“Monroe’s mother had always been much better at starting things than finishing them. When she died, she left behind over 300 canvases, not one of them finished. Along with Monroe, who felt pretty unfinished himself. The orphanage allowed him to keep only one painting. And so he chose the unfinished swan that had always been his mother’s favorite. But that night he woke up to find the swan had disappeared. So he took his mother’s silver paintbrush, and followed the footprints into a little door he hadn’t seen before.”

So begins The Unfinished Swan, a delightful freshman effort from the studio Giant Sparrow, released in 2012. In it, the player takes the role of Monroe, the recently orphaned young boy, as he journeys through a series of strange lands, chasing after the titular unfinished swan that escaped from his mother’s painting. The gameplay is effectively a series of navigation puzzles. The game is broken into chapters, each featuring a different sort of disorienting environment that must be traversed by throwing liquid blobs using Monroe’s mother’s paint brush. Each of the 3 main chapters, plus the short epilogue, feature a different set of mechanics and play quite differently, but they all attempt to connect to the theme of incompleteness and creative struggle established in the opening narration.

Chapter 1: The Garden

The first chapter asks the player to traverse a pure white environment with the aid of black ink blobs that can be thrown to reveal surfaces. I find something inherently exciting about staring into a blank screen, totally disoriented, before chucking an ink ball to reveal an unexpected object that was there the whole time. There is also a simple, base thrill I get from covering a clean environment in dirty ink. Whirling around, throwing a dozen ink blobs and watching them find targets with a satisfying splotch is great.

The mechanic provides a perfect framework for buildups and reveals, and the developers use that to provide many clever environmental surprises to uncover. When chucking an ink ball, the player may uncover a creature, that runs away startled. One may reveal a funny statue, a swinging crate, or a body of water inhabited by a sea monster. The world is a joy to discover, filled with surprising humor and life. The developers smartly use sightlines and perspective tricks to guide the player and create more fun reveals. The occasional golden object, like the titular swan’s footprints and other visual highlights, sharply contrast against the white environment and beckon the player in the proper direction. The game also provides many instances where the player can look back upon areas they have traversed. This helps keeps the player oriented, and creates a curious joy of being able to trace a path through a level that earlier was nothing but a blank slate. And the game constantly tries to confound expectations, like allowing the player to fall into an unseen hole, or blocking one’s progress with a hidden gate. The clever environmental design here is the focus - if the player were asked to simply traverse a rectilinear maze, the game would quickly become tedious. Indeed, the developers show their knowledge of that very fact in the first level, suggesting that the player may have to traverse an massive labyrinth, before providing a shortcut to the end.

The game knows when to mix things up to keep the gameplay fresh. The game progresses through increasingly complex spaces of pure white, before transitioning to areas with some shadows. The challenge shifts subtly; an area may look normal from one direction with shadows that clearly define the objects in the environment, but viewing the scene from another angle leaves the player in disorienting white again. The change also allows for the developers to create more visual splendor with vast environments. Walking out a doorway or up a set of stairs can reveal a towering castle, or a giant labyrinth.

Learning in pieces about the silly, mustachioed King that created this sterile, white land only adds to the fun. Via storybook-style murals around the environment, the player learns the story of the King that created this strange land. This is one of the great tricks of the game, contextualizing the abstract game world with a charming tale in the style of a child’s storybook. A talented and headstrong artist, the King created his kingdom in pure white, thinking no color was good enough for his creation. But as more people arrived in his kingdom, and their complaints about the confusing white land grew, he was forced to compromise his vision by adding shadows. Eventually, the King gave up on this kingdom and the demands of the people who inhabited it, leaving it behind, unfinished, as he went to establish a new kingdom.

The first chapter feels like the most polished section of the game. The unlockable demo level, accessible to players upon collecting all of the hidden red balloons in the game, shows the ink throwing mechanics realized in an early phase of development basically unchanged from the final product. This was clearly the main idea driving the creation of the game, and the developers explore many ideas with this mechanic in a short amount of time. The pacing of the first chapter is perfect, and the reveals and visual humor are clever and abundant. The hour or so it takes to play through it is sublime.

