Unravel Two not yet possible on Switch

Unravel Two would appear like just another success story for Nintendo Switch, a puzzle platformer with 2D gameplay and beautiful art perfect to pick up and play for shorter bursts with seamless co-op. Except for the fact that the game is not heading to the platform. After a lot of port begging, game creator Martin Sahlin said on Twitter that "we haven't given up on it, we WANT to do it, we just haven't found a way to make it possible yet". The reason is simply down to the hardware.

Producer Michael Gill and lead programmer Jakob Marklund explained to Games Industry that the game is power demanding despite 2D appearance. "Some locations have around four million triangles on screen. There are a lot of details, complex landscapes, all the vegetation and stuff. We can do it, but it will take some time", said Marklund, adding that "there's water simulation in a lot of areas and the yarn physics - although they're quite simple mechanics, it still has a lot of layers just to make it playable. There are a lot of physics to tweak all the time, and we have systems on top of those to make it feel good as well. We use all cores quite heavily on the bigger consoles."

Another problem is the engine. Unravel Two runs over Sony's PhyreEngine, which doesn't support other consoles. "We had to port it to Xbox One ourselves. It doesn't have support for Switch yet, so we would have to do that port and the engine work ourselves, and we're a really small team", said Marklund.

Coldwood Interactive really wanted to launch it on time, but the extra work would have taken six months more, they said. Hopefully, the resources needed and the technical solutions will reveal themselves...