In love with: Sword of the Sea

Journey by thatgamecompany has been rightfully considered a classic for over a decade now, a perfect culmination of ideas the team has played with up until that point. But when several team members left and created their own studio Giant Squid, their first project Abzû was highly liked, but never reached the same cult status. Which is a real shame, because it is one of the most beautiful and medidative games I’ve ever played with really fun movement. A few years later, the team followed it up with The Pathless, another game with really cool movement, but that one I did not finish. It felt like a very odd mix of open world-ish design with the meditative pace of Abzû (that had linear levels), so the end result to me felt very boring. Several years later still, the team decided to mix the best ideas they’ve had in all projects since Journey into Sword of the Sea and it’s really fun.

Just like the other projects from these developers, this game is incredibly beautiful looking and moody, focusing on atmospheric exploration accompanied by beautiful music more than on mechanics. Yet, also like other Giant Squid games, the movement here is extremely fun. This time around, the team has decided to take skateboarding (or snowboarding, I suppose) as the basis of the movement, so you get very fast traversal across areas with fun additional mechanics and even tricks. You do get a score and there are optional trick-focused bonus areas where you can try to beat the high score to get rewards. Even though by default all that extra information is hidden to keep the gameplay screen with no HUD. Lots of elements from previous projects return in some form and the overall structure this time around is closer to The Pathless in its openness, but now more tempered so the end result feels closer to Journey in just how open the game is. But the player speed and fun of movement makes sure that the size of the areas never feels boring to go through.

The potential drawbacks of such a game are quite typical. Don’t expect it to be mechanically challenging – everything in the game is very easy to pull off, even the bonus trick areas can be cheesed without even realizing you’re doing it. So if you’re going into this game looking for mechanical difficulty of any kind, this game isn’t for you. The platforming can occasionally be a bit too floaty for the things the game expects you to do, especially when you’re exploring and trying to find different optional things. The story is of a fable/myth type as well, which I’m sure some will find not as interesting. But if you’re going in with appropriate expectations, this game really delivers.

In the end, this isn’t a better version of any of the previous projects the team has worked on, this is its own thing, despite pulling from all of those games, and that’s wonderful. The visuals are incredible, with possibly best stylized usage of Unreal Engine 5 I’ve seen so far. The music is beautiful. The exploration is fun. The mood is impeccable. If you like “this type of game”, grab this title immediately.