A Story About My Uncle Review by Kinglink

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Video Review:

A Story About My Uncle was suggested to me by one of my Steam friends. I knew almost nothing about it and had received A Story About My Uncle over a year ago in the Humble Indie Bundle 18. Still, I seem to have gravitated towards story-based games, so what’s the harm in one more?

A Story About My Uncle starts with the player entering his uncle’s house and finding it empty, The house is wonderfully decorated with a ton of tchotchkes in it. In fact, I had a lot of fun exploring the house because of all the items in the place and because of how many hidden easter eggs, including a youtube link, there are. Everything felt really interesting and unique and it felt like a house I wanted to explore.

From there through a number of steps you get teleported to another world and I have to be honest, I loved looking at the levels in this game. Each level is lovely to look at and fills me with wonder. A Story About My Uncle ends each level abruptly and jars me out of the trance it has weaved, but when the next level starts, I forgive it because I’m filled with a strong desire to explore the new location.

The gameplay helps with that as well. The player is given a suit that allows him to run around and jump great distances, even controlling which direction he’s falling while in midair. The suit even has the ability to “power jump”. The mobility the suit provides makes exploration very interesting because the game is allowed to build in a vertical direction as well as a horizontal one.

However, that’s not all the tricks the suit has. On the first level, you get a crystal that activates the suit’s “tether” from there you can look at any surface that is close enough and press a single button drawing your character to the point where you aimed. It makes what is an average adventure into something rather special. The ability to pull yourself up a cliffside is excellent, and the tether has limits, so aiming at the side of a cliff will only pull you to the side, getting on top of the edge of a cliff is a whole other story. That is the challenge, to use your new found superpowers, and it’s an interesting challenge at that.

The tether also can be used for momentum as it drags the player toward an object, if you release early before the player collides with the object, the player can fling themselves across chasms and gaps. It’s exciting and fun to use.

You see, when the tether’s target is in constant motion, such as a windmill, the tether will continually draw the player in, but the target will continue to draw the tether out creating continual motion and slingshotting the player to places. The rush as you ride along on these objects almost make you forget how outlandish some of them are. Many of them are just floating rocks orbiting around another rock or empty space with no connection to reality, but the experience is some of the most fun I’ve had in a game.
 
I’ve made the tether sound exciting, but is it as good as it sounds? Well within the first look I called myself spiderman, and I’m having trouble coming up with a better comparison. It’s as if someone stuck a web shooter on my character’s hand and I’m web-slinging around the environment. While it doesn’t have the range I’d really want, or the fact that it immediately starts to retract after making contact, it really does feel like you are swinging on a web just as Spiderman would, and that feeling almost never goes away in the game.

There’s even a point where you get an additional tool, a pair of rocket boots, in the game, and from there you feel more like a Marvel character, only this time you can fly. It’s more Tony Stark’s Mark I model, than a true flying hero as they only give you a small boost, but that boost completely changes A Story About My Uncle and makes you feel even more amazing in mid-air if that’s possible.

With all these tools, the question of what is the gameplay about comes up. The entire game is about finding out where you should go next, usually by finding a common mark that tells you your uncle has already been there. Then you have to find points to sling yourself to or from and from them to execute a plan that eventually requires three tethered shots and sometimes a rocket boost to get where you want to go next.

A Story About My Uncle does a great job of showing you the pathways. The levels are well laid out and there are only a couple of levels that I had trouble with. The marks your uncle left are rather big clues, but once in a while they look reachable but are not. As I said before every level made me want to explore it but even as I did, there’s usually one clear pathway from each point and from there you can clearly know where to go next.

The levels themselves are great, however, the final level… well, it’s rough. The game gets too clever requiring precision that wasn’t asked from the player previously. It’s a constant request as well, not just one or two hard movements, but almost every jump in the final level is significantly harder than any jump requested previously. In addition, there are crystals that will recharge the number of tethers you have but you are also asked to hit them in mid-air, and quite often there’s less than a second to target the crystal and then target what you need to swing to next. It’s a very tight timeframe and doesn’t make the game as enjoyable as the rest of the game.

In addition for some reason, the game stops giving you the rocket boots for part of the level and then returns them to you again in a story moment that’s clearly there for a gameplay element. It’s a shame because the rest of the game worked well and never felt like it abused the story for a new challenge. Here in the last level it’s an unnecessary challenge that’s thrown together, and it doesn’t seem to work.

Still, I was able to pass through it relatively quickly, it just was the most gamified level in A Story About My Uncle. It just doesn’t feel like it fits as well as the rest of the experience. By the time you reach the final level, you should feel quite accomplished but that final level seems to delight in just finding new frustrating ways to annoy the player.

There’s also the idea of collectibles in the game, and those can be interesting to discover. The collectibles make a little sound like a clicking when you are near them and from that you can locate where they are. I didn’t find many of them in my game though and didn’t feel a need to go back and collect them all. If you are a collectible hunter, there are five of them per level and most are fairly well hidden.

So we come to the story. Honestly, the story in A Story About My Uncle is flawed. It starts off interesting and sounding like we’ll have a sad twist or find out the story is in someone’s head. It just has all the marks of a manipulative story.

As A Story About My Uncle progresses you find fantastic villages and even a frog person friend named Mad Maddie who assists you for part of the way. It’s actually a bit charming. Just as the world make you want to explore more, the story makes you wonder what you’ll find next.

If you want to read more, you can see the full review with pictures and video at https://kinglink-reviews.com/2018/06/27/a-story-about-my-unc.... You can also check out my Curator page at If you want to hear more from me, you can show me that by following my curator at http://store.steampowered.com/curator/31803828-Kinglink-Revi...