Unravel Two's story detracts from an otherwise fantastic co-op platformer

Unravel Two has you play as two tiny yarn creatures connected by a thread that you can swing from, pull, and wrap around objects. You can play single player but the game is made for and best as a couch co-op platformer game. As far as co-op games go it is extremely stress free, with unlimited instant retries an optional hint system and a fantastic big-brother mechanic that lets either player hop on each other's back and literally be carried through the obstacles. (Or in my case my fiancé and I forcing each other to take the reins so we could have a turn drinking).

The game feels great to control (very Celeste like in how the jumping feels and the layout of some of the harder optional challenges, as weird a comparison as that is to make) and has some gorgeous graphics. The two Yarnies (Yarnii?) are small helper spirits (think Swedish folklore) so all the settings are normal human areas made giant by perspective - something that leads to creative puzzles and one especially memorable boss fight.

The negative is that the story is not entirely centered around these two yarn characters, there's a human storyline playing out in the background of levels too, and it is completely obtuse:

Initially very intriguing, the story has two children that can be seen in ghostly form as you progress through the levels, occasionally affecting your level or vice versa. They appear to be involved in some physical dispute with a violent, shadow-y adult or two and go on the run from their home.

What happened? Why? Who are the shadows? The problem is it's left (supposedly intentionally) vague. No answers are ever given to what seemed like the core mystery of the game and the human storyline only gets more confusing from there.

The shadows keep multiplying until there's a HUGE quantity of adults seemingly chasing these two children, and despite it seemingly like a genuinely dire, life-threatening situation the two kids often stop just shy of freedom to hang out or seem completely unconcerned until the shadow adults catch up again. There comes a point where so much has happened it's completely ridiculous that the adults are still chasing them and that it can't be the simple domestic violence situation it originally appeared to be. By the end of the game the kids have seemingly broken into into some kind of weapons factory, broken out again, and caused a giant forest fire, before returning to their town and finding ALL the adults there are now shadow people.

The main level select hub is an abandoned lighthouse and after the final level the same shadows that have been hunting the kids are suddenly shown invading it, only to be immediately vanquished by turning on the lighthouse light

I really appreciate stories you have to interpret yourself, especially entirely wordless ones like Unravel 2 attempts, but I could make no sense of it this time and honestly I don't feel like there is any interpretation here - in trying to make the story vague enough that anyone could relate to at least some of it the overall whole makes next to no sense at all.

Looking for any further information online all I found was that the two kids are supposed to serve as a "found family" parallel to the two main characters (yep, fair enough) and that the level hub is supposed to be a metaphor for you, the player's, mentality (nope).

All in all the core narrative ended up being a big distraction from everything else genuinely great the game had to offer, and in my opinion it would've been better off cutting the human storyline altogether.