The mechanic provides a perfect framework for buildups and reveals, and the developers use that to provide many clever environmental surprises to uncover. Whirling around, throwing a dozen ink blobs and watching them find targets with a satisfying splotch is great. There is also a simple, base thrill I get from covering a clean environment in dirty ink.

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.

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. 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. 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. The gameplay is effectively a series of navigation puzzles. 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. So begins The Unfinished Swan, a delightful freshman effort from the studio Giant Sparrow, released in 2012. So he took his mother’s silver paintbrush, and followed the footprints into a little door he hadn’t seen before.” But that night he woke up to find the swan had disappeared. And so he chose the unfinished swan that had always been his mother’s favorite. The orphanage allowed him to keep only one painting.

Along with Monroe, who felt pretty unfinished himself. When she died, she left behind over 300 canvases, not one of them finished. “Monroe’s mother had always been much better at starting things than finishing them.

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