5 reviews
A Story About My Uncle
A Story About My Uncle is a non-violent First-Person platform adventure game built in the Unreal Engine. It is a story about a boy who searches for his lost uncle and ends up in a world he couldn’t imagine existed. The movement through the world in A Story About My Uncle is a crucial part of its core gameplay, focusing on swinging yourself through...
Details
- Released
- May 27, 2014
- Developer
- Gone North Games
- Publisher
- Coffee Stain Studios
- Platforms
- PC
How it plays
Time to beat · 12 player times (IGDB)
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A Story About My Uncle Reviews
Professional reviews from gaming critics
It’s fitting A Story About My Uncle seems to have lept from the silver screen, given it’s a game all about, well, leaping. There’s a touch of the Percy Jackson or Inkhart about its story in which a young boy inherits a magical jumping glove from his explorer uncle and follows his trail through vast cloud cities, mystical mountain passes, and twinkling shrines. It’s pure children’s adventure
A Story About My Uncle is a strange name, but it is an appropriate and perfectly descriptive one. In the game, players tell a story to their daughter about the time they followed their adventurous uncle Fred into a mysterious world. This whimsical setup frames the action, which focuses on a clever grappling hook mechanic that allows players to fling themselves between platforms over great distances.
Unfortunately, the last quarter of A Story About My Uncle does become a little too repetitive, and slightly overly obscure grapple set pieces require blind luck more often than skill. That said, this is still a great adventure - one which will return you to childhood fantasy, and one which will far from get your goat.
Ultimately, A Story About My Uncle is a pleasant but wobbly experience which only takes a few hours to finish. The checkpointing can be a frustration, the voicework is idiosyncratic, the prettiness can tip over into twee-ness and the story's conclusion lacks punch. In the moments when it finds its feet you get glimpses of a pretty platformer with a great sense of momentum. It's a shame, then, that the way the action and the other elements of the game are integrated keeps stopping that momentum dead.
As an extra note, one minor gripe I have with the grappling mechanic is that sometimes, it felt like some objects that where evidently within range were not reachable until I got even closer to them, while in other cases, objects that seemed to be out of range were indeed able to the grappled. I’m not sure if it was an inconsistency, or perhaps my range perception in the game was off.