We just got a 3-minute gameplay video of Unravel from Gamescom, and it does not disappoint. Unravel captured pretty much everybody’s hearts after its Swedish creator, Martin Sahlin, took to the stage at E3 earlier this year. Sahlin was nervous (understandably—that’s 21 million people watching, give or take) and genuine as he showed us his Yarny doll and talked about going out into the woods to suss out new adventures for the game. His tattooed hands shook and his voice wavered, and it was easy to tell that he felt really passionate about the game he and his team had worked on for months. His presentation was a nice break from E3’s usual corporate gimmicks that always feel a little too…planned. There’s nothing wrong with being a polished presenter, of course—the fascination with Unravel was more about the heart of it. This wasn’t someone paid to do PR and given a script with some awkward jokes scattered here and there, this was someone with a lot of passion for what he was showing us.
Fortunately, Unravel was well-received, and not only because of Sahlin’s adorableness and enthusiasm for it. (Yarny’s adorableness has to be at least an equivalent factor too.) The game looks completely gorgeous, and the physics-based side-scrolling puzzle gameplay seems imaginative and challenging. We’ve gotten hints that it might have a pretty good story behind it, too. In this latest footage, we see Yarny sharing a moment with a small red fish that doesn’t seem to be sentient, like he is, but is made of the same material.
The narrator (Sahlin, I believe) tells us about the sequence in the video: “It’s based on northern Sweden, our home. Inspired by happy sunny memories of going to the coast, both as a child and as a parent. Unravel is a game about reaching out, about mending broken bonds.”
