The Unfinished Swan is a short game that's really hard to pinpoint it into a genre because it is very different to most other games. It takes place in a first person view and perhaps the most unique and well-known aspect is the first stage where everything is white. You shoot black paintballs in order to get the outlines of items and see what is in front of you. It's really confusing at first but you will manage it and it becomes the most distinguishing aspect of The Unfinished Swan.
The annoying thing with the first stage is that you cannot throw paintballs everywhere without a care since you will end up painting everything a solid black which is equally impossible to see. Splatter just enough to show the outlines of items and it looks amazing. The game incorporates a few light puzzles which honestly isn't that hard to complete although a few might get you thinking for a few moments. In the second stage, it is water themed and you end up shooting water pellets in order to solve increasingly harder puzzles. This second stage ends up being nothing special, if anything, it overstays its welcome by being slow going and becoming annoying when you were waiting for vines to grow as you shoot water at them.
The third stage changes the gameplay once again and now it takes place in the dark. There are lights scattered about and spiders appear which will attack you when you're not in the light. It becomes tenser but even if you die, you respawn in a safe place right before the place you died, which makes it easier to bear. This stage had an annoying section where you have to push a glowing ball and keep near it to advance. However, it also had a neat creative section where you can create blocks to help platform your way through.
The fourth and final stage is really short. It retreads most of the previous gameplay mechanics into a summary and in truth, it felt truncated in that the story ends so abruptly after the slow buildup up until this point. You honestly expected the ending to be longer and more profound. The Unfinished Swan is a short game but still takes around 4 to 5 hours to finish. It tells a nice sweet story about a boy who has his mother's last artwork, an unfinished swan. He travels through the painting and has to find the sleeping king.
The story captures you and it was delivered perfectly with further storybooks to be found within each stage. As the relationship between the boy and the king and what was happening slowly unfolded, you become more invested into the game. This is a really easy game to immerse yourself into the world and definitely one to play if you want to relax. There are no penalties for death and in most of the stages, you can't even die. The music is serene and the clean art style works so perfectly. To extend the game, there are collectibles which take on the form of balloons, scattered around each stage. Some are easy to find and others are sneakily tucked away, easily giving you a few more hours of game time if you don't want to use a guide.
In addition to shooting your paintballs, the other ability is that you're able to jump. Collecting the balloons will also give you some sweet unlockables. You can unlock the prototype stage, a sniper rifle which can shoot paintballs in a straight line and extra abilities to make the game easier or just something fun to muck around with. Overall, The Unfinished Swan is a unique game that's fun not in the traditional sense, but in the unique gameplay it presents and the sweet fairytale-like story it tells. It is definitely worth a go!
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