EA shares an inside look at the art of Coldwood Interactive's inspiring co-op puzzle-platformer. Pick up the new Yarny Bundle (including Unravel & Unravel Two), available on PS4 today.
Unravel Two – a puzzle-platforming adventure where you play as two adorable creatures made of yarn – takes place in environments full of natural beauty. The Yarnys explore many spellbinding places, from lush forests to serene urban hiding spots. But according to the game’s creators at Coldwood Interactive, they didn’t create anything that wasn’t already there.
“We tried to capture beauty in the environment that surrounds us here, which actually wasn’t that hard,” says Coldwood Co-Founder and 3D Artist Dick Adolfsson. “When you get down on your knees and look at the world from another perspective, magic happens.”
Coldwood is located in Umea, Sweden, and natural sites are never far away. The original Unravel focused on those environments heavily, sending Yarny through mosquito-filled swamps and snowy fields in the Swedish countryside. Unravel Two features similar locations, but also sends the Yarnys trekking through the streets of a small town and the gears of an ominous factory.
“I think what we tried to do with this game was… explore different types of environments,” Director Martin Sahlin explains in a recent interview. “It’s still very much based on places we know and places around us, but we tried to do different things with it this time.”
“We have this principle in our art direction that we call ‘highlighting the beauty in the ordinary.’ That everything is really lovely if you just get to look at it closely enough. Even the most boring, mundane things can be super beautiful if you just give yourself time to look at it and look at it closely… And that’s sort of the cool thing about being a little Yarny, that we can allow you to get really close to things.”
In Unravel Two, you play as two Yarnys (either on your own or with a friend in local co-op) who act as helper spirts for two young people. The teens’ tale takes you to a variety of locations important to them, with the Yarnys running, wall-jumping, yarn-swinging, and puzzle-solving their way through the world in their humans’ wake.
The game is split up into chapters, each with its own challenges to overcome: falling rocks, scorching machine parts, and hungry birds can be waiting around any corner. But the most frightening enemies of all are creeping shadow creatures that dissolve any Yarny they touch. You’ll have to use all your skills and rely on the Yarnys’ friendship to make it through.
Every step of the way, you’ll see places that the Coldwood team wanted to show in all their splendor, even if they aren’t what most people would call beautiful. “What we tried to do now with Unravel Two is – can we take even more ordinary, can we take even more mundane scenes, and make them look magical and beautiful and Unravel-y?” says Sahlin. “We have things like a cityscape or a strange factory that we tried to [ask], ‘How can we just make these feel as detailed and as alive and as beautiful to watch as those beautiful forest sceneries that we did in the first game?’ That’s been an interesting challenge and I think it turned out pretty good.”
Want to see for yourself? The Yarny Bundle (containing Unravel and Unravel Two) is available now at PlayStation Store! Or try it first before purchase by playing the free trial of Unravel 2, and swing into an adorable adventure!
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