If you spend your time speedrunning Mario Maker levels designed by Satan then you’re going to have a good time with Unbound. They could have focused more on the story and been a little more forgiving with the platforming but that’s just my opinion. If you’re into a challenge you’ll probably get a lot out of Unbound. Now let me be clear, this isn’t a knock against difficult games. It was a relief to have made it but then I realized that there was something likely more difficult waiting up ahead. I was impaled, maybe, 30 times before I made my way across.

When success or failure counts on perfectly timing your jump, having your double jump trigger first is a special kind of frustrating.īy opening and closing portals you’re able to sort of fly but expert timing is required and the section feels just a bit too long. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. About two hours in you get a double jump ability. There is some satisfaction when you beat a difficult sequence of jumps but there are moments when you won’t even be sure if things are working the way they’re supposed to. As I watched Soli die over and over and over, popping like a cheap party balloon against spikes, barbs, and the mandibles of hungry monsters I began to ask myself just what was the point of going on? Sadly, the story here is undercooked and you can practically taste it. A game like Inside brought the vibes of Portal and The X-Files to a platformer and to this day is one of my favorite games. We’ve seen it a hundred times and Unbound doesn’t make much of the setup. The typical fantasy story plot is at play here: everything is fine until a portal opens up and the source of all evil in the universe burns your village down. So what’s the game about besides being reminded of your earthly mortality? You play as Soli, a child of a civilization of glowing eyed, robed beings. In Unbound it can feel almost out of place. You could say the same for Cuphead but that game’s unique old-timey cartoon style and revolving around boss fights made the difficulty more digestible. And when you do clear a section it will feel more thanks to luck than skill. Unbound however is all difficulty all the time.

Unbound worlds apart villagers