The only, admittedly minor, criticism I have would be the use of portals. At two points in the chapter, the game uses spatial distortion. It is first set up in a room where two doors on opposite walls are impossibly linked together, creating a infinite chain of identical rooms, impossible to escape. The puzzle is to understand that a hole in the floor is also linked to the open ceiling, allowing you to fall to an otherwise inaccessible elevated platform to progress. This is the only point in the chapter that this mechanic is used for a puzzle. Unlike the ink throwing mechanic, which is explained in the story as Monroe using his mother’s paintbrush, or the strange look of the world, explained as the visual preference of the odd King, these portals are not contextualized within the narrative. Its lack of explanation and very brief usage in the game leaves it feeling half-baked and underutilized. However, the moment when the mechanic returns is such a great payoff that I have to forgive it. As the player begins to traverse a giant labyrinth and the immensity of it really sets in, a gate the player passes through transports them to a castle in the far distance. Walking through the gate and looking back over the labyrinth I was just in is so striking and memorable that the portal mechanic deserves inclusion for that alone. I only wish the mechanic saw better integration at other points in the game.

The first chapter had me fall in love instantly with this game. It is a masterclass in environmental storytelling. Impressively, the game manages to follow-up with a great second chapter that, though it has faults, successfully explores a new mechanic.

Chapter 2: The Unfinished Empire

The second chapter begins strong. Monroe is in a new kingdom, and the new art style that accompanies it is gorgeous. Black objects sit upon white backgrounds, and pops of gold and light blue accentuate key elements. A sleeping giant lays just beyond a wall, his giant toes peeking over. His breakfast, a giant slice of toast rests on a nearby building.

Mechanically, Monroe now throws balls of water which paint a light blue mark on surfaces but quickly evaporate, contextualized by Monroe having fallen into a sea at the start of the chapter. The early parts of this level could feel like a regression as a result, or at least an abrupt shift. The only new gameplay mechanic to engage with is throwing water blobs at clearly marked red turnstiles to interact with certain objects, like lowering a bridge or turning a crane. It doesn’t really leverage the game’s unique throwing mechanic, as it is functionally no different than pressing a button to activate a device, a totally pedestrian gameplay pattern. The game is still clever though. A fun moment comes when Monroe finds a dammed-up, empty water canal that he must jump into. Here, there are no shadows or other colors, maintaining the idea that such things only exist if the King intentionally painted them in, which he couldn’t do under the water. The player must then use the temporary stains of the water blobs to guide them through the pure white canal, to a place where they can rise out and open the dam, thus raising a boat and allowing them to continue forward.

The problem is that the early sections of the level are brief and disconnected from each other. At one point, the player walks through a deeply shadowed area, and again must use the water stains to guide them. Then the player must ascend a structure of scaffolding, using water balls occasionally to interact with mechanical elements to further their progress. Then the player must find a path to another red lever to open another dam. Each of these segments are brief, shallow, and fail to create a cohesive gameplay identity for this section. Where the first chapter steadily built upon the unique ink throwing mechanic in clever ways, the early segments of the second chapter feel disjointed, fine ideas in isolation but not building upon each other in any interesting ways.

The game finally finds itself again by introducing the vines. The vines are brilliant. By throwing water onto a surface, vines will wildly race towards that spot. The more water you throw, the more the vines will spread, covering more surface area and spawning more vines. Monroe can climb on the vines up vertical surfaces, allowing players to create pathways for themselves around the environment. This is a perfect extension of the core ideas of the ink throwing mechanic. Both are used to provide a freeform and expressive way of creating a path through an environment. Both are used to create visual surprises and humor - the ink by uncovering unexpected objects, and the vines by periodically providing objects like trellises or topiary structures that animate when covered in vines. They both leave permanent marks on the landscape, allowing the player look back on their path through the level and see their progression, a fact leveraged by level design that provides many viewpoints to look back on that path. And they both connect thematically to the story of the overzealous King, by providing ways to disrupt his carefully sculpted kingdom.

The apotheosis of the chapter comes when Monroe enters the King’s chambers, another pure white space like the first chapter, fitting his personal preference. Here, in a similar fashion to the first chapter’s ink, the vines now allow you to uncover the contours of the environment. Covering a sterile white space in leafy growth to find a path through is just as satisfying as splattering black ink. Nearly as fun is when you are given a firehose to spray water at a great distance, allowing you to coat whole buildings in vines and trace a path across a great gap.

