Sword of the Sea (2025)

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.

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.

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.