Sword of the Sea (2025)

An extremely solid title from Giant Squid. The skating and traversal mechanics are the biggest highlights, and as always it is utterly gorgeous. Doesn't hit the same heights as Abzu or Journey though, feeling like it's missing just a little extra something to push it over the edge.

All the same, that's more nitpicky than anything. I thoroughly enjoyed my few hours with it.

...your score is gorgeous and I def plan to listen to it on Spotify, right now though this visual delight of a game is a really rewarding excuse to catch up on podcasts, albums and or audiobooks I've been procrastinating on.

There isn't enough here for me to call this a success, every aspect of this game feels like the edges have been sanded down, you quite literally glide through this world with no sense of danger and or challenge, and so if it was standing on its own I honestly think I would have bounced off of it, however coupled with a second medium, it starts to present itself as a stunning visual feast, a beautiful excuse to just lay back and let your hands move by instinct while listening to a good book. In that context I highly recommend it.

Article: Sword of the Sea Review - Beauty For The Sake Of Beauty by Kyle Hilliard

Score Report: 8.5 / 10

I appreciate Sword of the Sea’s brevity and visual goals. It never gets close to dragging or overstaying its welcome. It moves at the pace of a magical swordsperson speeding across sand dunes on a floating blade at 170 miles per hour (a speedometer unlocks after you beat the game), and it never gives you a reason to look away. I wanted to feel more from the story, perhaps only because every other element of the experience elevated it so high that my expectations were right up there with them.

There's a wooliness that pervades the game's mechanics, themes, and story that left me a bit cold, despite the fact that the visuals and music are undeniably excellent.

This game's central conceit doesn't work. Returning water to the land isn't as emotionally clear as returning life to the world was in Okami or Flower. The rolling deserts, which explicitly echo the landscapes in Journey are already beautiful, as are the other landscapes later on. They don't feel like dead worlds in need of saving, so the transformations aren't cathartic. This isn't inherently a problem, but the game doesn't resolve that lack of emotional clarity nor do anything with the tension that results from it; in fact, it seems unaware of it. It treats this return of water as if it were uncomplicatedly good.

The transformations are also undermined by not committing to the concept. The sea life that emerges floats in the air. I wouldn't usually get hung up on this kind of detail in a piece that is so clearly working on the level of visual metaphor. However, if the core of the game involves changing land into sea, it seems very odd for the water to feel meaningless. Beyond letting you move a bit faster on your sword-board, the water is only important because it has a symbolic relationship with the objects in the air. You need the jellyfish to bounce you up there, so you need to return the water. It's tenuous.

Movement feels great and the sense of speed is wonderful but the mechanics are disappointingly shallow. After playing Flower, Journey and Abzu, I had no illusions that this would be a complex or challenging game; the mechanics, just as in the previous games, are a means to convey mood and movement, to facilitate exploration, which they do admirably. But there's a gesture here towards more complexity, tricks to learn, collectible currency, optional score attacks, which makes the absence of challenge or mechanical development more noticeable. It's hard when playing not to imagine a version of this game that might have made some use of the game's wonderful movement and challenged me to get from A to B at speed, for example.

A consequence of this game's movement is that the landscapes are incredibly vast. Combined with the fantastical elements, it means there's so much superficially grand ethereal spectacle, it starts to feel meaningless. The landscapes are so big and abstract, so inhuman, they feel contrived and artificial; by half way, I no longer felt I was exploring real places, but someone's DeviantArt page.

Like the mechanics, the story's half-measure approach means it occupies an awkward place between being pure archetype, like Journey, and actually having a proper story with characters. There are some lore turds to stumble across and a wordless tale of rivalry and friendship that almost looks like it might be something. It descends into cliché by its end, with a boss fight of all things, against an unambiguously nasty critter. Disappointing.

Article: Through Sand, Sea, & Snow - How Sword of the Sea blends sick stunts with contemplative storytelling by Marcus Stewart

Designing a world to facilitate skateboarding presented a challenging early dilemma for Giant Squid. Its last game, The Pathless, also featured fast-paced traversal blended with traditional platforming design. Would a similar approach work here? To find out, the studio initially toyed with separating platforming gameplay from exploration by having the Wraith leave his board to traverse structures and other areas more traditionally.

