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Developer Giant Sparrow's PlayStation 3-exclusive downloadable game, The Unfinished Swan, is one of those titles that hits all the "games as art" buttons: It's colorful, it promotes exploration, and at no point in the entire story does your character blow an enemy to bloody chunks.
Swan also pounds (literally) on the "quirky/innovative gameplay mechanic" button. Like Flower's "You are the wind" and Canabalt's "Just jump, man" dynamics, the first level of Giant Sparrow's game has you throwing blobs of paint around to reveal the contents of a uniformly white world. Later on, you throw balls of water around to make vines grow, lob nondescript spheres at lanterns to create light, and toss some round things to determine the dimensions of a 3D object.
Basically, The Unfinished Swan has a lot of balls. And that's pretty much where the problem is.
Despite the fact that you're doing different things in every level, you're going to spend the bulk of your time with The Unfinished Swan throwing balls at things. Take those vines, for example: each glob you toss at them makes them grow for a little while and then stop. Eventually, they'll grow up a wall that was blocking your path, allowing you to climb to the next area. But that growth happens a little bit at a time, and it gets old after a while. Eventually, I'd end up just whamming on the water button as fast as I could to speed things up. And that might actually be what Giant Sparrow is going for.
I imagine that the point of this is something about drawing a distinction between the main character, Monroe the Obligatory Storybook Orphan, and the mysterious King who created the world that Monroe explores. I assume that we're supposed to see Monroe as a chaos-splattering free spirt to the King's obsessive-compulsive control-freakery, and all of this is true. But what it means for me, the player, is that I have to press the "throw orb" button a lot.
That's not to say that The Unfinished Swan is boring; it really isn't long enough to reach that point. But it does show that it even the most dazzling visual style and the most offbeat of mechanics still need some pacing.
