What if you could surf in Journey? That’s the basic proposition behind Sword of the Sea, a new game from Giant Squid that I’m pretty sure I could hang out in for days on end. Surf Journey, Tony Hawk’s Art Skater, T&C Surf Desert: there are jokes and goofs a-plenty if you just need to call it by a snarky short-hand. Let’s call it by its name, though; Sword of the Sea deserves that respect, because it’s maybe the best thing I played at SGF this year.
The Journey comparison is immediate and unavoidable. It’s got a faceless, silent main character who wears a cool robe and explores sand-clogged, quasi-mystical ruins in an enormous desert. Instead of walking, though, they shred—or hang ten, if you prefer surf talk. That’s the beauty of Sword of the Sea: it’s both skating and surfing at once, letting you rip tricks and occasionally dropping you into half-pipes as you glide across the sand like a surfer catching a wave.
Sword of the Sea is a literal title. You’re not on a board; you’re on a sword. A surf sword. One that hovers above the sand, where you’ll careen off conveniently ramp-like ruins and into dilapidated temples and abandoned castles, magically resonating with urns and braziers and other checkmarks while slowly restoring the seas to this sunscorched domain. It’s sweet.
The gradual reclamation of this desert seems to be the game’s primary goal, and it’s just as beautiful when the water has returned as it is before. Only now you’re surfing on water, the thing one normally surfs on in our world, so perhaps it loses a soupçon of its otherworldly magic. You’re still a weirdo in a cool robe, though, and you’re still surfing on a damn sword, so it’s not like it becomes a trip to the dry cleaners, or anything. It’s still arty and dreamlike and transfixing, only now with orcas and dolphins splashing around.
The Journey references aren’t just a case of writers being lazy. It is that, sure, but it’s not just that. Matt Nava, Sword of the Sea’s creative director, was the art director on that classic. Nava also directed ABZÛ, Giant Squid’s first game, which takes place in the ocean. Sword of the Sea basically splits the difference between the distinctive environments of two of Nava’s previous games, and then lets you do kickflips and cutbacks all over the place. And like those games, there’s not really much in the way of real language, and all communication with other characters is cryptic and inscrutable, deepening the sense of mystery that hangs over the whole game—the atmosphere that this is an actual preexisting world that you’re a guest in, and not an intentionally designed space by human artists trying to provoke specific feelings and responses.
That means that, like some of Nava’s previous work, there’s an ethereal quality to Sword of the Sea, something inherently meditative that makes it almost worrisomely easy to play. I spent over an hour coasting over its dunes at Summer Game Fest without even realizing it. There were two different times where I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do next (that’s on me to an extent, but also on the game, too) but it didn’t matter: the simple pleasures of moving through this world and looking at its gorgeous art design kept me transfixed. Surf and skate games tend to sully something elemental and powerful about those pursuits by straddling them with scoring systems; that turns the transformative flow at their heart, which apparently can feel both freeing and all-consuming at its peak, into something rank and mercantile. By ditching the points Sword at the Sea comes closer to the point, depicting the surf/skate essence as the journey of self-discovery that its most passionate adherents describe it as. I’m ready to absolutely drown myself in this one when it’s released in August.
Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.
