As seminal oddball indie Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP hits 15 years of age, you can pick it up for less than a coffee

Let’s travel back in time, roughly to the late 2000s and early 2010s. It was a time where indie games were becoming more of a defined Separate Thing from blockbuster games. It certainly wasn’t the birth of indie games, but with the release of certain notable games like Fez, it did mark a change in who got to make money from them at the very least. But to me personally, there is no more quintessential indie game from that era than Superbrothers: Sword & Sorcery EP, which against my wishes has turned 15 today.

I present this to you under the guise of it being nice and heavily discounted (it’s literally two quid on Steam right now, you really should pick it up at that price, especially considering there’s only two days left until the discount disappears), but I will not lie to you, this is a humble ruse. More so this is a longing for a direction particularly mobile indie games could have, mayhaps should have, went in. As yes, it was originally designed for your smartphone, or iPod Touch as I played it on for the first time, ported to PC the year after its initial release.

There just wasn’t much quite like it on smartphones at the time. It was so early on in the App Store’s life that the suits hadn’t figured out that making games free-to-play and filled with tempting, expensive, infinite lures (gacha rolls, microtransactions) was much more lucrative. It was a game that continued on an already long-running lineage of point-and-click adventure games, adapting the genre for a modern, irreverent, social-media loving audience; I’ll remind you here that every line of dialogue was shorter than 140 characters so that it could be, out of context, shared to your own Twitter account. And do that I did, to an audience of no one.

Games on your phone and social media on your everything aren’t remotely in the same spot as they were when Sword & Sorcery first came out. This is broadly speaking a bad thing! So when I think of Sword & Sorcery, it takes me back to a not necessarily better time, just a time with a more interesting, less homogenized (and Grokified) mobile future ahead of it. Ah well! Not much to be done now but to dive back in and put on those rose tinted goggles.