The Unfinished Swan!!!!!!

This blog post is about a game called the Unfinished Swan. This is a indie game made by Giant Sparrow for the PS3 system only (partly because it was published by Sony themselves).



This game is surreal and quite interesting in concept and execution. The story is reminiscent of what you would find in a well written children's story book.


The premise of the Unfinished Swan is that you play as a boy named Monroe whose mother was a famous painter but had a habit of leaving her paintings unfinished (hint hint). When she died, the local orphanage let Monroe keep only one of 300 paintings (all of which were only partly complete). Monroe chose the one that was almost complete. A painting of a swan (hint hint). One night this same swan painting suddenly came to life and ran through a magic door, leading to a world of blank whiteness.


Now for gameplay. The game is played from a First Person Perspective. It's probably the only game I would get with this perspective besides Minecraft (which I have on PS3). But this is not a shooter game like literally EVERY First Person game is (except for Minecraft. Unless you have the PC version and installed a mod that lets you use guns. In that case Minecraft becomes a shooter). Anyway, It's worth pointing out that Wikipedia fails to mention some gameplay mechanics introduced past the very first level.


The game requires you to "paint" your surroundings
to see them.


Some examples include spraying water on a vine to make it grow (as seem in the picture BELOW), exploring pitch black caves with glowing mushrooms, encountering a large sea dragon type monster, and more.



Some puzzles require you to make vines such as
these grow rapidly. You can climb up walls using them!




BUT the main thing is shooting orbs of paint at a seemingly invisible environment and working your way to get ever so closer to the titular swan (who is constantly taunting you by stating still long enough for you to catch up, only to fly away to somewhere impossible to reach without the aid of rapidly growing plants, or a hot air balloon.


All the while Monroe learns about a wacky but strange king who is partly responsible for the blank whiteness seen at the beginning of the game (he refused to let anyone paint anything because he thinks that no color is perfect enough for his kingdom. Ironically nothing is perfect. Something can be perfect in one way but flawed in another way).


The music in this game is amazing as well. You kind of have to listen to the music itself in order to understand why I personally think it is so good.


This game is download only as far as I know and can be purchased from the PlayStation Store and is relatively cheap despite the quality of this game (on a scale of 1-10, with ten being highest quality, I give this game a 10)


For more info and possible spoilers please go to IGN (the multi entertainment site) because there is no real wiki for The Unfinished Swan (I checked. There is no wiki besides the walk-through guide that Ign has).