Image credits: Coldwood Interactive/EA
Hanging by a Thread
The Delicate Balance of Holding On and Letting Go in Unravel
by Alix Markman
Warm, late afternoon sunlight spills in through a rustic window. An old woman sits at her kitchen table, surrounded by scrapbooking materials. Examining one picture still in its frame, she laughs, then sighs. Unable to continue, she abandons her project. A ball of red yarn falls from her basket as she walks away, giving life to a small anthropomorphic creature of yarn. As Yarny makes his way back to the woman’s table of scattered memories, he passes a pillow embroidered with the Swedish phrase lycka blommar ur små enkla ting: “happiness blooms from small, simple things.”
So begins Coldwood Interactive’s 2016 puzzle-platformer Unravel. The game follows Yarny as he journeys through his creator’s memories. Yarny uses photographs scattered throughout the old woman’s home to travel to key moments in her life, collecting her forgotten memories and filling her scrapbook in her stead.
At first, the game is idyllic. Yarny explores richly drawn autumnal environments in the Scandinavian countryside against a spirited folk music soundtrack. But as the vibrant colours and warm sunlight of autumn inevitably give way to bitter winter, so too do the old woman’s memories take a darker, colder turn. Picturesque chapters such as “Berry Mire” and “Mountain Trek” are followed by gloomier, tumultuous memories with melancholic titles like “Down in a Hole” and “How Much is Enough,” and Yarny bears witness as his creator’s home and family are torn apart by age, industrialization, and greed.
Despite the marked shift in tone, Unravel’s gameplay remains largely the same throughout. Yarn is the main tool at the player’s disposal in solving the game’s puzzles, with Yarny using his own material to climb, swing, and drag objects in order to progress. But players must take care not to stretch Yarny (literally) too thin, lest his yarn fray.
Coupled with the game’s progressively melancholy story, these mechanics form a powerful metaphor for the grieving process. Yarny’s inability to move forward when stretched too thin is a pain familiar to all acquainted with grief. But Unravel’s most evocative metaphor is its gameplay. The solutions to many of Unravel’s puzzles lie in timing, with Yarny identifying the precise moments when he must cling to or release his yarn in order to move the story forward. While an emphasis on timing is hardly an anomaly in a physics-based platformer, Yarny’s role in helping his creator fully process her grief – finding the strength to hold on to the happy memories, while letting go of their inherent sadness – makes the design a poignant choice.
The grief explored in Unravel is not limited to sadness in the face of death. Yarny grieves with his creator over the brevity of childhood, the environmental devastation of her home, and, eventually, the death of her husband. Grief is not simply a response to the loss of life, but rather the death of innocence – the loss of the person we were or life we knew before we were forced to grapple with unfathomable hardship. Yarny’s journey, then, is one of reconciliation. He helps his creator achieve the delicate harmony between acknowledging what has been lost and finding peace in what remains.
The phrase at the beginning of the game, “happiness blooms from small, simple things,” is a clear allusion to both Yarny and the memories he collects. However, it is not these “small, simple things”, but rather the choice of the word “bloom” that is most significant. It is no coincidence that the changing seasons are threaded through Yarny’s adventures. As the old woman writes in her scrapbook’s final chapters: “All things eventually come to an end.” The seasons must change, and all which blooms – be that love, land, or life itself – must die, leaving in its wake the seeds of growth and rebirth. Thus, to fully process one’s grief is to make peace with this reality: to find the seemingly paradoxical balance between letting go and hanging on, just as Yarny does.
The penultimate chapter of Unravel takes place in a cemetery. Devoid of all collectibles and nearly any puzzles, Yarny – and the player – is forced to face his creator’s grief at the death of her husband head on. Without the comforts of normal gameplay, Yarny has no reprieve from his unbearable sadness, and literally unravels at level’s end.
But there is hope for Yarny yet. Within moments of his apparent death in the dark, blizzarding graveyard, our little hero is reborn, waking to the lush greenery of blossoming spring. Warm lights carry him home, where he mends the final piece of his creator’s scrapbook: a heart made of yarn.
All which blooms must die, but death doesn’t need to be the end. By granting ourselves the space to both hold onto what remains and let go of what has been lost, we can transcend death, carrying in our hearts the loves and lives long gone so that we may truly heal from our grief. As the final page in the old woman’s scrapbook reads:
Love forms bonds, like strands of yarn.
Like yarn, those bonds can be fragile, or get all tangled.
But when they’re kept and cared for, they can bridge any distance.
Even that which lies between life and death.
Alix Markman is a queer screenwriter for TV, digital, and video games. She's passionate about LGBTQ+ representation, storytelling, and whether or not a game will let you pet the dog. In addition to her screenwriting work, Alix also writes for numerous other platforms. You can find her byline on Screen Rant, Medium, and The Beaverton. Find her on Twitter and Instagram.