The PS3 continues its year of relatively high profile artistic PSN games that started in the spring with Journey, and continued in the summer with Dyad and Papo & Yo, with Giant Sparrow’s beautiful and, for both good and bad, aptly named The Unfinished Swan. Despite being played from a first person perspective and involving the player to “shoot” the game is actually a first person puzzle game in the same ilk as the Portal games and Q.U.B.E.
The Unfinished Swan’s story is framed in a way not too unlike that of a children’s story. The game’s tale begins with a young boy named Monroe losing his mother. Monroe’s mother loved to paint pictures of wildlife. However, she never finished any of the paintings before her death.
The orphanage Monroe is sent to allows him to keep only one of her paintings and he chooses to keep the painting of a swan that was nearly 100% complete except for a small section of its neck. One day Monroe looks at the painting and notices the swan is missing from it and a small door he’s never seen before appears near the painting. Monroe enters the door and we are treated to the game’s first level. 
At first it may appear that the first level is still loading and the game is using a blank white loading screen, but mess around with the PS3’s controller and that assumption would be proven to be false. The Unfinished Swan’s first level is actually completely white and you must find your way through the level by shooting globs of black paint all over the level unveiling the path you must take.
To shoot the paint you simply press any of the shoulder buttons on the controller or the trigger button on the Move controller, and the game’s simple control scheme is rounded out by the trusty X button for jumping. To help guide you through this level and all of the other levels in this game, you will occasionally happen across a set of orange tracks left by the swan, showing you the direction you must guide Monroe in.
After making your way through this blank canvas of a world you’ll come to a point where you are overlooking a vast labyrinth with a massive castle in the center. You must guide Monroe through this maze and into the castle where Monroe hitches a ride on a hot air balloon, but falls out of the balloon over a second castle where the gameplay shifts to something new.
In this castle instead of paint Monroe shoots spheres of water with the goal being to help patches of creeping vines grow over the walls and structures to help Monroe move through the town and hitch a ride on an airship docked all the way at the top of the tallest spire. The rest of the game hasn’t been shown off in public gameplay demos of the game, so I’ll leave them a secret so you can experience them on your own.
Throughout all of the levels there are two types of hidden objects. First there are story pages which help add to the story of the game. You’ll find the story pages by finding a large colorful letter on one of the surfaces in the level which you’ll then have to uncover by shooting at them. Secondly there are balloons. Finding balloons and then setting them free by shooting them adds them to your collection.
You can then buy some upgrades as well as the game’s concept art gallery with these balloons. Some of the upgrades you can buy include a radar that helps locate balloons, the ability to freeze time on the balls Monroe shoots letting you shoot several of them all over the place and then unfreeze time to cover a large area at once, and a hose that basically upgrades Monroe’s gun from the equivalent of a pistol to a machine gun.
The game’s art is amazing, easily putting The Unfinished Swan up there as another example of games as art. A running theme in the story of the game is leaving things unfinished and that transfers over to the game’s art style and level design. It isn’t uncommon to find dead ends in the game’s world caused by the connecting path not being finished. This unfinished state of things is the crux of the game’s puzzles, which nearly all revolve around getting to the other side.
Musically, The Unfinished Swan is a case of quality over quantity. There isn’t a long list of songs to the soundtrack, but what songs there are are stellar. The game is also very light on voice acting, with there being only three characters with lines, one being the game’s female narrator and the other two I won’t spoil.
Now based on how I worded the opening sentence to this review you are probably wondering what is wrong with this game. The issues I have with this game is two fold. Firstly this game is a jack of all trades, but a master of none, with its constantly changing gameplay mechanics.
Normally I would praise a developer for constantly keeping the gameplay in a game fresh, but The Unfinished Swan is only 3 or so hours long, and as a result the constantly changing gameplay isn’t that good of a thing. Especially as the gameplay changes just as the previous gameplay style really started to get to the good stuff. On top of that, two of the game’s chapters have multiple gameplay styles in them, one chapter in particular switches back and forth between the styles as you play the level.
If The Unfinished Swan was longer, and not even that longer just at least another hour or two at the minimum, this wouldn’t be an issue for me. In the end I just wanted more time with some of my favorite styles, the game’s blank canvas style specifically, especially since that was the style that pretty much sold me on the game in the first place.
Secondly, there is almost no replay value to this game besides just experiencing the game’s beautiful level design over again and collecting any story pages and balloons you might have missed. Arguably the biggest reason to replay the game is to try and make it through the very first level whilst shooting 3 or fewer balls of paint, upon which doing so earns you a gold Trophy. But beyond that, I just don’t feel that compelled to keep going back for more like I do with Journey, for example.
Despite the above paragraphs, I still really like The Unfinished Swan. For what few issues I have with it, it is still a stellar game that should be experienced. If you are indifferent or on the fence about artistic games, give the demo a try and maybe buy the game if it is on sale. If you have loved the other artistic PSN releases this year or if you care at all about the artistic merits of video games, you need to grab the game as soon as possible, because The Unfinished Swan, regardless of its minor flaws, is still a work of art.
The Unfinished Swan retails for $14.99 on the PlayStation Network Store and was released on October 16th, 2012 for PlayStation Plus subscribers and October 23rd, 2012 for non-subscribers.