Enjoyment - 7/10
Difficulty - 3/10

A real cinnamon roll of a video game. Tearaway: Unfolded welcomes you into their home and makes you a cup of tea. Great hospitality and pleasant experience.
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Tearaway Unfolded improves in some aspects over the original Vita release, namely graphics and performance and a bit of expanded scope. The Vita game made better use of the hardware features to create a meaningful and personal experience that the PS4 game doesn't quite reach despite trying a few things with the PS4 controller.

At any rate, this is a good 3D platformer that takes place in a unique setting and oozes charm, so if you are a fan of the genre is definitely worth checking out. Oh, and photo mode is excellent and a time sink with all the features and filters, it's almost its own game mode.

Top 50 Favorites: #2

Something special. Media Molecule's finest work as a developer in a career jam-packed with unforgettable gaming experiences. Every pixel of this game radiates the same comfort level as a warm log cabin in December, sitting in a soft chair with a mug of hot cocoa beside the fireplace. Makes your controller feel like a true magic utensil come to life, the gimmicks in this game genuinely made me feel like a kid again - "Ooh"-ing and "Ahh"-ing in giddy excitement with each new twist on the DualShock 4 (and your phone, which I highly recommend also using)'s utility. It really shows just how much Sony underutilized the PS Vita that all its features transferred over without compromise - nay, BETTER - from its original rendition. The sense of imagination here is so red-hot that it feels liable to beam out right off of your screen. Can't express enough how much I love this game, the dictionary definition of adventure. Comparing this to LittleBigPlanet, I feel, would be reductive - since this very much has its own unique identity - but it has more of that same 'energy' than that 2020 Sackboy game imo.

Tearaway is visually spectacular but ultimately rather joyless to play.

The game begins with a lame skit making fun of cable, the game's enemies are scraps of newspaper. There are "no stories" left in the "story box" of television. A "real" story can begin with the introduction of the capital "Y" You, the player. You pull the trigger on the controller and shine your light on the world. "The message must become a messenger"; the player input needs representation.

Tearaway nakedly admits virtually every problem I have with video games today. Games are for "stories" now, yet mere interactivity of any kind is supposedly enough to heighten vapid, pulpy, or outright hollow material. The player has nothing interesting to do in this world, nothing interesting for their character to do, but you can do something, and the game will never let your forget it.

You spend the first half hour or so not even being able to jump. Your character does not in any way interact with the enemies; you (the You) interact with the enemies directly, hypnotizing them with your motion controlled light. The most tactile thing in the game is using the touch pad to open a box from time to time. You pick up collectables and the sound effect for it is a nigh imperceptible rustling of paper.

It is appropriate that the main collectable and currency of the game is confetti. That represents very well what this game is: something shiny and colorful that you can periodically throw around for literal seconds of shallow entertainment.

It's like a playable CBeebees program, but a really charming one that actually respects children's intelligence.

It's also an existentialist nightmare dissecting the horrors that comes from mortal beings attempting to play god, after the morals behind an omnipotent being's control over the world they inhabit are questioned. The illusion of free-will has been broken with the players consistent presence within the story as "you", and the game dares to ask that if we were to discover the existence of entities beyond our comprehension controlling the fabric of reality, if it is best that we simply comply, like the protagonist and their companions on the journey, or attempt to fight back and seal our own fates like how the Scraps do, who are the real heroes of the story.

Ultimately, this leads to an insane meta-commentary of the illusion of free-will mentioned earlier; the player having to question the ethics behind their actions and whether they themselves are truly in control of the story, or are simply being puppeted much like Atoi, coming full circle. The Scraps being brainwashed to conforming with the rest of the characters, as the actual player must grapple with the heinous acts they have committed after learning the Scraps true intentions, feeling a further disconnect from the character of "you".

Fed up with the world they're forced to reside in, Atoi manages to escape and is sent to a new reality, where they can build a new world, to make their own stories, using the abilities "you" bestowed upon them to control their own fate, until it dawns on them... they've become just like "you". Atoi goes beyond anything any other character before them has gone before, using their newfound capabilities to create an escape from the actual video-game, slowly crawling their way out and ending the game... no longer in the game. This bullshit reality they was brought into to is no longer to their concern, because it isn't real, it's just a pre-determined hell that you (the player) mindlessly follow along with, controlling Atoi's every whim, under the impression that "you" (the character) is just an extension of yourself and not some depraved entity playing mind games with you, as a way to torment everyone in the world into following "you's" every sociopathic whim. Atoi can truly go and live away from it all, while you must sit with everything that has just happened; Atoi reading you the story of everything you made them do under the orders of "you", leaving you with nothing but regret, you could have stopped at any point... but you didn't... it's all your fault...

