Unravel Two (2018)

Love the co-op, love the story, art and mechanics. Don't love how unforgiving controls are and how long levels are. Many of us are playing co-op with less-expert vid game players and frankly the aforementioned issues make things frustrating and since levels take FOREVER ( 2 hours) each session quickly devolves into arguments. If you are two highly competent players things move faster but levels still feel too long. We have gone to replay many times because we always tend to give up before the end, forget why after a few months, try again and go 'oh yeah, this is why'. Tis a crying shame cause it could have been 5 stars otherwise.

These games, in theory, are a work of art and right up my alley, but in practice, are honestly extremely underwhelming, disappointing and just kinda plain bad. I love the idea. I love the visuals. I like the concept of the gameplay...until you start playing them, and then you realize most of the puzzles are either poorly designed or completely incomprehensible, and there is rarely a middle ground. Meanwhile, there's supposed to be a "plot" but...there really isn't. It's that 'subtle background' plot thing, but it's not effective whatsoever and often impossible to tell what's actually happening in it (speaking specifically of the second game in this regard anyway) and aside from the beautiful visuals, these games are just...tech demos, plain and simple. And not even good ones, considering they handle like crap most of the time. A real damn shame.

I feel like Unravel Two is a perfect example of a game realizing it's medium can now be so visually enthralling and so emotionally engaging that it forgets to actually be fun to play. It's like a tech demo, not a game. I so badly want to like it - because on the whole it isn't a bad game by any means and I love platformers - but it's trying my patience.