Unbound: Worlds Apart, a game made by Alien Pixel Games and published by both Alien Pixel Publishing and Digerati Distribution, manages to make itself innovative by ripping a hole in the fabric of space-time. It's got the standard platformer experience as well, but its unique qualities help it stand out as an excellent genre experience.
The main gameplay mechanic of Unbound lies with the main character Soli’s ability to create portals to other dimensions. These portals layer another world’s laws of physics and reality onto the one Soli is traversing and in so doing create both solutions to the obstacles that they are trying to get through as well as yet more problems that they must solve. The wide variety of powers that these portals offer makes sure that this mechanic never gets stale and the inclusion of areas that don’t allow the creation of portals entirely makes sure that the player always appreciates this skill when they have it.
The powers that these portals allow Soli access to range quite widely and include things as standard as revealing platforms or reversing gravity at will to the more bizarre, like turning into a boulder. Given such a wide range of powers, the platforming in Unbound is constantly varied and even allows for some personal flair when dealing with its challenges. The ability to find preferred solutions is especially nice due to the game’s general difficulty. While it ramps up at first before evening out in the middle of the experience, allowing the player to settle into a false sense of security, the gauntlets near the endgame can be enough to make even veterans of the genre’s hands cramp after dying so many times to the same section. Thankfully, the game is very kind with deaths and checkpoints; after a failure it takes barely a second for the game to respawn Soli and allow the player to try again.
For those wishing for a good narrative experience, Unbound has plenty to offer. While kept purposefully nebulous at first, the story slowly unravels through dialogue with various characters found in the world. A corrupting influence is spreading across the Sea of Reality, which connects all of the worlds in the universe, and leaves naught but demons and desolation in its wake. It has just come to visit Soli’s reality, and if anyone is to survive, the blight must be taken out at the source, the Demon King. This is not all there is to know however, and, cleverly, Unbound encourages players to find this out by having lost villagers, who Soli has to rescue, each give a little piece of the story. Further incentivizing this course of action is that only once enough villagers are saved, some of the game’s hardest areas are unlocked, which allows even those driven only by challenge to see the bigger picture.
While Unbound is certainly a solid title, it is not without its flaws, though most of them are very minor. Likely the one that will prove most irksome to the general audience is the way that the game looks and feels like a Metroidvania. While it does have some areas that are inaccessible until the player has gotten a certain amount of the way through the story, this is very rare. For the most part, everything is a series of linear challenges with all of the game’s hidden content easily conquerable as soon as it is available. Bosses, a staple of that genre, while present, are exceedingly scarce and even though there are so few, they can repeat as well, which makes things feel slightly less climactic than they should be.
From Ori and the Blind Forest’s difficulty to Limbo’s puzzles and aesthetic, Unbound displays its inspirations with aplomb. On top of the innovative gameplay mechanics, the game’s art style, monster designs, and narrative are all fantastic. For fans of puzzle-platforming or gorgeous narrative aesthetic, Unbound: Worlds Apart shouldn't be missed.
Unbound: Worlds Apart will be releasing today, July 28th, 2021 for PC and Nintendo Switch. Screen Rant was provided a digital Steam code for the purposes of this review.