A Story About My Uncle is a fairly straightforward first person platformer. The premise of the story is that you have wandered into your absent uncle’s house and find a teleporter that takes you to another world. Using the suit he left for you, you must find your uncle and make your way back home.
The central mechanics are quite simple; there’s no combat in this game, with the game being wholly devoted to platforming through 3D environments. Your abilities include a normal jump, a super jump, an energy grapple you shoot from your hand that can connect to most (but not all!) surfaces and pull you towards them while allowing you to swing after a fashion, and later on, a pair of rocket boosts which give you an abrupt, very large bit of acceleration in a certain direction (yes, as if with a rocket) when you try to double jump in midair.
These controls are quite simple, and the game fundamentally consists of using them to traverse environments. You start out only getting one grapple per jump through the air, but soon you end up with the ability to grapple up to three times before landing – and in the final area, refresh them mid-jump by draining glowing crystals on the walls.
Sadly, the lack of much variety in mechanics means that, in the end, a lot of puzzles ultimately feel fairly samey – there’s only so much you can do with a limited control set, and it feels like you’ve done it all by the end of the game, and probably more than that. A number of areas feel kind of samey, which isn’t helped by the graphics – while each area of the game has its own unique look, each individual level looks pretty similar internally.
This is kind of annoying later on in the game, when it becomes increasingly more difficult at times to see what exactly you’re supposed to be grappling onto – there’s a few points in the game where you have to do a bit of searching to figure out where you’re trying to go next, and it can be less than obvious. Combined with the game’s general aesthetic of “rocks floating in midair/stuck in the sides of a cave over bottomless pits”, the environment can start getting a bit confusing and very same-looking over time.
Really, that’s all there is to the game; there’s three or four characters, with decent but slightly off voiceovers that contain the odd grammatical error betraying the writer as a non-native English speaker (or just some poor proofreading), but in the end, I didn’t feel a strong connection to any of the characters. Without this, there’s just the platforming – and that wears thin after a while.
Overall, while the game has an okay aesthetic on the most basic of levels, in the end it ends up feeling too samey and there just isn’t anything else there to give it much oomph. It just is what it is, and what it is isn’t anything special. At the end, I was left walking away without feeling like I’d gained anything from the experience, or experienced anything really memorable. It just isn’t worth your time or money.
Decent aesthetic, but too repetitive and not very memorable
A Story About My Uncle is a fairly straightforward first person platformer. The premise of the story is that you have wandered into your absent uncle’s house and find a teleporter that takes you to another world. Using the suit he left for you, you must find your uncle and make your way back home.
The central mechanics are quite simple; there’s no combat in this game, with the game being wholly devoted to platforming through 3D environments. Your abilities include a normal jump, a super jump, an energy grapple you shoot from your hand that can connect to most (but not all!) surfaces and pull you towards them while allowing you to swing after a fashion, and later on, a pair of rocket boosts which give you an abrupt, very large bit of acceleration in a certain direction (yes, as if with a rocket) when you try to double jump in midair.
These controls are quite simple, and the game fundamentally consists of using them to traverse environments. You start out only getting one grapple per jump through the air, but soon you end up with the ability to grapple up to three times before landing – and in the final area, refresh them mid-jump by draining glowing crystals on the walls.
Sadly, the lack of much variety in mechanics means that, in the end, a lot of puzzles ultimately feel fairly samey – there’s only so much you can do with a limited control set, and it feels like you’ve done it all by the end of the game, and probably more than that. A number of areas feel kind of samey, which isn’t helped by the graphics – while each area of the game has its own unique look, each individual level looks pretty similar internally.
This is kind of annoying later on in the game, when it becomes increasingly more difficult at times to see what exactly you’re supposed to be grappling onto – there’s a few points in the game where you have to do a bit of searching to figure out where you’re trying to go next, and it can be less than obvious. Combined with the game’s general aesthetic of “rocks floating in midair/stuck in the sides of a cave over bottomless pits”, the environment can start getting a bit confusing and very same-looking over time.
Really, that’s all there is to the game; there’s three or four characters, with decent but slightly off voiceovers that contain the odd grammatical error betraying the writer as a non-native English speaker (or just some poor proofreading), but in the end, I didn’t feel a strong connection to any of the characters. Without this, there’s just the platforming – and that wears thin after a while.
Overall, while the game has an okay aesthetic on the most basic of levels, in the end it ends up feeling too samey and there just isn’t anything else there to give it much oomph. It just is what it is, and what it is isn’t anything special. At the end, I was left walking away without feeling like I’d gained anything from the experience, or experienced anything really memorable. It just isn’t worth your time or money.