developer shouldn't have to point out the themes and meanings in their games as that's something the player uncovers for themselves, but clearly this project means so much to the team making it. 

As excited as I am for Fallout 4 and Kingdom Hearts 3 and the other huge Triple-A titles of the year,  Unravel was the one game of this E3 that looked like it would truly make me feel something special. Of course I'm totally sure that I am wrong about that, and there will be many wonderful experiences with many of the games from this show. Unravel gave me a special feeling even just by it's trailer, and it's an example of the very reason that I have such a love of video games. As long as people keep making games like this I'll stay wholeheartedly invested in the video game industry. I'm stunned that this game is my favorite game of the entire show, but it's the greatest surprise I could have asked for this year. Take a look at the trailer and see if it means anything to you.