“But it wasn’t fun,” Nava says. “What you wanted was for the landmarks themselves to utilize the board, like, I want it to be a skate park. I want it to have half pipes and jumps and ramps and do all the stuff that I do in the open world, but with a lot of interesting geometry to jump on. And we removed the thing where you could get off the board, because it was just like, ‘No, I just want to stay on the board. I just want to keep skating.’”

As such, Giant Squid opted to design Sword of the Sea’s world as a giant skatepark first and foremost. Despite never leaving the board, platforming still allows for plenty of precision thanks to its strong air control, where you can shift trajectory and speed in midair to land tight jumps. This design also encourages players to increase their understanding of the environment to figure out the best ways to use its elements to explore more efficiently or entertainingly.

This game is a great example of games as art; it really feels like you're playing through a skilled painting. Sword of the Sea balances the art with fairly responsive and fun gameplay. This game does still have a lot of the journey DNA, and it also has some of the same faults; this is a very short game, and will only take you two or three hours to beat. For all the complaints of expensive video games, the value proposition of $30 for a 3-hour game isn't great. All of that said, if you're looking for a short and sweet experience with a game that will remind you why video games are art, this will remain a great option.

8.25/10

I haven't been the biggest fan of Giant Squid's output, and consider them an inferior copy to the original thatgamecompany games, from which several of the founding members of this company originated.

Abzu was just alright. The Pathless I bounced off of after about an hour. I keep telling myself I'll give it another chance someday. Maybe I will.

Sword of the Sea is the first game of theirs that feels anywhere close to Journey. The movement feels great, there are more wow moments visually than in Abzu, and I like the little bit of exploration and larger areas. I still think the magic is missing and I'm assuming that magic is Jenova Chen.

Despite fantastic and consistent art direction (not a surprise since Matt Nava, the art director from Journey and Flower, is the founder of Giant Squid), it feels like that art direction is lacking, well, direction. The pacing, the set pieces, the emotions evoked in the player, are all just stronger in Journey and Flower for me.

Giant Squid makes very pretty games, and with the exception of Abzu they make games that feel pretty good to play as well. But their games feel emotionally empty without anything of interest to communicate to an audience. This is a textbook example of a studio with VERY talented individuals but no visionary creative director to push their projects to the next level. They need a Kojima, a Miyazaki, a Jenova Chen. Someone opinionated and passionate with an actual vision and ambition.

There are so many cool possibilities of what a team like this COULD do, with the right project and the right creative director. I would love to see this level of artistic confidence and accomplishment and this level of polished controls applied to something different and more ambitious. Imagine if this team made something 15-25 hours long, instead of 3 hours long, with zelda or metroidvania influences and more involved gameplay mechanics. Maybe even gasp combat. That could be a goty contender rather than just "another one of these."

The game is beautiful and movement is smooth and satisfying. The music is also gorgeous.

However, I can't escape the feeling that the devs are phoning it in. The setting and gameplay is almost a clone of Abzu, including the giant chains guiding you and whales and other sea creatures flying around. The mood is also the same, with the same choral arrangements. The only innovation is this trick mechanic that doesn't make any sense in story context and is integrated into the gameplay as well as a metal rod in Phineas Gage's head.

So, I don't know. I feel that this is a very nice game when judged in a vacuum, but when looked in the context of the existence of Journey, Abzu and even The Pathless, I can't shake the feeling that we've been here before. How many times do we need to bring life back to the world while gliding among the ruins of a once-mighty civilisation backed by eerie music and simple models with flat colours?

I was going to say that this was like a mix of Abzu and Journey with smooth movement that reminds me of The Pathless. And yep, it's from the same dev of Abzu and The Pathless!

So far it's very satisfying. Movement is nice and cathartic but requires some skill (although not as much as The Pathless).

The story, such as it is, seems to be basically the same as Abzu/Journey. Roam around the ruins of a once-mighty civilisation bringing back life to a lifeless world. Which is fine, but nothing new.