A Story About My Uncle

Most platformers that I have played make the same decision of being difficult, sometimes sacrificing visuals to do so.  Games like Mirrors Edge and Portal look good, but make it a point of making the games difficult, some to the point of causing people to quit.  I myself have quit platform games due to their high difficulty.  This game feels as though the developers were willing to sacrifice difficulty for beauty.

A Story About My Uncle is a bedtime story the protagonist is telling his daughter about the time that he, as a younger man, went looking for his uncle.  He had grown up helping his uncle Fred with inventions and exploration.  One day he went to visit and Fred was gone.  There was no sign of him in the house, but we find an invention Fred had made for us, a suit that allowed us to do amazing things.  After putting on the suit you make your way to Fred's observatory, a room that has an odd "Trash Disposal Teleporter".  You fire it up and are taken away to another place.

When you land you see a beautiful place, a cavern with bridges from island to island.  Some islands are floating in air, some are floating, orbiting others.  Learning to jump from island to island is quite a blast!  At this point you have an added ability: a charged / super jump.  It allows for higher and longer jumps, depending on whether you are running or walking.  It is an amazing sensation to fly through the air.  After a little while it's really fun to find shortcuts, to skip an island or two, and to see how far you can soar before having to touch the ground.  Some islands have little glyphs on the ground which are little "save points" so that if you fail a jump and "die" in the water or fall into oblivion, you have islands where you respawn.  It's a fun mechanic that saves a lot of effort with some of the more difficult parts of the game.

Not far into the cave you find a crystal that powers your glove up just a little.  With that power up you can send out an energy beam to grab the islands and the ground, drawing you toward or with whatever you grabbed.  Basically it's an energy grapple beam.  This is the main item you will use in this game.

As you delve further into the cave you will find another crystal, increasing your energy beam to 2 uses.  Later you find a frog-girl that will lead you to a city of frog-like people.  When you arrive at the massive cavern that houses the city you will see a gorgeous sight, with twinkling lights and beautiful colors.  The little stalls and sheds are adorned with beautiful red and blue tapestries.  There are beautiful blue lights everywhere, lighting the cavern with a beautiful color.  This was truly one of the first beautiful sights in this gorgeous game.

In this city you meet their leader, letting him know that you're looking for your Uncle Fred.  He will give you another crystal and wish you good luck in finding your uncle.  With the third crystal you will have your third and final use of your glove.  Leaving the city you delve deeper into the caves to continue the search for your uncle.

In the deep caverns it is a different feeling than the beautiful, lit, decorated caverns.  These deep caverns have an entirely aspect.  Where the upper cavern was well it, these caverns are shrouded in darkness.  The upper caverns were easy to traverse, while the deep caves are a maze of winding, spindly paths, outcrops of jagged rocks, and falls into the eternal misty darkness.  The glowing plants only serve to make the atmosphere more darker, more tense.

As you continue down the path you find plants that glow brightly when hit with an energy beam, helping illuminate the dangerous path as you work to escape this dark location.  You have a small challenge with a 'boss', then not long after you make your way out of the cavern.

What you see next is one of the most beautiful sights, no, the most beautiful experiences of the game.  As you leave the cave you see a moving wall that turns out to be the side of a blimp!  You then see beautiful floating islands that have blue/white crystals growing on them.  You see beautiful pathways, gazebos, lanterns, and benches leading from island to island.  There are giant windmills that dot the sky.  There are points where you have to use the windmills as connection points as you travel.  

Eventually you reach a sky city, where there are more frog people.  You find jet boots, which help shoot you from place to place.  At this point you have gained all the gear for the game.  The boots are a great way to help recover from missed or failed grapples.  It's great to soar through the air even more than before.  Once you reach the city the puzzles let up a little, making this part of the game a little easier for a short time.  Don't worry, the puzzles will come back with a vengeance later.

As you leave the city, it is truly a heartbreaking moment.  You leave on an airship, moving from the sky city toward the ice mountain.    Look back toward the city is the last moment of warmth, bright colors, and soft tones in the game.  The final act is, as is standard for most games, the most difficult of them all.

You're in the final act of the game.  You are in an ice mountain, where everything is harsh.  The colors are harsh and glaring.  The challenges are more extreme and less forgiving.  Whatever puzzle up to this point was only training you for the real test: diving your way into the depths of this icy nightmare of a cavern.

You have all the gear in the game, have said your goodbyes to the frog people, and have entered the ice mountain in search of your uncle, the true test of what you learned before that moment happens.  In the other areas the energy grapple from the glove would stick to almost any surface.  Here, the surfaces it'll stick to are extremely limited.  There is ice everywhere, making movement more precarious.  And worst of all, in order to progress past the first room, you have to travel from one side of the room to the other in a chamber filled with floating blocks.  Getting to the far side isn't the difficult part.  After taking the power from the crystals at the far end of the chamber, the floating blocks loose their power and start to fall.  The true challenge is making it from one side to the other without falling into the endless abyss as the blocks fall.  When you reach that puzzle, I'd suggest taking a small break to let your hands rest, as it may take you a good deal of time to beat it.

All I'll say for the rest of the map is good luck.  It can be difficult at times.  The map will challenge your precision with the glove and boots, as well as your patience with the challenges.  I personally spent close to an hour on a single challenge that in the end took me a total of no more than 5 minutes to finish when I did it correctly.  The challenges are difficult, but they are always fun.  Some make you rethink the way you have been using your glove.  Have fun with these challenges.

In the end you do find your uncle.  He is in the depth of the mountain running experiments.  He says that he has a way home, but it's one use only.  He doesn't feel like going home, so he sends you home in his place.  As you leave you get one of the other most beautiful sights in the game.  You see the gems, the blue/white crystals that have permeated the game, all in beautiful veins in the walls and floor.  Watching your uncle as you leave is not an easy experience, but it's sadly sweet in a way that wraps the game up nicely.

In the end I would love to play this game again.  It took me roughly 3 hours to beat, including learning the controls and struggling with a few specific locations.  Playing through again would be fun to see how much time I could shave off knowing more skills and tricks about the movement.  This game was an instant favorite.  In a time of challenge and novel game ideas, this game goes back to the basics: beauty and fun.  I would suggest picking this game up, even at full price.  If on sale please don't hesitate to pick it up!