Unpetrified: Echoes of Nature’s colourful visuals and promise of a relaxed experience called out to me as soon as it popped into my email inbox. Its non-combat, exploration-based gameplay based on helping the local wildlife, restoring the land to a more prosperous state and finding out what happened to the golem race all felt like the game I needed right now. We all need that time with a game to be able to just take a moment, for the experience to not feel too overwhelming but still be rewarding, and Unpetrified ticked all those boxes.
The game starts with a blue butterfly breaking from its cocoon and proceeds to give life to a stone golem, who you promptly take over. From this point onwards a wordless journey to a faraway tree kicks off as you follow a mostly linear path to your destination. You’ll travel through various different areas of the world, all with various different scenery and elemental differences. But it’s not just exploring that the golem needs to complete to finish their journey.
Throughout the game there are many puzzles that will need to be solved to be able to gain access to the path ahead. These are all based on feeding blue lines of light from one place to the other by figuring out the best route and clearing stones that might be in the way. The golem will use their aura power to move objects and to create the blue light from certain concrete posts, which will dissipate as you use it. This can be filled up by standing near plants and wildlife and hitting the action button, and its level is shown in Dead Space style through a crack on the golems’ back.
These puzzles start off easy and never get in the way of the exploration. They were also clear on its objectives, which fitted in nicely with the easygoing vibe of the game. But as you get deeper, they start to become more and more complex, spanning vast areas of land and can become unclear in their objective thanks to the game’s wordless approach. In some situations I also struggled to figure out what my actions did, hearing a mechanism whirring into life but having no idea where it was and spending time having to explore the area to find it.
Because of the puzzles growing in size, it also meant that I was using much more aura power, and I was constantly running out. I spent far too much time looking for flowers and wildlife to top it up than I would have liked, and I was craving a way to extend the amount of aura I could hold through some kind of upgrade system to alleviate this, but unfortunately no such system exists here.
But that’s not to say these puzzles were not well thought out, as they mostly were, and I completed many through clear paths thanks to their designs, but it was these larger, more complicated puzzles, like a maze-style one where you have to move different sections to make new paths, that I really struggled with, and with the game’s six-hour runtime, I did become fatigued by the end.
Another area that can affect the gameplay is through the golems’ emotions. When it is happy, its eyes will shine blue, and it will be able to roll into a ball, which helps massively with traversal. But when something bad happens, the golem reverts to a sad state, depicted by yellow eyes and gloomy, thundery weather. During these phases it cannot roll into a ball, which plays into the certain sections this happens in. Mostly these involve trying to solve whatever is bothering the golem or to find a special meditative area to turn his sadness into happiness, which will give you access to its ball skill and allow you to escape the area by breaking rock barriers.
The other main mechanic in the game comes from a fox friend that you’ll make on your journey. When you do become friends, you’ll be able to instruct them to sit on certain switches within the blue light puzzles, and… that’s about it. Although it worked well, and the fox mostly listened to my instructions, this feature did feel underbaked. I would have loved to have been able to give the fox a much larger range of instructions, which could have really opened the game to many more possibilities.
There is also much jank here with graphical pop-ups, random wildlife behaviour, visual bleeding into other areas, gravity-defying rocks when you break them and the fox randomly leaving switches and glitching to the golem’s location. At one stage a section of the game did not load properly and let me roam the outskirts of the game world itself until I fell down an invisible hole to my doom, which thankfully forced the game to load in the correct layout. But there’s also a lot to love in this area with charming visuals, detailed animal models and environments, good level design and the golem itself easily expressing its emotions with its body language and use of its life force.
