A Story About My Uncle - "Wrong, Said Fred"

A Story About My Uncle is a first person platformer held together with grapple physics. Putting you in the boots of an unnamed protagonist retracing the steps of the titular Uncle Fred, this game tries hard but unfortunately ends up proving that the indie badge does not guarantee value for money.

I have a mixed history with platformers of the first person variety. Mirror's Edge is the highest profile and probably best executed example in the subgenre - while that game did have problems, they lay in its combat, whereas the platforming was rock solid. When it's not the primary focus of a game however, the results can be pretty tepid - the first person platforming segments of Assassin's Creed: Revelations were awkward and felt out of place. The main issue with the concept is a matter of perspective: in a third-person game, you can see the character, and you can see where you want them to jump to. In first person, you can see that jumping destination, but have no frame of reference for where your feet might be, and as a result landing on that target with any accuracy can be frustrating.

Portal notably solved this conundrum by giving the player a lot of mobility and allowing them to carefully plan each move they make. The grappling mechanics in A Story About My Uncle perform essentially the same role. At the start of the game, the protagonist discovers one of his missing-for-years Uncle's inventions: a suit that allows the wearer to jump really high and grapple to most objects and surfaces within range, via some fancy laser technology. The grapple laser then pulls you in that direction like a tractor beam, but your forward momentum prior to grappling continues, launching you in a swinging motion from one grapple-point to another. The controls are simple and generally feel pretty great: ASAMU is at its best when the player is soaring confidently from one target to the next, effortlessly crossing great distances before landing on the next platform with a satisfyingly hard impact (no fall damage occurs, presumably due to suit-magic). The game makes an excellent first impression, providing some idyllic fantastical landscapes to traverse. At this point the only criticism I might have made was that the central mechanic of the game results in an over-abundance of the same grey floating rock, which is a bit lacking in variety.

Diamonds aren't called "rocks" here. Because there are rocks EVERYWHERE.

This positive experience diminishes as the difficulty ramps up. Now, challenge is a necessary component in the majority of games - personally, Super Meat Boy strikes me as the perfect example of "tough but fair" difficulty. That game's great strengths included a fast restart after dying, and a clear sense that any mistake was down to the player, not the game. ASAMU lacks both these elements: missing a platform or grapple-point leads to watching your character's arms flail for what feels like an eternity, when all you want is to return to the checkpoint immediately. Secondly, successfully finding an in-range grapple point can be exceedingly frustrating: the prompt for when you are in range is a target-reticle that lights up when hovering over a close enough object; this element of the UI is more subtle than I would have liked. In practice it means that when you're airborne, you spend all of your time floating the reticle over the next grapple-point you want, which is often a forlorn hope as the arc of your last swing turns downwards. Even worse is running out of momentum inches from the next platform and checkpoint; you can only grapple up to three times between landings on solid ground, so if the design of a section requires you to swing along via three floating rocks, and you slightly mess up the last swing, prepare for some angry feelings. The checkpoints are also just a little bit too far apart, and the longer ASAMU goes on the more cheap and unfair its level design feels. This is excruciating because, as mentioned earlier, the core sensation of the movement while grappling is the game's best feature, but certain sections are unforgiving and unforgivable.

These hell-cubes are falling stepstones across a void that I fell into constantly.
Fuck. This. Room.

To be fair, they're probably scared that I'm planning to dissect them.

Lots of indie games have great narratives that can make up for not particularly enterprising gameplay mechanics - Gone Home, for instance, whose story was so effective it could get away with zero traditional gameplay. Framed as the protagonist telling his daughter a bedtime story about his search for his Uncle, ASAMU's narrative is mostly eked out via voice-over conversations between these two, and dialogue with Maddie, who is almost the only walking, talking character in the game. The thing about Maddie... she's a frog-person. That is literally the in-fiction nomenclature of her race, "frog-people". She has a goofy, stylised design to her, reminiscent of cartoony PS2-era child friendly games like the Jak & Daxter series - slightly alien, stylised characters can be endearing and avoid the notorious "uncanny valley" effect, but in this case they are a bit nondescript and uninteresting to look at. Over the course of this short game Maddie accompanies you to a number of small towns built on big floating boulders, and with the exception of one scripted sequence the player is completely ignored by every single NPC. Was this representative of a deeply ingrained racism in the frog-people community, envious of their taller cousins who didn't have to live on a fifty-meter wide rock? That might have been intriguing, if ASAMU had elaborated in any detail on the world it is set in. It never reaches beyond the generic fantasy aesthetic established in the first five minutes. Every exchange with Maddie, every forced attempt at humour, every minimal effort at telling a story left me more and more disappointed: this is a safe, neutered, devoid of life, frankly boring excuse for a fairy tale. The writing was neither good nor bad, it just happened every now and then and left absolutely no impression. The fact that this game has the word "story" in its title makes me feel like I was lied to.

Even Maddie wonders what happened to her personality.

Occasionally, this game is stunningly pretty.

At least there are nice environments to look at. The combinations of vivid colours make, as I mentioned earlier, a strong first impression, and although the visuals are not graphically astounding,  they struck me as a prominent example that aesthetics can trump graphics. Copy-and-pasted rocks for grappling aside, there is a reasonable degree of variety in the landscapes you traverse, and are lot of them are very pleasant to look at. This is undone slightly by later stages in an ice cave that featured the unfortunate combination of frustrating difficulty and a not particularly stimulating environment. Additionally, the voice acting throughout feels wooden and incredibly awkward in its attempts at comedy - although in all fairness, I got the feeling that English was not the first language of the actors, and given the assumedly low budget of ASAMU I won't knock them too hard on their delivery. Nevertheless, this contributed to a thoroughly underwhelming story in a game without much else going for it.

I purchased this game during a Steam sale for less than a newsagents charges for Fanta, so I can hardly claim to have been ripped off. But in the increasingly crowded video game space, even a three-hour game needs to justify its use of your time, which I am reliably informed is equivalent to money. A Story About My Uncle hits the "high" notes of a basic tech demo with its grappling-hook physics, and has some striking visuals in spots, but unfortunately delivers very little of value beyond that. Not every indie is a darling; this one isn't worth your time.

Final Score: 3/10