Cruise Elroy

I’ve had a half-finished post entitled “What’s next” in my queue for months now. It’s a gloomy piece about how the “thinness” of games on iOS leaves me cold. I don’t mean to say that iOS games are all bad, but rather that I’ve never actually looked forward to playing one. They are diversions and time-wasters, not inherently satisfying experiences; as such, they occupy a fundamentally different space for me, and (I wrote) I’ll likely lose interest in the medium if that’s the way all games are headed.

After playing Sword & Sworcery for twenty minutes, I scrapped that post.

Sword & Sworcery — more formally Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP — is a collaboration between musician Jim Guthrie, artist Craig “Superbrothers” Adams, and indie developer Capybara. Unusually, the idea for the game grew out of the music and art — Guthrie was inspired to compose some tunes after seeing Adams’s pixel art, and in an interview with Now Guthrie describes the eventual result as “an album you can ‘walk through.’” Naturally, that phrase alone was enough to get me excited.

The actual appeal of Sword & Sworcery, though, is more difficult to describe. Yes, the music and art are fantastic, and they complement each other well, but I got the sense that I was responding to something deeper. I might call it intentionality: everything in the game feels like it belongs, in a way that seems rare for video games with their piecemeal development and iterative design. It’s as though the entire project fell out of someone’s head in one piece and they shipped it, warts and all. The focus on aesthetics certainly helps with this cohesion, but I think there’s also some ineffable quality that I haven’t nailed down yet.

On top of that are a million small touches that make Sword & Sworcery something more than the sum of its parts. I love the inscrutable main menu. I love the on-screen directions like “tip tap?” and “believe.” I love that you can tap every bush in the game to make it rustle. I love that the girl (named Girl) stands up every time you pass by. I love that the writing invests phrases like “our woeful errand” with ominous power and then subverts them with lines like “groan not another fetch quest amirite?” I’m not really sure how or why all of this adds up, but it does; it has substance, and gives me what I’ve been missing from iOS games thus far.

That said, it’s worth mentioning that the gameplay itself is not particularly engaging. If I had to tie it to existing titles, I’d say Sword & Sworcery mixes together elements of Out of This World, Prince of Persia, The Legend of Zelda, Punch-Out!!, and, er, Twitter. At its core, though, it’s a simple adventure game where most puzzles (and battles) can be completed by just tapping a lot. There are a few LOOM-like moments of brilliance where you move mountains or call down lightning, but these are rare and unintuitive enough that the game must nudge you towards their solutions.

That kind of criticism seems unfairly reductive here, though; the aesthetics so thoroughly dominate that the shallowness of the game mechanics don’t hinder the experience. The developers’ precious descriptions of Sword & Sworcery — a “brave experiment in I/O cinema,” a “psychosocial audiovisual experiment” — seem to pick up on this as well; it’s the kind of game where you can spend half your time wandering, listening, and tapping the screen at random and still somehow enjoy yourself. Perhaps for some it only evokes the experience of playing a game without providing the real thing, but for me it was enough.