Wonderful smooth movement, jumping and the energy beam grabling is fantastic. The way the story was told as a bedtime story was quite fun and unique in my opinion and I really enjoyed that. The game was a lot shorter than I expected and the graphics were wonderful. I just wish the crosshair marker would have been smaller for better screenshots, or that there was a way of hiding it temporarily.

If you receive this game for free, its definitely worth it, but at just above 12€, I dont think it is worth it compared to the content length and quality. If you get it at a discount, be sure to grab it!

"Then what happened, dad?"

"Then I did about an hour of tedious first-person platforming between floating rocks."

"Wow! And then what?"

"Well, then I did it some more and then I was done. The End."

"Wow ... great story, Dad."

It's cute, fun, and meaningless. Interesting how we got such a fun movement mechanic so early and how little reciprocity it received since then. This is purely based on established aesthetics, because few people will object to that swinging at high speed with a nice rhythm through a sun-drenched evening sky between floating islands just looks good. Beyond that? You'll see very little. This is more of an escapism game than anything else, and if it was released today it would be a different story. But it was pretty early and built a nice bridge between minimalism and accessibility.

This is a perfectly fine game. The first person platforming is simple but fun enough, it introduces all of the mechanics fairly quickly and I guess they're used decently, though it never gets very challenging. The story is just... there. It didn't evoke much emotion or interest, but wasn't actively bad. It's held back some by the voice acting and character animations feeling very stiff. I can admire going for what they did on a lower budget, many games just wouldn't show you the characters directly or communicate only through text as a way around this. I dunno, this is okay but also isn't very well done here. The highlight of the game is definitely the environmental design and art. The areas were really nice looking, pretty diverse for a short game, and fun to move through. It's hard to think of who I'd recommend this to, because it doesn't really excel at much, but if it seems interesting to you it's not bad and it's fairly short to play through.

First person platforming isn’t attempted often. A Story About My Uncle keeps it basic with grappling, anti-gravity jumping, and various puzzles. The story is fairly simple and doesn’t really mean anything until the very end. A boy is trying to find his uncle Fred. He finds his uncle’s lab where he straps on a weird jumpsuit and takes off to some unknown land. He eventually comes across a species of frog people and a little girl from this village befriends the protagonist.

The jumping is actually quite exhilarating. You jump really high and your character’s hands swing around which make you feel vertigo. The sheer speed and height this game creates is something not really seen in most games. As you make your way across bottomless chasms and dark caves you begin to wonder what all this means. What’s the point? The jumping puzzles get progressively harder to the point of downright frustration. The grapple has three shots. Once these run out you either need to land or you’re falling into the abyss. Later on, you get rocket boots that allow a quick boost if you miss your shot or your next grapple point is too far away. One of the hardest obstacles are the windmills. I actually had to manipulate the physics by landing on one for a split second so my equipment recharges. The game gets so tricky towards the end that casual players may not make it. Sure the game is only a couple of hours long, but the complicated jumps are just mind bobbling.

With that aside the music is great and the game looks beautiful. While it uses the dated Unreal Engine 3 the art style is superb. I honestly felt like this was Journey to the Center of the Earth meets Mirror’s Edge. There’s nothing else out there like it and the ending is extremely touching, well worth the play through to get a few heart-strings pulled.

I just wish there was more to the game. Sure jumping around gets fun, but sometimes I feel areas dragged on forever with too much nothing in between. It’s a step in the right direction for this type of game. With more story being pushed out and some variety in gameplay, this game could have been something even more incredible.

A Story About My Uncle is a game that sets up some particularly interesting gameplay and a premise for a simple albeit engaging story, and then fails to deliver on those marks due to its short playtime. You're presented with an interesting, imaginative world hidden within massive, sprawling caverns, and some sort of sci-fi electric grappling hook to explore it. Levels take the form of a (relatively linear) set of floating platforms and checkpoints, and you can use the grappling hook to traverse across them. It ends up allotting you with this very enjoyable set of tools to traverse the level, and the gameplay is particularly solid for a first-person platformer. The disappointing outcome is that the gameplay never gets the opportunity to evolve much. You see minor changes between each level which gives a feeling of progress and growth, but you get shunted as the game concludes only two hours in. It's incredibly disappointing as the gameplay never approaches a level of challenge or gives you the opportunity to string together creative forms of platforming. There are a few small sequences that require you to get more creative and skillful with the grappling, but they're few and far between. The story is an additional fatal flaw, as the curious and fantastic subterranean world of the game falls apart and fails to deliver on any worldbuilding that could make the levels more unique. It's certainly an enjoyable game but there's just...not enough of it. It's disappointing how little I have to say about this from a critical perspective.

Originally posted here: https://cultclassiccornervideogames.wordpress.com/2019/01/31/a-story-about-my-uncle-2014-review/

Every now and again I come across a great game that focuses on it’s story instead of combat, such as A Story About My Uncle, which is a game that has no combat, and instead has the player leaping from platform to platform and experiencing the world it has developed.

Told through a father recounting a story told by a father to his daughter, the game follows a young boy who goes to look from his missing uncle Fred. After finding a a mysterious suit that lets you jump incredibly high and far, the main character soon finds himself in another world filled with a strange frog people that he becomes friendly with, along with encountering a few dangers along with the way.

Most of the gameplay involves the grappling hook mechanic, which feels incredibly smooth and satisfying. It’s like a smaller scale first person Spider-Man game. Along with the grappling hook, you can occasionally leap from platform to platform with the help of your suit, and half way through the game, you can get rocky boots that add a rocket jump, giving you some extra help with certain platforms.

Near the end of the game, it can go up in difficulty, and the young audience that this is aimed at might have some trouble getting through it. But the whole game is never unreasonably hard with it’s puzzles.

The game art stands out, and makes up for the games obvious lower budget. It starts out looking nice, but half way through the game, it really shines and shows how gorgeous the game can be. I can definitely see myself using a screenshot or two, or some of the art for this game as the background on my computer. I should also not that the soundtrack is also pretty nice, and compliments the rest of the game really well, really adding to the whole experience.

Every now and again I don’t quite know where to go due to some of the floating rocks you have to swing across not being immediately obvious, taking a moment or two to for me to find them. Sometimes, one of the rocks can be hard to determine how far away they are, leading to a few leaps of faith before getting it right.

There is some replayability in the game, with a few some unlockables both in the form of Time Trials you get after completing the game and collectables tucked throughout the game that give you stuff, including being able to change the color of your grappling hook, an Acrobatic and Adidas mode, along with something called Goat Mode (which is almost to be expected since this game is from the same guys as Goat Simulator after all).

A Story About My Uncle is a fun and pleasant experience the whole way through, and I found myself going back and playing it a second time a while after finishing it. I’d easily recommend this game.