Parent's Guide: Unravel - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

What is Unravel?

Unravel is a puzzle-platform game that tells the tale of a little woollen doll called Yarny. A game for the thinkers, Unravel takes you on an adventure through frozen fields, leafy forest floors, and into the heart of a giant, industrial machine, as you venture on a quest to collect little woollen mascots, and restore lost memories.

How do you play Unravel?

With a huge emphasis on puzzles, Unravel is a game that'll really test your grey matter. Making use of his woollen body, Yarny can attach himself to tether points scattered throughout the level in a number of different ways and use them to get from A to B. Throw a yarn lasso at a tether point that's high up, and you can swing from it like Tarzan. Tie some string between tether points on the ground, and you can create a makeshift bridge, or a trampoline. With puzzles around practically every corner, you'll have to apply real world thinking to each situation if you want to make your way through the game - figuring out what objects to use, and how to use them is key. Maybe you'll be faced with a stretch of water, and you need to figure out you'll need to tie a rope bridge together, to push a log up on to a rock, so you can float across the water? Or maybe you're faced with a field of crows, that have a nasty habit of taking Yarny away to eat for dinner - a bit of scavenging might reveal a bucket, that you can use to turn Yarny into a kind of hermit crab, as you scurry across the field. 

To make matters more complex, Yarny starts out tethered to the beginning of each level - and as he moves through each stage, he begins to unravel. Luckily, there are just enough wool replenishing checkpoints to keep you going, but that means that not only do you need to solve the game's many puzzles - you'll need to solve them efficiently, too, without leaving any yarn unnecessarily tangled up, or you won't be able to reach the goal.

How hard will kids find Unravel?

Younger children will likely find Unravel a bit on the tricky side - the puzzles require a lot of a very specific type of thinking, and are tricky enough that some left us stumped for a good few hours, even when working as a team. With no hint system, if your child comes up against a brick wall, they'll likely either have to come to you, or head on the internet to find a walkthrough. Beyond the overall complexity of the puzzles, Yarny's constantly unravelling string makes things that much trickier, as you really have to keep in mind how much thread you have left. In that way, it's never enough to simply solve the puzzles - you have to solve them efficiently, too, and that will make things much more complex for younger children. Working together, with one person playing, and another advising, two younger children may just about manage to make their way through this - but for solo play, this is best suited to older children, who like a good logical challenge.

In terms of mature content, there's very little for parents to be concerned about in Unravel. There's no swearing, sex, or bloody violence, but there are a few scenes that may be upsetting for younger players. When Yarny comes a cropper, he sometimes does so in a somewhat violent manner, whether it's being snipped from his string by a crab, and bashed around, or flattened by a tyre with a noise that sounds more like bones breaking than a woollen doll getting squished. Still, while that may mean the game isn't suitable for the youngest of players, they almost certainly wouldn't be able to do the puzzles either - if they can figure out the game's puzzles, the rest of the game is OK for them too.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: Playstation 4