Similar to the gameplay, the story is also a bit meandering in the early sections, before also finding it’s focus. The opening cutscene and initial area establishes a lazy, sleeping giant as a focal point, the only remaining resident of this kingdom. But the giant is soon forgotten. It is a loose plot thread, one that deserved a payoff, however small, at some point that never arrives. The story regains its footing again as it recounts how, again, the King struggled to meet the demands of his subjects. He was forced to build a sewage system and then a canal system to satisfy his subjects. But then the canals brought a horde of vines, the ones that comprise the main gameplay of the chapter. The vines were a wild element beyond the control of the King, one that his unruly subjects secretly helped to flourish. In anger and desperation, the King created a terrible creature to combat the vines. Naturally, the creation was beyond his control, and he was only barely able to force it into the sea. This chapter also introduces the internal motivation of the King - his desire to leave behind a permanent legacy, inspired by the destruction of his sand castle by the waves when he was just a boy. The story begins to humanize the King more, which will reach a climax in the final chapter.

Despite the genius of the vine mechanics, the chapter doesn’t quite leverage them in the same way the first chapter did with its ink mechanics. The ink was a constant in the chapter, a thing the player had to use nearly constantly as they explored. The vines not only take a while to be introduced, they also are periodically taken away from the player afterwards, and also given strict limitations. Cracks in the environment cannot be crossed with vines, creating set areas in which one can explore. This was an unavoidable limitation, given the size of the environments the developers crafted. Making all of it freely explorable via the vines would likely be confusing to players. Still, the limitations are strongly felt, and the simple freedom and genius of ink throwing is only reached at points in the second chapter.

Despite my criticisms, the second chapter is still very strong, and is a suitable follow-up to the first. The lack of mechanical focus for its early part is made up for by the incredible visual direction, and the vines, though somewhat underused, are a brilliant extension of the first chapter’s ideas. Sadly, the third chapter fails to live up to either of the preceding chapters.

Chapter 3: Night Time

While the second chapter takes a while to find its focus, the third never does at all. It begins with a strong enough idea. Monroe finds himself in a dark, unsettling forest at night. The only way to orient oneself is to stare up at the stars above and use the silhouettes of the overhanging trees to provide a sense of spatial orientation. It’s a good visual hook, and it feels faithful to the feeling of being in the wilderness on a dark night, away from the usual light of urban environments, where the stars and moon above are the brightest lights to be seen. It is even an idea that appeared, in a form, in the unlockable early demo level of the game, though it was accompanied by the ability to throw white paint in that version.

It is evident right from the start that the mechanical focus is lacking by the the sort of liquid Monroe throws. The black ink and then the blue water of the earlier chapters connected to the story and the mechanics tightly. In the third chapter, its not even clear what you throw. It’s black like ink, but evaporates like water. Most of the chapter has the player traversing a nearly pitch black environment, so it doesn’t reveal anything in the environment. On third replay, I suspect it may be intended to be black water, polluted by the terrible creature the King banished to the sea in the earlier chapter, but if it is, it is not made very clear. The only mechanic it has is activating bioluminescent plants scattered in the environment upon contact. The lack of clarity and versatility of the liquid is a small but telling sign that this chapter is undercooked.

The game requires the player to run between points of light for safety. Being in the dark inflicts damage on Monroe by unseen monsters, which introduces something new to the game - a fail state. The player could only “die” in the first two chapters by falling into water, which simply placed Monroe back on land where he fell in. It was not a punishment for doing anything wrong, as platforming challenges were not the focus. It was simply a way reset the player and keep them within the bounds of the game world. But in the third chapter, the player is expected to complete somewhat difficult challenges, the failure of which forces them to try again. This is a dramatic departure. Monroe being eaten by monsters, complete with with bite and claw marks and red tinting on the screen feels out of place in the otherwise light-hearted, storybook nature of the game. It is also simply not fun. Activating lights and running between their spheres of protection is functional, but boring. Seeing lights in the distance, obscured by trees, ties back to the use of guiding sightlines in earlier levels, but it is very simple and activating the lights lacks the freeform expressiveness of the ink and the vines.

Soon a light orb is introduced, and it manages to get even worse. It is a physics object in the world that emits light, and the player must guide it using their body and their liquid blobs. This is a very frustrating mechanic, because the orb is difficult to guide and behaves erratically with Monroe’s body and the environment. At one point while I was playing, the orb got caught between Monroe’s body and a piece of the environment, causing the ball to skyrocket into the air, leaving me in the dark where I got eaten by monsters. At two points, the player has to run to keep up with the ball, once as it rolls down a hill, and at another when it floats down a river. This introduces an element of time pressure that also has not existed up to this point, which lead to more frustration when I failed to keep up, got eaten and had to retry from the beginning of the segment.

