Unravel two

I saw this little game a while ago but wasn’t convinced enough by the reviews to buy when it was £24.99 but yesterday it came up in the Nintendo Shop Black Friday deals for about £6 so I jumped at it. I wasn’t put off by the lovely graphics but I was a bit nervous about how the control mechanism would work, when handling 2 characters but as it turned out I need not be worried. The introduction leads you though all the possible moves you’ll be asked to make and you can either take it in turns with each of your Yarny characters or collaborate with a friend to solve problems. 

It looks initially like a metroidzania type platform game and actually it plays very like Ori and the Blind Forest but actually it’s more of a strategy game because you move between tableaus and each stage is pretty much a stand-alone puzzle in it’s own right. This lets you think about a problem and try out a few scenarios without dying and being sent back for ages. The times that you do die or be sent back are very few and you only go back a little way to the beginning of the current puzzle. 

The story sees 2 characters made from yarn, washed up on the shore. You can unite into one character to make moving simpler and then separate to solve puzzles that require 2 things to be done at the same time. Intriguingly, there is a back-story told in ghostly shadows of 2 children running away from bad guys and taking shelter in places across the city. You follow them on their journey and presumably learn the full story. Along the way there are challenge levels that are fairly tricky but don’t block your progress in the main story. 

All in all I am really enjoying this game – the puzzles are very well thought out and there are only a few where very fast button combinations are needed. If I had any criticism it’s that throughout the game you’ll be using lasso points to swing from and often it can be tricky to distinguish them amongst the amazingly lush scenery. I’ll be playing it on the TV, not handheld!