Unravel Two

I cover shooters for a living, so when the Scout Team drops a puzzle-platformer on my desk I approach it the same way I approach a new TTK meta: with skepticism and a stopwatch. Unravel Two did not embarrass itself. It is a compact, physics-driven 2.5D platformer built around two small creatures made of yarn, and the core loop is smarter than it looks on a thumbnail. The setup is simple: two Yarnys are tethered together by a strand of yarn, and every puzzle in the game is some permutation of what two people connected by a rope can do. You swing off grapple hooks Spider-Man-style, anchor one Yarny to a ledge so the other can pendulum across a gap, tie the thread between two fixed points to build a trampoline, or launch one character off the other to reach a high platform. The movement feels tighter than the first Unravel, which had a floaty quality that frustrated people. Here the controls respond cleanly enough that failed jumps feel like your fault, which is where you want that line to be. There is no combat, only running from threats like an angry grouse or a northern pike, which keeps the focus on traversal and spatial problem-solving across seven main chapters set in photo-realistic Scandinavian environments. The co-op design is the genuinely clever part. The difficulty is tiered so one player can handle the tricky section while the other holds position, meaning a skill gap between partners is manageable rather than session-ending. When things get too hectic, the two Yarnys can merge into a single character, handing control to one player without stopping the game. There is also a time-slow option for tricky maneuvers and a hint system if you get stuck, all optional. Playing solo is fully viable, with a button swap to jump between the two characters, but the experience noticeably clicks into a higher gear with a second person on the couch. One hard caveat: there is no native online multiplayer. Local co-op only, which means Steam Remote Play Together or Parsec if your couch partner is remote. That friction is real and worth knowing before you buy. The main campaign runs roughly four to five hours, which sounds short until you factor in the challenge levels locked inside the lighthouse hub. Those are a different difficulty tier entirely, aimed at players who want something that actually tests precision and timing. For the base game, veterans of the genre will coast through it, and some players have flagged the difficulty as too low. That criticism is fair. This is not a game that will punish you. The story running in the background, ghostly figures of two children apparently escaping troubled circumstances, is intentionally opaque and easy to ignore. Community reception has been warm rather than loud, sitting at a Metacritic of 76 and around 74 percent positive on Steam from over 2,700 reviews. Praised for the physics puzzles and visual presentation, criticized for short runtime, low difficulty, and the local-only co-op restriction. One more thing on the PC side: launching through Steam requires an EA account and the Origin client running in the background. That overhead is annoying in 2024 and worth mentally pricing in. Fred, Scout Team