Review scoopings 3/5 · Feb 6, 2022
The Rudiments Of The Much Better Later Action Adventures To Come
Look: 8/10
Ooooo y'all know I love water-themed gamessss, I didn't realize this one would literally be that (since fireworld and earthworld weren't really except I suppose you could say in terms of the names of the rooms... well even then no). Anyway, as always, beautiful Atari 2600 colors 
Great animated changing-colors loading screen, too, which was reminiscent of the …
Look: 8/10
Ooooo y'all know I love water-themed gamessss, I didn't realize this one would literally be that (since fireworld and earthworld weren't really except I suppose you could say in terms of the names of the rooms... well even then no). Anyway, as always, beautiful Atari 2600 colors
Great animated changing-colors loading screen, too, which was reminiscent of the best title screen of the series....
Sound: 8/10 Glad this retained the musicality of the sound effects from FireWorld.
Play: 7/10 Wow, love that they had the water scenes between rooms, and I actually felt capable enough to tackle a lot of this! I got much more of the treasures/clues/guide actually done what a great feeling! I really like the seemingly-sharks parts (called "tests" in this swordquest), because I kicked butt at them :-p My kind of avoid-the-enemies scrolling sequence heh. Plus, incredibly responsive controls (tho the room collision masks and maneuvering is as clunky as any other Swordquest heh).
Feel: 9/10
Great feeling decent at a swordquest, great with the water theme, great sounds and colors. Lol legit watermelon room: 
Attachment: 7/10 As people have pointed out, without sites like this that provide access to the comic book, explain what the heck is going on. As WardCove pointed out, this is a game that you feel lost without a guide. I feel that a lot of these early adventure games and especially action-adventure games feel that way, even all the way up to later games like Legend of Zelda. But WardCove made a great point about how much more fun later games like Legend of Zelda were to explore: a lot of the early text adventure, early adventure, and early action-adventure games (hell, I will even add early CRPGs and dungeon crawlers and roguelikes to the list) eliminate the possibility of exploration, sometimes via insanely harsh RNG like early text adventures and dungeon RPGs, other times via utterly indecipherable gameplay like these early action-adventures. Legend of Zelda was fun because you could wander, often aimlessly, . With contemporaneous games like Getaway! managing to include that wonderful open feeling of wandering, which has always been a mainstay favorite feeling of videogames to me from GTA to Jak & Daxter to KH/FFX to Day of Defeat just staring off into horizons or swimming to the edge of existence, and may be why I love videogames to begin with, games like Swordquests are in the end disappointing. No matter how much I wanna love them, no matter how related they are to the later action-adventures I love, it lacks that wonderful feeling of wandering just to wander. While this has all the critical classic elements of action-adventure--ridiculous secrets, treasure collecting, a quest involving many rooms that are confusingly laid out, and exciting fast-paced action in between--this lacks that most essential element of all videogames to me--exploration. And I am so excited to see more games like Getaway! affect the action-adventure genre as my chronology project goes on. Like I've said before, I'm so close to the mid-80s classic era I can almost taste ittttt.