Descripton

Unleaving is one of the most visually striking games I have encountered in this genre — and I say that knowing how many visually striking games this genre has produced. Made by Toronto-based indie studio orangutan matter and released in 2024, it is a short puzzle platformer about a child following a moth into a surreal world built around the mysteries of life and death.

Every single frame of the game has been hand-painted by artist Sura Karnawi — not digitally illustrated in a painterly style, but actually painted, scanned, and brought to life through a unique painting-animation technique. The result looks unlike anything else on this database, and for that alone it deserves your attention.

The Story

Unleaving tells its story almost entirely without dialogue — just enigmatic on-screen phrases like “you yearn for a candle to burn beyond…” and the visual language of the surreal worlds the child moves through. A child at the edge of a cliff, a butterfly, a voice that says “Awake.”

From there the narrative becomes deliberately abstract, exploring the nature of life, death, and perception through imagery rather than plot. I will be honest — there are moments where the allegory feels slightly heavy-handed, where the game tells you what it means a little too insistently. But those moments are outnumbered by stretches of pure visual poetry that I found genuinely moving.

Graphics

This is where Unleaving is simply in a category of its own. The hand-painted frames give the game a texture and warmth that no digital art style, however skilled, quite replicates — you can feel the brushwork, the grain of the paper, the specific quality of light that only paint on a physical surface produces. One reviewer described it as “playable abstract art” and I find that exactly right.

Moving through Unleaving feels like walking through a gallery that has decided to become interactive, and I mean that as a wholehearted compliment. The stop-motion cutscenes are particularly stunning.

Gameplay

The gameplay sits in the Limbo tradition — deliberate side-scrolling movement, jumping, grabbing objects, solving environmental puzzles that are tightly integrated into the world rather than feeling imposed on it. The puzzles are creative and non-repetitive, each one introducing a new idea before moving on.

There are occasional skill-based sections that demand more precision, and these are the game’s weakest moments — the controls are not always responsive enough to match what is being asked, and the resulting frustration feels genuinely at odds with the contemplative atmosphere. When the puzzles flow, though, they flow beautifully.

Atmosphere

he atmosphere is Unleaving’s greatest achievement and the reason I keep recommending it to people despite its rough edges. The combination of the hand-painted visuals, ambient sound design, and a haunting score creates something that feels genuinely transportive — a world that exists only in this game, built from a very specific artistic imagination.

Several reviewers compared the emotional pull to Gris, and I think that comparison is fair — both games create a space in which feeling something becomes almost inevitable, without ever telling you exactly what you should feel.

Where can I play Unleaving?

Unleaving is available on PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, and on Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. A PlayStation version is also planned. It is modestly priced and worth every penny purely for the visual experience, even before the gameplay is factored in.

Similar Games

If FAR: Lone Sails resonated with you, these games share its love of wordless journeys, desolate worlds, and atmosphere that does all the talking.

If you are drawn to games that treat visual art as the primary medium of storytelling, Gris, Inmost, and Darq all sit in interesting proximity to Unleaving — each one using a distinctive aesthetic to explore darker emotional territory in its own way.