But generally, this is a game that expects a lot from you, and that was a dropped-gauntlet and challenge that we were willing to accept. This is a cerebral game, and the lack of guidance might push you to the odd walkthrough. You have to puzzle out what is required of you, and pull off reasonably challenging feats to complete them.
This isn’t a harsh or overly difficult game, but it’s devious. Perhaps the most refreshing thing about Unbound: Worlds Apart is how much it thinks of you. You’re not changing the whole world: you are changing a bubble within it, and that creates puzzles as you bring enemies, platforms and more with you into the mirror world. This interplay between the real world and demon world is inspired. What that mirror dimension does is dependent on your abilities: it can slow down time, it can flip gravity, or it can make platforms appear or disappear, and those are just the ones we’ve come across in our time with the game. They all share a common mechanic: you can travel to a mirror dimension that exists as a large circle around your character. Rather than be your conventional Metroid power-ups, these portals are superb. Soli was given the ability to use portal magic, which at least gives you a fighting chance against the bad guys. It thinks with portalsĮnemies weren’t the only things that came through the portal. You are given a vast map, with the ability to fast-travel to areas within it, and the only thing stopping you from trekking in a singular direction is the abilities you have. Unbound: Worlds Apart also leans on the structure of Ori also, as you’re very much given the freedom to explore the world as you see fit. The contrast of beauty and darkness was very much Ori’s bag too. You play a wee wizard called Soli, and you trek across this landscape trying to find the villagers and return the world to normalcy. But when a demonic portal is opened in the centre of a village, corruption and spiky ne’er-do-wells pour out. This is a beautiful, natural world that’s lived in peace for centuries.