It's really cute and it made me smile. :)

Tearaway is one of those games where the developers took a perfectly charming narrative-driven 3D platformer that they just made and decided "hmm the run time is a little low, we should add more collectables to pad out the gameplay" so now it's a collectathon against its will.

This game works in direct conflict with itself. The art style is gorgeous and I love this papercraft world, its paper foldout inhabitants, and its deliberate use of stop motion-esque animation frame delays to give it that tactile feel. I'm even finding myself invested in the whimsical "fix the hole in the sky to stop the newspaper scraps" plot. The problem is, while I'm in this world, the game wants me to pick up every piece of tiny floating confetti or else the giant numbers on my multiple pause menus are not going to read 100% and I'm not going to get the shiny papercraft medal next to the level's name.

I'm not a person that hates 3D Collectathons. My favorite games are colorful, bouncy 3D platformers where I collect all the things so that the save file reads 100%. I gave Donkey Kong 64 a 4/5 on this very website. You know things are dire when I've been forged in the fires of the most asinine N64 and Gamecube-era collectathons and even I'M looking at these confetti requirements and going "Really..? We're doing this?"

The main reason is the bugs. Similar to Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet, this game has a rich, wonderful art style full of paper scraps, wind physics, and billowing pathways that sadly also means that level geometry isn't as solid as you would like. I've gotten myself stuck on at least ten separate occasions during my playthrough for doing things like "Jump in the wrong place and land where I'm not supposed to", "Accidentally push an enemy into the wall with a gust of wind and the door will not open since the enemy didn't die so I have to reset a checkpoint", or even "accidentally holding onto the control stick during a cutscene only for my character to instantly die from a bottomless pit because they somehow phased through reality during a camera cut". I like it when collectathons are, you know, not buggy.

When I'm just bouncing around in a level and not paying attention to weird little collectables, I'm also not going to pay attention to things like a slightly unforgiving camera or my little guy regularly getting stuck on level geometry because the game is charming enough that I forgive a few minor glitches. But this game makes me pay attention to these things because I have to do escort missions that tell me "you have to physically go into the start menu and restart the level if you die at all during this escort mission", only for me to get trapped in the walls and then plummet through the ground because the game wants me to hold a gopher with separate physics in my hands.

This game puts a fun emphasis on crafting the world around you, but then revisiting certain things in case you want to change the designs means sitting through a lot of unskippable events and talking. If I want to re-customize the Escort Mission Gopher, I have to replay half of a 30 minute level and then hope I don't screw up the Escort Mission I get one shot at. I just wanted to give the gopher dragon wings. Why is this so weirdly tedious.

It sounds like I'm complaining a lot for a game that I'm giving 3 stars, but that's because I really like the game that's buried underneath the garbage. It's just buried under a lot of garbage and makes me look at things within this game and going "Man, Donkey Kong 64 did this better".

Ending still made me cry tho.

A very wonderful and lively world with many unique mechanics, for example you use your touchpad to draw all kinds of objects and they appear in the world, or you use it as a drum, the microphone makes you use it as an echo in a world , the motion sensor is very useful by giving light to this world and cleaning it of enemies. Very good soundtrack. As a bonus, if you are passionate about origami, you can make your characters in reality by receiving sketches of how you can make them as easily as possible.

A game with 10/10 aesthetics and presentation. Absolutely adored the art style, music, and craft. Unfortunately can't say the same for the entire gameplay expierence as its (ahem) paper thin and too long with not enough ideas for the kind of game it is. If its length was cut in half this would have been a significantly more impactful gem of some of Media Molecules strongest flourishes in creativity that are vividly brought to life on its center stage. A shame Mm spent all this time after the fact on Dreams and never took a swing like this again.

(I hear the Vita version is better but not sure by how much)

One of the most aesthetically pleasing and mechanically creative games I've played. This game should've come bundled with every PS4 the same way Wii Sports was with the Wii and Nintendo Land was with the Wii U, as it's the only game I can think of that successfully showcases every unique feature of the system. Taking a fully papercraft world and using that setting to allow the player to craft elements of it from the shape of the snowflakes, to their outfit design, to the look of their paper airplane, is just a brilliant creative design choice. It's perfect for people like me who look at something like the level creator in LittleBigPlanet and get overwhelmed by the possibilities of a completely blank slate. This game offers you just enough creative freedom within its well crafted linear story that it's super easy and fun for anyone to get into. A very light hearted and charming experience from beginning to end, I very much recommend this underrated gem to anyone with a PS4.