Developer: Gone North Games
Publisher: Coffee Stain Studios
Rrp: £9.99
Released: 28th May 2014
Available on Steam, Gog.com, and their Own Site
A Story About My Uncle is a narratively driven First Person Platformer where you play as a young man searching for his Uncle. All of this takes place in the past tense of course as the story is actually being told to the characters (you never find out his name) daughter.
One of the common complaints I’ve seen is regarding the controls. I’ll admit they take a little getting used to, while the keyboard controls remain unchanged from most FPS’s the mouse controls are a different story. The right mouse button acts as a powered jump, needing to be held down to charge. The left is your grappling beam, used to pull you from object to object.
The powered jump allows you to jump much higher than the standard jump, although that in itself is more powerful than in most games, but when used while running it becomes a powered leap. The part that requires some getting used to is having to retrain yourself not to press the space bar and instead press and release the right mouse button.
The voice acting isn’t great, it’s not terrible but you can tell that the people speaking the lines aren’t used to it or possibly aren’t used to speaking in English. Sadly the main narrator is the one who suffers from this the most.
Graphically the game is quite good looking providing plenty of beautiful views for you to look at… As you plummet to your doom for the fifth time.
The game relies on the player to explore their surroundings to uncover the story, there are interactive objects (that are given a blue outline) that will reveal more about the story. Sadly technique is a little hit and miss. It requires the player to explore and find them, if a player were to miss one of those objects they may become confused when the narrator mentions a story element that would have been revealed through it.
Precision and timing are everything in a game like this and this is no exception. That being said it is more forgiving than other First Person Platformers allowing for a few routes to a given destination.
Checkpoints are plentiful and load times are very short, making any mistakes made feel much less punishing. You will become thankful of these in the later sections as the challenges get much much more complex.
Each level has five collectibles scattered throughout it, once you get to a total of ten it unlocks some additional features that can be turned on or off in the Options menu.
There are also time trails available through the Extras menu, I’m not a fan of these game types because I’m a slower more methodical player.
Npc’s that aren’t related to the story tend to be static characters or have some minor repeating animations. Which is a shame as I wanted to interact with them and find out more about the world I was in. Of course I can understand why they don’t, this being from a small dev team and all. It just feels like a missed opportunity.
Clocking in at around four hours the game provides a decent amount of entertainment. Personally I think he Rrp is a bit too high, but that all depends on how much enjoyment you get from doing time trails. If you can get this game for anywhere below £7 I recommend you do, this game is certainly worth that.
