Conventional wisdom (or at least wishful thinking) says that death is like being in a featureless white room forever, a sort of insensible nothing without beginning or end. It’s an idea built on the inductive proof of self: if you can (not) sense a world outside yourself, then there must (not) be a self that does the sensing. If you take this idea to its boring conclusion, you question your perceptions and ask, “What is the Matrix?” The Unfinished Swan asks something more interesting, “What if there is something there, and I just can’t see it?”

Ian Dallas describes his game as a first person painting game in an entirely white world. “You’re a young boy, and you’re chasing a swan who has jumped out of a painting and wandered into this bizarre white space.” The white space is hardly featureless, however. Instead, you can reveal benches, bushes, and block puzzles by splattering them with paint balloons.

The first balloon you toss is blind; there are no edges, shadows, or visible objects of any kind. However, as you gradually give shape to the world, the objects you can see give hints about the ones you can’t. Even a single glob of paint on a bench can reveal an interposed wall, because what you can’t see tells you almost as much as what you can.

I don’t think he means it.

The Unfinished Swan is built on an exploration core, but is distinguished from other like games because there are two kinds of things to find: the things you were looking for, and the things you wish you hadn’t found. These latter revelations make the game tense. You never know when you’ll uncover a giant spider, fall into an unseen hole, or reveal sinister writing. “[The Unfinished Swan] is modelled on children’s books, specifically Alice in Wonderland and Edward Gorey,” said Dallas, “The thing about great children’s books is that there are things in there that are totally inappropriate for children. It’s important to have those moments of terror.”

Right now you have to want to be drawn into The Unfinished Swan‘s world, because there aren’t really any consequences for failure to force you to engage with the game. You may paint as much as you please, enemies are largely absent, and there are no greater threats than frustration. This is partly because the game is in such an early stage, and Dallas commented that the GDC demo is about determining how the core mechanic might be stretched into a full length game. It’s also likely because unseen enemies in a featureless world would be about as much fun as they sound. Then again, players seem to enjoy being punished, and Dallas mentioned that the most frequent suggestion he’d received at the IGF was to limit the number of paint balls you can have with you.

Ian Dallas

Photo by Kate McKiernan

Limiting paintballs and other petty punishment seems to miss the point of The Unfinished Swan, however. Having an unseen world that the player uncovers is the perfect environment for some Eternal Darkness grade deceptions. At the beginning of each stage, you have no idea where you are, what you’re doing, and even which way gravity is going before you fire that first paintball. The Unfinished Swan is a gold mine of deception-driven gameplay and seems like it would be just as well suited to the joy of discovery as it is to exporation. Puzzles seem less well-suited to the game, an absent piece is just as easily missed as an invisible enemy, though there’s definitely room for some clever nontraditional puzzles.

All these gameplay concepts hinge on the game’s strong aesthetic, and if the graphics don’t hold together, the whole game falls apart. The Unfinished Swan would be especially susceptible to clipping problems, because seams at object joints would not only kill the look, but being able to see through an object to view the paint splatters on the other side would violate the occlusion that makes the game world navigable. Happily, The Unfinished Swan suffers no such problems, although this is partly because the GDC demo uses very simple geometry. Objects in the white world are fairly simple, and though paint spatters are smart enough to splash both parts of an interior corner, don’t expect to look behind the slats of a painted park bench to find a series of black lines.

Dallas is talking to several publishers right now, and is in the process of hiring staff so he can move forward with the project. He hopes to have something to announce in the near future, which you’ll be able to find at Giant Sparrow’s website.

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