It doesn’t help that this segment lacks much of the visual charm of previous areas. The dark shading on many of the objects looks poorly done compared to the clean look of the first two chapters. And many surfaces have textures that are simply at too low a resolution. Worse, the game actually takes some bad framerate drops in this section. The game previously felt defined by clean visuals, a charming tone, and a calm, slow pace of gameplay. Now, you have muddy visuals, a dark sinister tone, and hurried gameplay filled with fail states. It feels terrible to play, and the frame rate drops make it even more frustrating.

Mercifully, this mechanical focus of the chapter eventually transitions to something else. After journeying through the dark forest, Monroe arrives at an unfinished house, and the focus becomes about entering portals into a blueprint world in which the player can create rectangular blocks by designating points on surfaces. The game asks the player to create steps and bridges to traverse the world, and occasionally create blocks that manifest back in the real world and allow for progress. It’s a serviceable mechanic, but it feels awkward and limited. The player is creating pathways, similar to the vines, but creating properly sized blocks is somewhat slow and awkward. The platforming in the game is floaty and imprecise, and these segments ask you to do more of it than any other part of the game. It recalls some of the ideas of the earlier segments - looking back the stacks of blocks one has made to traverse the level recalls earlier segments, and creating objects in the manner the King might have done is a neat contrast to Monroe ruining the King’s creations in earlier levels. But the clunkiness, as well as the lack of visual interest in these sections, result in gameplay that fails to make a strong impact.

The chapter ends with a dud. Monroe must ascend a giant statue of the King which he has been journeying towards the whole chapter. Again, a time-sensitive challenge is presented, in which the player must climb to the top as water rises around them. This happens in total darkness, with no way to illuminate the surroundings, so the solution is little more than trial and error. Thankfully, the segment is short, and I completed it in a handful of quick attempts, but it is totally unsatisfying. As a culmination of the chapter, it does not build upon any of the existing mechanics.

Despite this chapter’s gameplay being a mess, the story moves towards a powerful conclusion. The King, exhausted by the failures of his previous kingdoms, decides to move to an island and create himself a family instead, beginning with a house. Then he created himself a wife, strongly implied to be Monroe’s mother, thus revealing the King to be Monroe’s father. The King did everything he could to make his Queen happy, creating and recreating rooms of their house, and showering her with gifts. She was uninterested in it all, though the King was too oblivious to notice. The Queen eventually became pregnant, and left shortly before she was to give birth. This threw the King into a terrible state of depression in which he could not paint for years. Despite the many issues with this chapter, wandering through the dark abandoned house of the King and Queen, still unfinished, is one of the most poignant parts of the game. The portraits and unfinished paintings on the wall, along the unused nursery items, create a quietly sad and touching scene.

If the first chapter had a strong, consistent mechanical focus, and the second merely took a while to find it’s focus, the third has only a handful of unfinished ideas. None of the mechanics feel strong enough to sustain interest over a whole level, which may be why the developers felt the need to split their focus. Maneuvering in a dark forest by lighting up a path might have sustained a whole level if the ideas were polished up and expanded upon, but the muddiness of the visuals and frustration of controlling the light orb kill these segments. The blueprint world doesn’t have the depth to create interesting interactions for a whole level, which is perhaps why it is confined to roughly a third of one chapter. The worst part of this chapter is that the developers have not found any way to entwine the level design with visual surprises and humor, perhaps the most endearing part of the first two chapters. There are no surprises to be found in illuminating the forest, nor objects of interest to be created within the blueprint world. The rigid and frustrating gameplay mechanics are nearly all that is to be found here.

Epilogue: The King’s Dream

Thankfully, the game still ends strong. The King’s Dream is an epilogue and a capstone for the game, narratively and thematically, as well as for the gameplay, as it briefly revisits all the ideas of all the previous levels. It’s joyous ending, as you revisit many locations and mechanics as the music swells and the credits roll. It is a strong note to end on. It allows the weak link that is the third chapter to be a dip in quality that picks up again for the finale, instead of a sour note to end on.

In the narrative, the King explains to Monroe how he resolved to create a giant statue of himself, a monument to his ego meant to last for ages, but this too he could never finish. He got trapped, literally, in his dream, for that too he was unable to finish. This is where Monroe finds him, sitting by a fire, alone but for his pet hippo, sleeping up until the moment Monroe arrives. The King recounts his dream, having seen in it his life’s work ruined, by Monroe’s destruction and the ravages of time. He witnesses his own death and the destruction of the universe, and realizes how all he had done would eventually disappear. And yet, he comes to terms with it, accepting all he built and all he did not finish, and remembering the joy he had in creating it regardless. The King hands Monroe his own paintbrush, hoping that he will be a better man than he was, and then ushers Monroe away back to his room.

