A Story About My Uncle Review
A Story About My Uncle is a game developed by Gone North Games, a group now better known as Coffee Stain Studios and published by Coffee Stain Publishing. It is a platforming adventure game made for Mac and Windows and released way back in July of 2012. I recently was able to pick it up due to a free promotion through Steam, and today got the chance to finally play through it. Without further adieu, here are my thoughts!
Gameplay
The gameplay was very well polished and offered some very enjoyable movement throughout the whole thing. You start out just simply doing high and long jumps to get from place to place and both feel extremely fun to start out, then progress on to an energy grappling hook and rocket boost which help add flavor to the different kinds of movement you’ll be using. It all feels very fluid and polished and helps to make the game that much more enjoyable. On top of that, the different ways you can go about doing certain challenges allow you to have a large amount of replayability. It makes the game more interesting a fun to play through for those who enjoy speedrunning these kinds of games and will make you want to keep coming back for more. There were a few select parts where the movement felt a little too imprecise and made some encounters frustrating, but I never found anything too harsh.
Environment
If there’s one thing this game definitely goes above and beyond with, it’s the visuals and environments. The cartoony style of the game feels perfect for how wild the different things you’re doing get, offering the ability to get a little unrealistic with things such as villages in the sky and floating islands. The way the environment is created is awesome too, with no piece crucial to progressing feeling like it was shoved into somewhere that it didn’t belong. It all felt like it was meant to be there, and is something worth commending the developers for doing successfully. Speaking of the environments, there are only five different areas really present within the game, but these five areas all feel distinct and part of their own separate areas. All of these are beautifully crafted to help give each of them a great mood and helps you to feel different kinds of emotions as you traverse through them.
Story
The game follows a very basic story of a man telling his daughter a bedtime story about a real-life adventure that he went through, where he went to go find his uncle but traversed a massive world in the process. I won’t reveal much more, but the game is better experienced if you manage to find some of the collectibles. They help to give a few more details about the journey and the protagonist himself which aren’t crucial to the story but are good as extra little details.
Length
This is the one part where I feel the game falls short. I’m generally the type of person to think that games that are shorter are fine as long as it is of a higher quality and has more craftsmanship put into it. This game definitely has no lack of craftsmanship, but I still only managed to take two and a half hours on my first playthrough. I feel like that could’ve been heavily shortened on the next playthrough which to me just feels very strange. It leaves a lot to be desired and I feel could’ve been expanded more to tell us about the people that you find there and go more into your friend’s story than it already did. If the game were a few hours longer, I could’ve easily excused this but I feel as though it was tough to get around really. Judge how much you pay for the game based on that factor.
Verdict
A Story About My Uncle manages to bring out a very good platformer with some excellent gameplay and polished mechanics. The game’s world really manages to capture your attention and offers something fresh and interesting from some great artistic talent. The story is simple yet offers to capture your attention and feels for the game’s world. The length though, leaves a lot more uncaptured potential that could’ve been much better expanded on and could’ve made the game better.
