A Story About My Uncle

Originally Posted 12/6/23

Brief Overview

Quick Overview

A Story About My Uncle is a story driven, 3D platforming game. You play as a character from a story that the narrator is telling their child. It involves a grapple hook sort of mechanic to get around, with some exploration available and I think an overall interesting story.

In Depth Review

Okay, so this one is going to be a little bit weird. I remember playing this game many years ago, and liking it a fair amount. I thought it was fun to swing around, and the story was interesting. It was a short game (I believe my first play through was only about 2.5 hours), but enjoyable. However, I recently replayed this game with my SO watching, and used a controller, and holy hell the controls were bad.

I want to say I'm used to controls that aren't great. I've played through all the Dark Souls games on PC using mouse and keyboard. Many people will tell you this is ridiculous and these games were not designed for that. But I was able to make it work, and while the controls were not ideal I didn't feel like the controls were fighting me. Any mistake I made simply was a skill issue on my end that I need to get better with. That is not how it felt playing A Story About My Uncle.

The entire time I felt like me and the controller were at odds. It's little things too that just add up and become extremely hard to account for. As I mentioned, this game is a platforming game with a grappling hook type mechanic. So a lot of the platforming involves jumping, aiming, clicking the button to shoot out the hook, and swinging to another location. This becomes more difficult as the game goes on, and you're making multiple swings at once. The problem is it appears you need to continue to look at what you want to swing from for at least half a second to a second before you're actually able to grapple it. Because controller controls are simply not precise, this led to many times my grappling hook just not going off, despite me looking at the object and pressing the button at the correct time, because I would look and then since I was moving wouldn't stay on the target and/or be looking at where I'm going next.

Another thing the game does is they have some parts where you are blindly jumping and have to grapple something before you fall. But, again, because controllers are just simply not that precise, this ends with you just falling to your death a lot. And that just feels bad because it's not even your fault that you didn't know where to go. It's like you need to fail to progress. But it's not even failing just because you're not good, it's because it's just how the game is designed and how the controls work.

The Falling Ice Cubes Room

The absolutely worst section of this game is a room with falling cubes. You enter the area and jump across floating cubes. This is a bit annoying as, again, the controls aren't precise. You get to the other side, hit a button, and now all the cubes are falling, and you have to get back to where you just came from. On top of all of this, the cubes fall in a seemingly random sequence. Meaning, if you die and need to repeat the area, the cubes you're working with are in a different location each time . So you can't even come up with an exit strategy, because it changes constantly. What makes this hurt even more is the fact that the only thing that happens in this room is you get to one end of it, press a button, and then leave the way you came. Meaning, this now extremely difficult puzzle you're being stuck on, is seemingly pointless.

It was at this point I was beyond angry with the game. I wanted to get through the game because I genuinely like the story and wanted my SO to be able to see and experience it. I started researching this section online to see if maybe there was some strategy I was just not seeing or something, but no this area is just simply an area a lot of people have difficulty with and dislike. There seemed to be a fair amount of people who simply stopped playing here. I was eventually able to get past it and move on, but it was a miserable experience.

Conclusion

I never ended up finishing the play through. I knew I was going to want to write about it, and I've been waiting to write this review until I fully finished it again, but I just haven't been able to bring myself back to playing it. When I stopped I was at about 3.5 hours on the controller play through. I know I'm extremely close to the end, but I just couldn't finish it. It's honestly a shame because I do like and want to experience the story, but it just feels not worth it with how much I had to fight with the game to do what I wanted the character to do. I wish there was an option where, if you fail a spot x amount of times you could skip that section. This would be nice for people who do want to experience the story, but simply can't get used to the controls or aren't good enough to complete the game. It's also frustrating because, story content alone, would take maybe an hour or two to get through. But for about 70% of my play through (if I had to guess), I wasn't exploring or experiencing the story. I was just repeating a section over and over again because I couldn't get the grapple hooking correct.

So yeah. My thoughts would be if you're going to play this game use mouse and keyboard. Stay away from it if you're going to want to use a controller. Also, it's been many years since I played with Mouse and Keyboard so maybe it's just as bad and I'm not remembering. I also know I've spoken mostly negative about the game, but I do genuinely enjoy the premise and story of the game, and it's one I've thought about over the years. It's just hard to get past the controls.