The Unfinished Swan begins with a blank, white, featureless screen. When the player eventually hits the correct button on their PS3 controller, however, their first-person avatar launches a series of black paintballs, which splatter on any surface they make contact with, revealing the world on the fly. It’s an ingenious mechanic—smart, addictive, and beautiful—and sits at the heart of the game.
Essentially, The Unfinished Swan is an interactive fairy tale. It concerns a little boy chasing a swan that has escaped a painting given to him by his deceased mother. The swan leads him on a wild adventure through a bizarre, unique world. Most interestingly, this world was one constructed by a proud, lonely king whose imagination has run wild. It’s full of over-the-top architecture and red herrings, and most of all it’s strangely incomplete.
The game involves no shooting or killing, and no enemies whatsoever. Instead, the experience is all about solving puzzles, traversing the world and soaking in the story it has to tell you through sound, vision and incidental detail. Like many fairly tales, it’s fairly short—from start to finish only a few hours long—but it’s one you’ll likely replay several times.
Hint: Find all the balloons and you’ll get the power of a sniper rifle.
by Devon Santos
Source : http://shonenjump.viz.com/node/1217
