Movement, meaning and mindfulness combine in Giant Squid’s latest, a game of free-form expression and flow.
What do we actually mean, when we call a game rewarding? I reckon typically it’s one of two things. First you have games that reward you for playing them well: rewards are given in return for achievement or superlative skill – a new outfit, a Legendary Cuirass, a skill point or two. Then you have the ones where you’re awarded simply for playing the game at all, that kind of external stimulus for engagement. The Skinner box method, basically, where you get daily bonuses for everything from simply logging in to maxing out your battle pass. What Sword of the Sea reminded me, as I lanced my way through desert dunes, 720’d my way across cliff edges, nosedived off a mountain face, or just awkwardly bunny hopped my way along a ledge I wasn’t sure I was actually meant to climb, is that there’s a third way. A game that rewards you neither for just playing nor for playing well, but for playing it right.
In reality this is really a bit of good old Game Design 101 – and Sword of the Sea feels like such a game designer’s game. What I mean is it’s instructional. Sword of the Sea uses rewards to teach, elegantly and (almost) wordlessly. But before I give you an example I should probably take a beat to explain exactly what it is.
Sword of the Sea is a skateboarding game. It’s also a surfing game. And a snowboarding game. It’s also not really like any of those kinds of games, at least not in the way you might have them in your head. And it’s also, kind of, just Zelda.
In the beginning, like in all good games of exploration and beautiful worlds, you start in a cave. A few quick lessons later – jump, skate a half-pipe, pay the mysterious vendor their toll – and you’re out. Rolling dunes – really waves of sand – invite you onwards, to the archetypal opening-credits cliff edge and a view over all there is to be conquered. And then, yes, a big old ramp. Your goal in Sword of the Sea is to return water to this dried out, ruined world. You carve through it looking for simple clues and following them to logical conclusion, and between those two points, the time between A and B, is all the magic. You jump, flip, grind, skid, spin, and trick your way across the world, a needle with a searing blue thread, weaving life back into the seams of nature.
Where Sword of the Sea differs from so many skate-surf-board games before it is in its forgivingness. Typically these kinds of games are hard. Or if not hard, at least a challenge, often with that sense of challenge baked right into it, in fact, delivered via imperative. Get a high score. Chase a combo. Survive. Extreme sports like these are extreme, after all, much of their thrill coming from the closeness with which you can get yourself to death. So it goes in, say, Lonely Mountains: Downhill, a game that tangles mindfulness with downhill sports with supreme skill, but which places great big emphasis on the crunch of failure (which if you’re anything like me happens quite often). With Tony Hawk there’s always a stumble waiting for you if your timing’s off, a trip hazard lurking either side of the beat. SSX Tricky pits you against others as well as yourself, always at the edge of chaos, and where the timer is god.
None of these are complaints! It’s just that Sword of the Sea opts for a different route. What’ll strike you, as you glide across that opening desert, is how forgiving it is. Miss a jump and there’s always a way back, a minor detour to make at most. Fail to land a trick and, well, so what? You keep riding, rhythm effectively unbroken. And those jumps are pretty hard to miss anyway: the sense with Sword of the Sea is that it doesn’t want you to fail. And so jellyfish, which might awaken as makeshift floating jump pads after you release water over a certain area, will actually just slightly drift towards you as you fling yourself towards them. Certain ledges feel almost a little magnetised. Little golden prisms, your only currency for spending with the mysterious vendor, hoover themselves up as you get nearby. The clusters of lamps that you light by surfing over them will trigger when you light up most of them. Imprecision, ultimately, is fine. There’s a minor challenge in just plotting a path and pulling it off, but Sword of the Sea is never truly exacting. It’s about feeling good more than being good. Good vibes and serenity triumph over all.
Where does Zelda come in? Well, there’s the lone, wandering hero, the ruined land, the prophesied sword. There’s pots to be smashed, chests to be opened, a world to be healed, with only a series of vast pseudo dungeons filled with gentle environmental puzzles in the way. The question’s not so much where you find Zelda in Sword of the Sea, as it is where Sword of the Sea would be without it. And from Zelda flows so much of the other inspiration here, of course. There’s a faint whiff of Shadow of the Colossus, for instance, with the game’s wordlessness and its vast, mysterious antagonist.
