A stone golem awakens in a relatively empty and quiet world, with only a butterfly to help it figure out where to go and what to do. The nearby area is mostly vacant, and strangely devoid of people, but it is home to different flowers and animals. This is how the 6-8 hour-long campaign found within Unpetrified: Echoes of Nature begins.
Through cues and text-based tutorials featuring diagrams, the person holding the controller soon learns that this stone golem can use its aura to awaken the nearby environment. Well, it can use its aura to bring flowers to life, interact with animals and that kind of thing. It’s also able to turn into a ball, and roll around like a small boulder. That allows one to get around faster, or break poorly constructed rock walls.
While exploring different regions of a human free world — including a forest, a meadow, a desert and strange ruins — one will rescue lost animals of different types. They’ll also use the golem’s aura to rebuild stone altars, fix broken benches and things like that. It seems very basic, bland and dated at the beginning, but gets better as it goes along.
Soon after starting this wordless quest, the player will stumble across grid and energy-based puzzles, which form the majority of what surprised me by primarily being a 3D puzzle game. The idea behind almost all of its many puzzles is that one must get a stream of light or energy (whatever one you’d prefer, I guess) from one point to another. Sometimes two or three beams will need to be directed towards one node, and then the golem’s aura can be used to combine them into one beam that opens a door or something like that.
In order to complete these puzzles, which become very plentiful and get to be a lot more complex, one must use the golem’s aura to activate energy totems, if need be, and direct the energy by moving rocks or glyphs that are blocking its way. This is usually done on grids that are located on the ground, but you will eventually find yourself dealing with moving energy along wall-based circuits within some pretty involved puzzles. Unpetrified: Echoes of Nature starts off basic, simple and boring, but really ramps up over time. As such, those who play it will need to don their thinking caps.
Not all of the included puzzles are of the aforementioned type, but almost all are. Near the end of the game, there’s a section involving moving water, and one honestly tedious and frustrating section where you’ll keep needing to manipulate a maze. I lost an hour or more to being stuck there.
As I’ve written in other reviews, including my recent Sizeable review, I don’t particularly enjoy puzzle games although I love doing word searches. Going into this game, I wasn’t aware of how heavy of a puzzle game it actually was, but it’s a really involved one. There are a lot of these grid-based energy puzzles, where you’re manipulating objects and the environment to direct it to where it needs to go. I’m honestly surprised that I was able to finish Unpetrified without a walkthrough, but I did. I almost needed one near the end of the game, and got stuck for a while in a cavern and in the aforementioned ruins’ maze. At times, I got by through trial and error. I finished it without any help though.
The unnamed rock golem is obviously heavy, and has a weighted feel to it. As such, its third-person movement is more cumbersome and slow than it is fast and fluid, but that’s understandable. The golem — who befriends a bird and a fox, which can be directed to stand on pressure switches to help with some mid-to-late game puzzles — also has visual emotions. When it’s happy, it will roll around whenever you ask it to. However, when it’s sad (such as during rainy segments), or feels lonely, it will not. The player must get to a hut, wait out the storm and emerge the next sunny morning, in order to make the main protagonist happy again. This only occurs a few times during the game, though.
I didn’t care for this title at the beginning, but it grew on me and I started to appreciate it. The puzzles did get tedious, repetitive and overly formulaic, but I appreciated how the developers were able to evolve the idea and create complex puzzles from the same simple design. That is, even though some of the puzzles (especially later on) were kind of frustrating, confusing and obtuse. The controls sometimes got in the way, and things didn’t always work as intended, including directing the fox, which got stuck frequently. There is a lot of weight to the golem, meaning he doesn’t move the best, and there were times where I fell without meaning to. There were also occasions where I’d press A to use his aura and it wouldn’t affect anything, forcing me to do it twice, or maybe even three times, before a puzzle would respond to my actions.
It’s important to note that the golem’s aura isn’t unlimited; nor does it extend far from him when used. It just goes out in a small circle. However, when it does run out, it must be replenished by interacting with a flower or plant. I don’t remember the game telling me that, but I may have missed it. Regardless, I figured it out. This was an annoying mechanic, though, because some areas had almost no plants or flowers to draw from.
Speaking of flowers: When one completes a side quest, such as returning all lost baby bunnies to their burrow, they’ll earn a colourful flower, which comes out of the ground. After picking them, the golem will plant them on a green patch on the top of his head. There, they remain, as decorations.
Unfortunately, Unpetrified: Echoes of Nature is buggy at this point in time. The first time I rolled down a long hill (a course, really), the golem got stuck and I had to reload my save. Then, the game wouldn’t let me roll at all. It didn’t work until I closed it and opened it again. I got stuck another time and had to reload, and also had to quit to the dashboard because of an infinite loading glitch.
When I went to start this game, after installing it, our review console told me that there was a temporary network issue and would only let me play it offline. This was the first time I can remember this happening. I was able to play through it (offline), but was still apparently online in general. I’m not sure if this was a glitch, if the game’s data wasn’t fully added to Microsoft’s servers, or what, but at least I was able to play through it.
For the most part, Unpetrified: Echoes of Nature is a pretty good game with some well thought out puzzles. However, I did feel that it overstayed its welcome, so to speak, and was overlong. At one point, I went into the desert and found tombstones featuring what looked like credits (developers’ names). Coupled with some unique music, I thought it was some sort of interactive credits sequence. However, I was only about halfway through the game, which kept going and going. Every time I thought I’d reached the final puzzle, there was another section, or at least more puzzles, to complete.
At first, the visuals seemed very dated, with relatively empty environments, kind of basic 3D models/locations and the like. However, it started to become more involved, and started to look better as it went along, thanks to lots of colour. The music was better than the visuals, though, and did a good job of conveying the emotions of the main character and the story in general.
I won’t spoil the story, but it has something to do with the relationship between the missing humans and the golems, and what it did to the natural world. It’s told through cave art style murals.
Unpetrified: Echoes of Nature is a surprisingly complex puzzle game wrapped around the design of a more traditional (and cozy) 3D mascot game. It’s quite long, and does get tedious, repetitive and (occasionally) frustrating. Still, those things don’t stop it from being a pretty good and likeable game. It’s just not as simple, easy or cozy as it may seem.
This review is based on the XBOX Series X version of the game, which we were provided with.