Last week’s Sony event didn’t offer many surprises, creatively speaking. If I’m permitted to err on the side of glibness, seeing two clones of successful Nintendo series and yet another God of War didn’t inspire the strongest feelings of inspiration in me as a gamer. I would have handled this sameness with the expected reluctant tolerance, but my first appointment landed me in a conference room with the folks from Giant Sparrow, an internal Sony developer nearly ready to release its first game, The Unfinished Swan. This first-person puzzler raised my standards for the remainder of the event, and with good reason: I definitely hadn’t seen anything like it before. The other titles on display? Well… not so much. If anything, you can credit Giant Sparrow for giving me unrealistic expectations and a distaste for the familiar over the following 48 hours.
Okay, so maybe the idea isn’t entirely new; a video showing off The Unfinished Swan’s tech has been floating around for a little over three years, but somehow managed to escape my attention entirely. The main conceit of Swan involves navigation of a completely negative space via blobs of black paint, which can be launched into the white void to reveal the surrounding environment. But really, what good are words when a video can convey this concept much more effectively?
My hands-off session with The Unfinished Swan didn’t last long, but what I saw of the game had me genuinely anticipating the finished product. Despite its unfamiliar concept, The Unfinished Swan isn’t afraid to challenge players from minute one; the game opens with a completely white screen, leaving players to figure out the (simple) controls without a single prompt. After learning this essential skill, however, the player is left to explore the environment of their own free will, with a scattering of orange footprints (those of the titular unfinished swan) acting as subtle guideposts. Though players are meant to traverse the landscapes of Swan through the use of paint blobs, the developers assured me that the audio cues in each level provide enough context to allow the especially gifted to navigate via audio only. I didn’t have the chance to test this hypothesis, but their bold claim indicates Giant Sparrow has faith in their unorthodox design.
I really wish I had more to say about The Unfinished Swan; my time with the game was painfully brief, and hands-off at that. But if you’ll excuse the uninformed optimism, The Unfinished Swan’s core concept could definitely lead to a lot of interesting and memorable puzzles — and the idea’s been around long enough for Giant Sparrow to thoroughly explore its many possibilities. Quantum Conundrum might be more of a known quantity at this point, but 2012 could very well bring into being two very different and very excellent first-person puzzlers.
Article source: http://www.1up.com/previews/unfinished-swan-preview