I want to say there’s a smidge of Sayonara Wild Hearts in here too – nothing to do with Zelda now – if only in the way your occasionally tunnelled movement is carried on a bit of signature score from Austin Wintory, developer Giant Squid’s long-time collaborator on Abzû, The Pathless, and before that with studio head Matt Nava on Journey. It’s tempting to say the whimsy and wonder of a soaring choir and twinkling piano in this type of deeply pretty, makes-you-feel-things indie is a little played out. But it isn’t. Wintory is rarely in the way here; the music lifts and floats, and also subtly drives you on. (As an aside, Sword of the Sea also makes maybe the best use of the DualSense’s speaker and rumble combo that I can remember, at least since Returnal, as it plays the role of dedicated sword-board microphone, playing out all the shimmers, flicks and carves – I’d actually recommend playing without headphones so you can enjoy it.)
Now, where’s all this instruction-and-reward business, then? Well, imagine you’re approaching a big door, the point very much being that you need to walk through it now to get to the next area. But what if you’re one of those people who, maybe a little compulsively, likes to check they haven’t missed anything, that some ledge way over there, which has just a little more light on it, seems just a little more prominent than the rest of the background wall, might be something you could hop on? What if, next to that big door in the otherwise solid, semi-unremarkable mountainside, there was a miniscule bit of path off to one side – the amount that might seem totally innocuous, accidental even. And what if that path actually went somewhere?
This is the lesson Sword of the Sea has for you, and it almost feels wrong to spoil it: every time you think something might be somewhere, or something might be worth just quickly checking out, quickly trying, the answer is a resounding yes. Sword of the Sea loves hiding things – often these things are very small, borderline pointless beyond the fact they’re hidden, and you’ve found them – and it hides them exactly where you want them to be hidden. And that’s where the lesson comes in. The first time your curiosity strikes, inevitably you’re rewarded, just with a little hat tip, a kind of silent designer’s nod. And so therefore every single time it strikes again, you know it’s worth a look. If you’ve ever had that urge, when you were a kid, to try and leap over the edge of a map, to break the confines of the game, to get on top of the unscalable wall, round the back of the walled-off castle, Sword of the Sea quietly, subtly encourages you to do it.
There’s a minor snag or two, albeit only minor. A couple of moments where you change what you’re riding, which I won’t spoil, are maybe the only times where Sword of the Sea’s controls feel a tad skew-whiff, an attempt at temporary hyper-responsiveness actually coming back a little too responsive. And its final moments, while stunning and necessary to conclude its story of ageless conflict, maybe don’t hit quite as hard as the sheer joy of open-world movement itself.
But then, ta-da! A final flourish. If you’re wondering if you can just free-roam around this game, go express yourself, play out with a little flair, the answer is yes. The answer to so many questions you might have in Sword of the Sea – will I get to…? Will this eventually…? Is this detour worth it? – is yes, in fact. Where once the world was a place to explore with a bit of pazzazz, sure, it eventually becomes sheer playground, a domain with which you have new means to master, your perspective shifted through a neat mechanical tweak.
And gosh is it pretty. As well as that ocean of desert you’ll float through nautical, abandoned city rooftops; scorch a line through ice; xylophone your way up giant, skeletal spines; scream across mountainsides. Sword of the Sea knows the power of putting you at the top of a steep hill and showing you the world. As it does the power of cause and effect. Of the instructional nature of play and the expressive, free-form nature of it too. It’s a game, like all of those others, about the deep, personal connection we’re able to form with the natural world by using it, being in perpetual contact with it, or simply flying through it at speed. The mindfulness of giving over a bit of control to the waves, the powder, the half-pipe’s immaculate curve and letting the world move you for once, instead of you fighting to move it. “It’s really about how movement is a way for you to connect with the world,” as Nava put it to me earlier this year. “You’re going fast down the mountain; you get to see all of the mountain very quickly. It’s the closest you can be to being everywhere at once.” Just how good do you reckon that feels?
A copy of Sword of the Sea was provided for this review by Giant Squid.
