EA has revealed a surprising new IP in their E3 2015 conference, a puzzle platformer called Unravel.
Unravel seems more like an indie than an EA game. While it is being developed by Coldwood Studios, it looks every bit like Nintendo games on the Wii U. Much like Yoshi’s Wooly World, the lead character, Yarny, is a doll made of realistic looking yarn. Much like in Pikmin 3, Yarny is a Lilliputian creature traveling across naturalistic settings, and it is also reminiscent of Pikmin’s impressively realistic graphics writ small.
Unlike those games, Yarny exists in a world occupied by real humans, and Yarny itself is acting to help one such creature. Yarny wants to help an older woman mend a broken bond, and reconnect with what she has lost.
What Yarny has to do with a still-unseen character remains to be seen, but we can see how gameplay will work out now. Yarny has a loose end he can use to interact with other objects in the world to move forward.
Coldwood’s creative director Martin Sahlin was unusually straightforward and personal about how the game was developed. He created a Yarny doll himself, and took picture of it in a camping trip out of Northern Scandinavia. It was those pictures that formed the basis of the game’s stages.
Unravel is planned for release for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Windows. You can see screenshots of the game below.
