Unravel asks you to care about a ball of yarn. It works.
Coldwood Interactive’s puzzle-platformer, published by Electronic Arts, arrived in February 2016 for PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One. It stars Yarny, an apple-sized creature made of red yarn, and it tells its story with almost no spoken words. That restraint is the point, and it is the reason the game holds up.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
A Ball of Yarn Rolls Out of Shot
Unravel opens in the quiet home of an elderly woman. She looks out her window, adjusts a picture of a baby, and picks up a ball of yarn. As she heads upstairs, a lone ball rolls out of shot. Yarny walks into frame and looks around in wonder at a world that makes small everyday things look enormous.
The setup is small and ordinary, and that is exactly why it lands. The photographs in the house are not decoration. They are the level select. Through picture frames, Yarny steps into environments that mattered to the family who lived there and gathers the memories held inside them.
The early memories are happy ones. A sea shore. A hike in the mountains. Then the game turns.
Toxic Waste and a Heart Attack
The rural forest is industrialized. Accidents with toxic waste follow. People start moving to the city. One memory reveals that the old woman’s husband died from a heart attack.
Unravel does not soften any of this, and it does not explain it either. There is no dialogue to cushion the blow. You watch a landscape change and you understand what was lost.
Each level ends with Yarny collecting a red yarn badge onto the cover of a photo album in the house. The album fills with photos of the memories encountered along the way. On the final two levels, Yarny finds only one half each of a heart-shaped badge.
The last level takes place in a cemetery. Yarny fights through a snow storm for the final half, it slips from its hands, and jumping after it, Yarny unravels completely. Only a red thread remains. A human hand picks up the badge piece.
Yarny wakes in a camping backpack holding the missing piece, runs home, and places it on the album. A child enters the room. Yarny feigns to be inanimate until the child leaves, then sets the piece in its final place and opens the cover.
That ending is the whole argument of the game in one sequence. A creature made of thread gives itself away to finish a story that belongs to someone else.
The Yarn Is the Mechanic
Yarny’s body is the tool set, and it is also the clock.
- Yarn forms bridges, pulls objects, and swings from items.
- The twine unravels as Yarny moves, leaving a trail behind.
- Walk too far and Yarny thins into a slim frame that cannot reach further.
- Balls of red yarn in the environment refill the frame.
Creative director Martin Sahlin explained the appeal of that system: “It’s always fun to play with physics. It’s not just about solving puzzles. It’s also a big part of how you move. Sometimes it’s just traversing, navigating. Since you always leave this trail behind you, you can always grab it and climb on it and swing on it. You can do these really cool things when you combine stuff.”
He is right about the trail. The line Yarny leaves is both a record of where you have been and a resource you can climb. Few platformers make their own history this literal.
Where Unravel Stumbles
The controls and the puzzle variety are the weak spots. Unravel’s platforming can be fussy when precision matters, and some puzzles repeat ideas the game already spent. A sequel, Unravel Two, followed in June 2018.
Those complaints are real, but they are secondary. The visuals, the protagonist, the soundtrack, and the tone carry this game. Yarny is a silent lead with no face to speak of, and the game never needs one.
Unravel earns its sentiment because it withholds it. The industrialization, the toxic waste, the husband’s heart attack — none of it is underlined. The cemetery level, where Yarny comes apart entirely, is the clearest example. The game does not tell you what that costs. It shows you a red thread in the snow and lets you do the arithmetic.
Ten years on, that is still the rare thing here. Most games this gentle are also this safe. Unravel is not safe. It is quiet, and it is sad, and it trusts you to keep up.
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