Unfinished Swan
Developer: Ian Dallas (USC)
Nomination: Student Showcase
Platform: Windows (video available)
Website
Description: Spray a featureless field with paint so you can visualize the world around you.

Adam’s Thoughts:
Yesterday’s game, Tag: The Power of Paint, used paint to defy ordinary expectations of game design, but The Unfinished Swan uses it to undermine your very vision. You play in a featureless white world where you can only highlight the environment by painting parts of it black. Paint too much, though and you’ll be stuck in a featureless black world instead. The Unfinished Swan is definitely a game about discovery–until you’ve painted the world, you can’t see what’s in it. As much as this is about exploration though, it’s about the unknown. There’s a potential for a frightening horror game here as you can’t always be sure you’ll like what you uncover.

The game is also notable for how it makes use of its graphics. Games are mathematical in nature: they’re uniform and precise, which makes even advanced graphics look plastic and unnatural. Critics therefore tend to glorify photorealism, because it’s as lovely to behold as it is difficult to achieve. The unfinished swan rails in the opposite direction, embracing that uniformity and leaving it to the player to add a bit of entropy by painting the world. Better still, as you move through the world you’ve painted, you’ll learn something about how you see, like how occlusion informs depth, and how parallax helps segment objects from one another. The game is just a video for now, but there’s a potential for some truly clever discovery gameplay here. We’ll be keeping an eye on it.

Katie’s Thoughts:
The Unfinished Swan is, as of yet, unfinished, and so there is a lot so far that we don’t know about it. It seems a little ironic, given that one thing we do know about the game is that knowing vs. not-knowing will be an important game theme. We do know, since Adam’s Ph.D is in visual cognition, that we’re waiting for this game with bated breath. The game might also be about scaring you half to death, because one of those things people tend to find scary is the unknown.

The visual impact of the black on white and black on white in the video has an almost Sin City-style splattered blood feel, which along with ominous writings uncovered on the ground, certainly hints at the game’s horror potential. If the game goes in that direction, it will be a very different sort of horror game from those you typically see on the market.

Whether or not this game ends up in the horror genre, its visual style and different approach to game exploration should make this title one to watch. (By the way, the developer is recruiting people for a commercial release of this game.)

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