A pleasant-voiced woman tells us the tale of the orphan Monroe, whose mother's passing left him with a wealth of her unfinished paintings. The orphanage would only allow him to keep one, and it's on a seemingly ordinary night that he awakes to find the unfinished swan he chose missing from the painting itself. Monroe leaps into the blank canvas, and the game is afoot.
Now, if you've seen or heard about The Unfinished Swan, what comes next might sound like all the game is -- but don't be fooled. Dropped into a completely white world, you hurl black paint to bring your surroundings to life from the first-person perspective. Each blob brings definition -- a wall here, a stump there, a hallway over yonder -- and slowly but surely sets Monroe down a path of discovery. It's breathtaking and intriguing, but it's just the beginning of what The Unfinished Swan has to show us.
The true beauty of the game is that each chapter of the storybook brings a new gameplay element or environment into view that has little to nothing to do with black paint. The hurling of water to create vines, moving a glowing orb for protection, building platforms -- it might all sound like a jumble of incomplete thoughts now, but those eureka moments are the heart of the game and it would do me no good to spoil them for you here. Just know that -- again, like Journey -- there's far more to this title than the previews and trailers have led you to believe and the diversity of what's to come is unmistakably beautiful.
Connecting it all is the kindly woman's story and the swan Monroe's chasing down. Even in pitch black areas or whiteout conditions, golden swan footprints will stick out to guide your moves. Golden letters will spring from the side of walls, and the splat of your paint will unveil the next segment in the kindly woman's story.
Which brings us back to "unflinching simplicity." This lovely story took me just under two hours to run through in my first playthrough. For me, that felt perfect -- The Unfinished Swan didn't overstay its welcome and it didn't lose its focus for the sake of extending its playtime. However, I know not every gamer making the $14 investment will see it that way. Still, the game is aching to be replayed. Each level features collectible balloons that you can then spend on in-game "toys" such as a balloon radar, concept art, and so on. Maybe you'd even like to tinker with the PlayStation Move controls, although I found moving via the trigger on the wand to be too tank-like for my tastes.
Still, those goodies and the PlayStation Network Trophies aren't what make me want to pick the controller back up. I want to play The Unfinished Swan to get lost in the storybook one more time. To have the docile tunes of the Nashville Scoring Orchestra dance through my headphones. To find Easter eggs like the one on the darkside of The Unfinished Swan's moon. To go back and unwind with a good book.