Unwording

When I reviewed Rainswept back in 2019, I was quick to proclaim that Frostwood Interactive was a developer worth paying attention to. I loved the quirkiness of the point and click mystery and named it one of my favorite games of that year. Unfortunately, I ended up hating their follow-up title, Forgotten Fields, an adventure where we’re forced to hangout with one of the most insufferable video game characters of all time. Now comes Frostwood’s newest release, Unwording, a game about overcoming depression. Will this restore my faith in the once-promising developer, or is it another agonizing trip to the Forgotten Fields? That’s what I intend to find out when I review Unwording.

Like a lot of short, bite-sized puzzle games that address difficult topics, it’s hard to talk about Unwording without spoiling something. Perhaps it will be the overall trajectory of our downtrodden lead character or the solution to one or more puzzles found within the two-hour adventure, but something is definitely going to get spoiled. If you intend to play this game and don’t want any of the surprises to be ruined, then you should probably stop watching this review and play the game for yourself. It’s short, fun and the only game I’ve ever played to suggest that all you need to cure depression is bird poop.

Okay, maybe we need to back up a bit and put that into context. Unwording is a game about an unnamed man who is suffering from a crippling bout of depression. He lives in a city full of strangers, has a thankless office job with rows of cubicles and can barely bring himself to eat the food he orders from Grub Hub every night. He’s haunted by the self-defeating thoughts of not making enough money, not having enough friends, not living in a nice enough apartment, not falling in love and not having any real hopes or ambitions. Every day is the same. We’re all stuck going around in circles, doing the same thing every day until we eventually eat our own tail.

The man’s depression is conveyed through a series of puzzles where you turn regular, everyday phrases into demotivating thoughts. For example, when the man overhears a conversation going on between co-workers, you rearrange the letters to create a paranoid phrase about how everybody is gossiping about the depressed hero. You do this by flipping the letters around, almost as if they are a series of letter dice, and then arranging them in the right order to create a critical thought. These puzzles help to show us the man’s inner-dialog and how he sees the world around him.

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But then, one day, all that is interrupted by a small yellow bird who builds a nest on the man’s window sill. This is where the bird poop comes in. All of a sudden, this bird forces the man to see everything from a new perspective. The bird will literally smack into the puzzles, turning them from 2D to 3D. With the bird by his side, the man begins to see solutions where he once saw obstacles. Instead of wallowing in loneliness, maybe the man should open up to the people around him or throw a party. Everybody loves a party.

Of course, it’s not just the puzzles that turn 3D, but also the way you start to view the world. That’s one of the clever things the game does as it’s showing you the gradual progression out of depression. There are a few different visual upgrades that happen in this two-hour adventure, and I like how each of them come with their own types of puzzles. This is good visual storytelling, and it’s easy to see why a developer would be excited about this concept.

Unfortunately, as a game about overcoming depression, I feel like Unwording bites off more than it can chew. I joke that this is the game where bird poop cures depression, but it’s kind of true in this example. Here’s a guy who has completely given up on life to the point where he’s not even eating, and suddenly a bird comes into his life and changes his entire outlook? I get what they were going for, but the whole thing is rushed and feels too easy. There are never any setbacks and the speediness of the healing really undermines the severity of his depression. As somebody who has dealt with this kind of thing in the past, I found that the solution came across as too simple and unrealistic.

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But hey, it’s just a game, and I can overlook a few rushed details if the puzzles are fun. Unfortunately, they aren’t. Once again, I feel like I need to praise Frostwood Interactive for coming up with a series of word puzzles that are unique and unlike anything I’ve seen before. The problem isn’t that they are original, but rather that they are frustrating in all the wrong ways. Rearranging the letters is especially tough when you don’t even know where to start. There are so many different options that the whole thing is overwhelming, which is probably why the game gives you a couple of hints that you can use.

The second type of puzzle is a little easier, but it’s frustrating in a completely different way. The idea is to move the letters and blocks around in a 3D space in order to spell out different words. The good news is that the game will alert you when you’re close to spelling a word, but this can be infuriating when you have no idea what you’re looking for. And this frustration only gets worse with the next type of puzzle, which essentially turns Unwording into a text adventure. There was one puzzle that wanted me to type the exact word the game was looking for, but I simply couldn’t think of it. I spent a good ten-or-fifteen-minutes staring blankly at the screen, until I accidentally stumbled into it. At this point, I’m not even sure I would call this kind of thing a “puzzle.”

All this is especially annoying because the concept is so good. I like the idea of watching the world and the puzzles change as you break free of depression’s nasty grip. The way the game conveys all this is smart and the visual storytelling is spot-on. This is the kind of small, personal game that I want to champion. After all, I appreciate that it’s trying to say something, even if it’s not fully successful. The problem is that the obtuse puzzles keep getting in the way and the bird poop solution undermines what could have been a thoughtful game about overcoming depression.