Sword of the Sea is a game about letting go. Its main mechanic involves surfing across vast desert dunes on a thin blade, slicing through glittering sands and scaling ancient towers on a quest to unearth the secrets of civilizations past. It plays best when you forget about the controls entirely, and just surrender to the slick physics and let your little character flow. With enough exploration, you’ll naturally discover glowing orbs and shining gold gems, and the sands will transform into deep, crystal clear seas with fish swimming through the air, carving wet paths through the dirt. Your character, dressed in flowing robes and a gold mask, rides the orange hills and the blue waves with the same easy athleticism, reacting instantly to every input on the controller.
Charge up a jump and then complete sick tricks with a few quick inputs, or unleash a bubble of sonic energy to smash nearby vases, uncovering bits of currency in the shattered pieces. The protagonist moves in whatever direction you push, stopping immediately when you let go of the analog stick. There are giant chains to grind, a hover ability in some areas, and half pipes generously positioned around the environments. Control prompts pop up when you’re first introduced to an ability, but the text fades quickly and you’re left alone in the desert. There are no waypoints in Sword of the Sea, but the environment tells a clear story, inviting you to solve puzzles in the mysterious temples dotting the landscape. Find glowing orbs on the rooftops and hidden down secret passageways to unlock the buildings’ secrets, opening up new areas.
I played about 20 minutes of Sword of the Sea at Summer Game Fest, but I wanted to surf its dunes for a lot longer. It’s the kind of game that makes the real world fade away, no matter how chaotic or intrusive your immediate surroundings are. It’s built on rhythm and vibes, and it encourages a meditative flow state from its first frames. Learn the controls and then forget them; play with pure intuition and it’ll most likely be the right move.
“The game is about surfing, and it’s really about the process of learning to surf and getting comfortable with surfing, and then trying things that are a little bit beyond your abilities, failing, and then figuring it out and actually accomplishing them,” Sword of the Sea creator Matt Nava told Engadget on the SGF show floor. “And in the process, you kind of realize that surfing is all about harnessing the power of something greater than yourself. You’re not paddling — the waves carry you. The zoomed out camera, the little character; in a lot of games, they’re right on the character, because the character is the focus. But in this game, it’s about how the character is a part of the environment, that is the focus. And I think that’s a constant in a lot of the games that we’ve made.”
Nava is the creative director and co-founder of Giant Squid, the studio behind Abzû and The Pathless. Even with these two successful games under his belt, Nava is still best known as the art director of Journey, thatgamecompany’s pivotal multiplayer experience that hit PlayStation 3 in 2012. Nava has spent the past decade attempting to build explicitly non-Journey-like games with Giant Squid, and while Abzû and The Pathless both have his distinctive visual stamp, they’re the opposite of Journey in many ways. Where Journey was set in a dry, desert landscape, Nava’s follow-up, Abzû, took place in an underwater world. After that, The Pathless was mostly green, rather than dusty orange.
With Sword of the Sea, Nava let go. He dropped all preconceptions of what he should be making and mentally said fuck it. He finally allowed himself to manifest the game that came naturally to him.
“In this game, it’s very much taking on, accepting and proclaiming that this is me,” Nava said. “I did Journey. I’m doing orange again. And I’m going back to the desert because I have way more ideas that we couldn’t do in that game … It’s like I’ve been living in my own shadow for a long time in a weird way. It’s like, why am I doing that? I should just be who I am and continue to explore the art that is my art.”
Sword of the Sea is a specific and special game, and even though it’s set in an orange desert, it doesn’t feel like Journey. The game also includes music by Austin Wintory, the Grammy-nominated composer behind Journey, Abzû and The Pathless. Together, Nava and Wintory form a formidable foundation.
“A lot of video game scores, they just make a music track for the area,” Nava said. “If you’re in the town, you hear town music, and then it just repeats. But that’s not how it works here. The music advances as your story advances, it reflects where you are on your surfing adventure, what you’re learning how, how far your character has gone on this character arc. And so that’s where the music of a video game like ours should be.”
As Nava and I chatted, someone sat down to play Sword of the Sea on a nearby screen, and when I glanced up, I saw that they were gliding through an area I didn’t find in my runthrough. A giant animal skeleton was half-buried in the sand, bright white vertebrae dotted with gold gems for the player to collect. There are a lot of secrets in Sword of the Sea, Nava assured me. The best way to find them is to just let go and play.
Sword of the Sea is due to hit PlayStation 5, Steam and the Epic Games Store on August 19.
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