Review: Uin
by [redacted]
There was a point toward the end of Uin where I became stuck. I had navigated a water level and a forced-scrolling shooting segment, and was now faced with a sort of a boss battle. My character stood in a bubbling pool of water. To the right floated an enormous child, orbited by a handful of large five-pointed stars. Occasionally the stars would shoot out, then boomerang back, causing my character damage. For the life of me I couldn’t beat this boss, and I had started to despair of ever finishing the game.
To further my frustration, the last save point was several minutes earlier — before the water level, and before a sequence reminiscent of everyone’s least favorite part of Konami’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles NES game. You know, the bit with the coral. So each time I reached the boss, both my character’s energy and my own were fairly well drained. And each time I failed, I knew I would have to navigate that whole sequence again.
And then something happened. Well, two things happened. One, I realized that I had recently earned a new power — one that I had never used, as I had been underwater all this time. Two, I randomly hit on a new strategy that used, though did not rely on, this new power. The next time I faced the boss, the encounter was over within seconds — and I realized it wasn’t so much a boss as a random obstruction.
My fault had been in filtering the event too strictly through my own understanding of game structure. And that is the uncertain balance tread throughout this game. For all its waves to tradition, Uin is still a biggt production. It may have an inventory, and a persistent world structure, and sub-quests, and cutscenes, and a fully developed (if eccentric) control scheme, but those details are incidental to the dream logic at play.