A Story About My Uncle Review (Roytheboy)
I wish there was a middle between thumbs up and thumbs down. Anyway, this game was created in 2012 by a handful of Swedish creators making something small, but meaningful to them. If I had played it in 2012, I think it would be in my list of all time greats. Alas, I played it in 2025.
That's not to say it's a bad game or that I didn't enjoy it. A Story About My Uncle is an interesting platformer with some cool mechanics and a story that is surprisingly deep - though the message is hidden a bit.
For the good column, I mostly enjoyed the platforming elements. There are some unique things you can do in this game and a few puzzle that take a bit to figure out. That was fun for me. I also liked the overall art design. Keeping in mind this was created in 2012, it has solid visuals and interesting character designs and a really cool looking world. I think there was opportunity to do more with the characters, but again -created by a very small Swedish team doing this part time - so it makes sense why they wouldn't add a bunch of side content. There is one character in particular I liked a lot. Talking about them would be a spoiler, but I wanted to call out that there is one relationship in this game that goes a bit deeper than everything else and I liked that.
For the not-so-good, most of the platforming is both too simple and sometimes too difficult. There's not much challenge in most of the game except sometimes figuring out where the next platform is. And then suddenly, there are one or two puzzles at a specific point in the game that are much harder than the others because of new mechanics that get introduced. Not being able to progress because I'm not good with the new mechanic yet is a really shitty way to introduce that mechanic. Once I got the hang of it, I actually enjoyed it a lot, but I wish the first few areas were more friendly to the newbie I was. Also, while I like the story overall, the character I liked is the only one that gets developed really. And that's a shame. I thought the others were interesting and I wish they had more time to be explored.
And, I guess, my final complaint is also something I enjoyed about the game once I learned about it, but didn't know about it until I was looking something up for a different aspect of the game. I'm going to do this next part spoiler free, but I'll be flirting with some spoilers so jump to the next paragraph if you don't want to know. You've been warned. The story of this game is much deeper than they let on, but they hide it in some game mechanics that aren't really accessible to most characters. The ending does a good enough job exposing what the game is really about, but that and a hidden mechanic are the only ways to understand what the real story is. I think that was a bad idea. I think they should have made the mechanic available to players more easily and straight forwardly instead of hiding it. There's not enough replay value here to want to go back and do the work necessary to get these story elements and in the end, they aren't even story elements, they're more story descriptors. Anyway, I think they could have done this much better and it would have made the game as a whole and the ending in particular hit much harder. I'm going into a lot of words for this because if I hadn't stumbled across these elements on accident, the game's story would have impacted me less and I'd probably give this 2 stars instead of 3.
All-in-all, it's a cute little platformer that does what you want them to do. It's not nearly as good as others, but it's short play time (I went very slowly and beat the game in 3.5 hours) makes up for the fact that the platforming and story elements could be better.