That night, before going to bed, Monroe paints a complete swan.

On Themes: Art and Time

The game’s story is told in the manner of a fairytale or child’s storybook, and even with the simple child-friendly language the story is conveyed with, there are several themes to tap into that contextualize the act of playing the game. The most evident and persistent in the game is the struggle of artistic creation. Monroe’s mother could never finish her paintings and all of the King’s works in all the lands you explore are left incomplete. It’s not clear why Monroe’s mother also struggled to complete her art, but she was made by the King in his own image, so she likely inherited many of his issues. For the King, his works are incomplete for a variety of reasons - his work is unable to be appreciated by others without being ruined (as with his pure white garden), he gets frustrated with the demands of his subjects and abandons his creations (as with the first kingdom), he no longer wishes to go through the work of maintaining them (as with the vine-infested kingdom), or he loses his creative energy (as with his giant statue). All his work is incomplete or ruined, and the player brings about much of its ruination. The player, as Monroe, can be viewed as the agent of destruction in the King’s lands, splattering ink and spreading vines over his creations. Throughout the game, the King bemoans the destruction of his work, but his realization by the end is that all the artistic creation, regardless of its state of completion or its longevity, was still worth it. He enjoyed the process itself, even if his work and legacy is inevitably doomed to be destroyed.

But Monroe could also be viewed as completing the King’s work. The pure white lands of the first chapter were confusing to the King’s subjects, and by traversing them and covering them in black splatters, Monroe makes them legible and capable of being appreciated. It’s the same in the kingdom of the second chapter, which was beautiful but lifeless and difficult to traverse. By covering them in vines, Monroe makes them more beautiful, more accessible, and returns life to the abandoned city. This connects the first two chapters to the third, in which Monroe enters the King’s blueprint world, and helps to finish the King and Queen’s abandoned house. An aside: This actually compounds my frustration with the light orb mechanic in the dark forest, which does not adhere to this thematic reading of the game.

From this perspective, Monroe is fixing the mistakes of his parents, and finding his own complete identity by reconciling their works. Throughout the game, Monroe is chasing his mother’s unfinished swan, which is leading him towards his father. Monroe uses his mother’s paintbrush to move through the King’s lands, leaving his own marks upon them and completing them. By playing through the game, you are unifying the mother and father, creating something whole in the process. The theme comes full circle in the end, when Monroe receives his father’s paintbrush as well, which he then uses to create a complete painting of his mother’s favorite work, the swan. Again, the father and mother combine through Monroe to produce something that is whole. As the child and new generation of artist, Monroe takes what worked about the previous generation and uses that to create something better and more complete. The passage of time destroys the old, but the new grows out of its ruins.

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There are so many details to love in this game. The storybook introductions to each level, and the way they smoothly transition into gameplay; the honking of the swan and its goofy waddle as you chase it around; the audible expressions Monroe makes in response to parts of the game. The 2D storybook art is lovely, and scrolling through the unlockable concept art is a joy. The soundtrack perfectly matches the storybook tone, and is a great listen independent of the game as well. The balloons are a fun collectible that use some clever visual tricks to hide them in the environment - I only wish I could reset their locations so I can find them anew whenever I replay this game. Despite its shortcomings, it is an easy game to love, and its short length makes it a blast to revisit. So much of the game is precisely crafted, and that makes it frustrating when the game loses its focus, particularly in the third chapter. The third chapter feels unfinished and disappointing as a result, yet the beginnings of great ideas are present nonetheless. Somehow, even this game’s failings seem to stay on theme.

I noticed the inklings of a metacommentary on videogame development in this game. It crossed my mind when, in the epilogue, the King’s voiceover directly acknowledges the credits that appear in the environment. The succession of the kingdoms can be interpreted as the development of a game. First, there is only untextured, unlit geometry. Lighting and shadows are added, and then eventually color. The King is developer, and his reluctant compromises for his subjects are akin to making gameplay compromises for players. In the malformed third chapter, the developers get quite literally lost in the woods, adding enemies and fail states that do not add much to the experience. Monroe is the player, and his gameplay mechanics, at once destructive and constructive, represent the unexpected ways that players will interact with and respond to a game once it is released. The King’s faulty creations invited Monroe to explore them and complete them with his own tools. In the same way, I have explored Giant Sparrow’s beautiful and flawed game, and in writing this, in my own small way, perhaps I have contributed to making it whole.