This year’s Tokyo Game Show has showcased many titles, but none of them has an ounce of the creativity shown in The Unfinished Swan.
Plot-wise The Unfinished Swan is a modern fairy tale. One day, the titular swan disappears from a little boy’s favourite painting. So then he enters the painting and travels across the world beyond to find the swan.
The Tokyo Game Show demo was the game’s first area: a world made up of nothing but white. Your only ability? To throw blobs of black paint. As you cover the landscape in paint, you uncover not only the path forward, but objects as well: a wall, a bench, a bucket, a frog. Some objects can even be gathered and used to affect your paint spray in different ways. And when you look behind you from a high vantage point, your random splashing has created a beautiful work of art.
Best of all, this is only the first level of the game. Each subsequent level will have a different visual mechanic — which has yet to be revealed.
In the end, The Unfinished Swan reminded me of nothing more than Journey — a game of pure exploration across a beautiful world. We can only hope the the rest of the levels live up to the promise of the first.
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