February 2022 • Macworld 53audience. Admittedly, Gone North
Games isn’t the most well-known
developer, consisting of a group of
former students in Sweden, whose
biggest hit seems to have been 2014’s
Goat Simulator. A Story About My
Uncle was also released on PC in
2014, although the Mac version took
a few years to arrive, and is now
available on Steam.
The story follows a young boy
who goes in search of his Uncle Fred,
an intrepid explorer who on this
occasion seems to have gotten a bit
carried away, and has gone missing
in one of those Doctor Strange-
esque inter-dimensional landscapes
populated by floating islands and
strange alien creatures.
The game starts off like an
adventure, asking you to find clues
about your missing uncle, but rather
than sticking with
2D graphics and
dull swathes of
text, the game
suddenly goes
rocketing across
the dimensions,
turning into a kind
of 3D platform
game as you
use Uncle Fred’s
‘adventure suit’
to run and jump around the alien
landscape and track him down.
The suit starts off with a single
power-boost that helps you to jump
around the various floating islands
and platforms, and then you get a
grappling hook as well, which gives
you more freedom to explore the
world around you. There are alien
encounters as well, but this is a
strictly non-violent game, so rather
than killing everything in sight, you
can interact with the beings you
meet, learn about their own stories,
and maybe pick up a few clues about
your uncle as well.
My jumping skills are clearly a bit
rusty, and I died quite a few times
even in the game’s early tutorial
section, but once you get the hang
of it, A Story About My Uncle,
is a fresh take on the traditional1.