14 DAY TRIAL // 
A Story About My Uncle is a first-person platforming adventure created by Gone North Games and representing Coffee Stain Studios' first foray into publishing.
The game follows the story of a boy searching for his lost uncle, finding himself in a wondrous place he never thought existed, a faraway planet where his uncle stumbled upon something incredible.
The game is presented as a bedtime story that a father is recounting to his young daughter, detailing his adventures on the strange planet while tracking down his inventor uncle, with the assistance of various technological implements that he devised.
As you venture deeper into the world, with the help of gadgets that allow you to jump incredibly high and soar through the environment, you will discover what kept your uncle from returning home.
Movement is a big part of the game, as it mainly focuses on the exploration of vast and beautiful environments, swinging through the air with a wonderful feeling of freedom by making use of an energy beam that pulls you toward certain objects, like a grappling hook.
You can only utilize the grappling hook a limited number of times while in the air though, so you have to use the energy charges carefully, in order to make sure that you're going to land in the right spot. Once you land though, your charges are refilled, probably by the mysterious force of the crystals found all around.
The main attraction of A Story About My Uncle is the free-form movement afforded by the grappling hook and the rocket boots, and the tense moments between jumps, wondering whether or not you'll be close enough to your next tethering point.
Although it's a first-person game, it completely forgoes the shooter component that is usually associated with such titles, offering a completely non-violent experience, that is driven entirely by narration and exploration.
The environments are pretty varied, going from an underground cavern to out in the open sky, beneath a frozen mountain, through the floating jungle islands looming over a massive river and then back in a different kind of underground cavern.
The movement is pretty varied as well, and you'll find yourself not simply cruising forward, but also falling to abyssal depths, climbing to dizzying heights and slowly making your way along the walls of immense underground caves, seeing your destination clearly and struggling to find an adequate route, gliding along the walls and jumping from ledge to ledge.
That being said, the game has a strong puzzle vibe to it, almost all of the time imposing a strict route for you to decipher in order to progress, and not letting you experiment with the environment enough.
You can, of course, employ a couple of shortcuts once you learn the ropes of the movement system, but only during subsequent runs, and there are many areas where you can correct your mistakes with a well-placed rocket boost that will get you back to safety.
But the main thing you'll be doing while playing A Story About My Uncle is falling to your death. Although the game is very linear, it's not always very clear about the direction you're supposed to go in, and so you'll end up doing a lot of experimenting to see whether you can reach a certain point or not, which equates death most of the time.
This linearity is something that will gradually become a little irritating, giving the game world a very contrived and unnatural feel, making everything seem like it was created by someone to be just in range of your grappling hook rather than naturally existing there for you to make use of.
Although the beginning is very exciting, the fact that, instead of using your arsenal of gadgets to roam the world, you always have to find the intended path, most of the time through painfully repetitive trial and error, detracts from the entire experience.
This coupled with the fact that the story begins by being genuinely interesting, raising a bunch of questions, but then falling flat on its face, is another aspect that marks down the entire experience.
Frankly, I found the lack of a great story the most disappointing thing about the game. The grappling hook gimmick is fun enough, and the game looks great, but that's not enough to carry the whole thing. I expected much more from the narrative, and, unfortunately, the only thing I got was the feeling that there wasn't enough time to explore it.
A Story About My Uncle is very short, and it, unfortunately, feels pretty void. If you just treat it like you would a puzzle-platformer with some narrative in the background, then it's fine, but, given the exciting movement system and the level of detail in the graphics department, the feeling you end up with is that it missed its potential.
There is no substance to the world, the backgrounds look good but they feel like a canvas that's pulled around you so you would bask in its vibrant colors and not notice how barren everything really is.
You meet the frog people, you see the special bond between your uncle Fred and Maddie, one of the younglings, you assist her in following her curiosity and then deliver her to the exiled frog people who left their initial home and tapped into the power of the crystals, being much more advanced, and then, a cave later, you meet Fred and that's it.
The game ends very abruptly, and so does the story, raising many questions but answering none and making no sense, making you feel like the kid you were telling it to fell asleep and you no longer had to explore it in its entirety.
Who were the frog people? What's the mystery behind the crystals? What about the passage of time? How did Fred ever plan to go back, considering that reaching him had to be done through some one-way-only flying and jumping action? How does the suit work?
What is going to happen to the frog people? Why were the ones in the cave so set in their ways? What are the ones that got out and flourished going to do?
The answers to these questions will never be revealed, unfortunately, and that the developer didn't even bother to write something about the entire thing at the end of the game.
The entire idea behind the game was that Fred created a device that transported trash someplace else, and you find out that it was another planet, where some frog eggs turned into anthropomorphic sentient beings that built a society from our trash, but it never gets explored in any meaningful way.
Especially since going around the environments is usually quite fun and would have been even more fun if it were just a means to an end, and not the entire journey itself.
The game also has some really nice graphics, blending light and shadow, glowing effects and colorful vistas, both underground and up in the sky, making for a great visual journey.
You'll find yourself simply checking out the interesting view a lot of the time, especially in the more populated areas, but overall, the world just feels very disconnected from what it should be.
The Good
- Beautiful visuals
- Fluid movement
- Exciting mechanics
- Replayability
- No combat
The Bad
- Disappointing story
- Very short
- Not much to do except jump around and swing
- No combat
Conclusion
Also, the game is less of a non-stop torrent of high-speed action where you go around the environment as you please, at blinding speeds, but more of a puzzle-solving game where you look around, plan your next move, and, after managing to pull it off, you stop and plan again, making for an anticlimactic overall experience, especially so since there is usually only one correct way to do things.
You get the feeling that the world is just a series of platforms that you have to check, like in a giant slalom skiing tournament, with all the eye candy trying to fool you into thinking that you're actually doing something else entirely.
The premise of the story is interesting and gets you hooked, and even though the game is linear and demands near perfect execution for many of its puzzles, it's still an interesting mechanical and visual experience, but A Story About My Uncle ultimately disappoints by ending very abruptly and not getting anywhere.
On the other hand, you could also say that it revolutionizes the way we think about platformers. It's rewarding to play, and you can even pick it up after you're done with the story and have some quick fun with it, so in that aspect it wins a few extra points.
