Quick Review: Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP

Don’t mess with things not rendered in your world’s style.

Developed by Capybara, Superbrothers and Jim Guthrie, published by Capybara Games, Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP was released on April 16th, 2012. It’s available on Steam, but also on iOS and Android, hence the controls suited for mobile play.

Meet the girl named Girl.

In this story in about four acts, you follow the story of the Scythian, a warrior wielding a sword and a shield who begins a quest to retrieve a book of power knows as the Megatome. On her journey, she meets various folks like a woodsman (“logfella”), a puppy (“dogfella”), a girl (…“girl”)… as well as some worrisome dark forces that awaken upon her taking the book. To remove the curse now befalling this land, the Scythian must use both the mind-reading powers of the Megatome and a new connection with the dream world to set things right.

Logfella. He chops trees. He walks dreams.

Oops. Looks like I have awakened the evil.

This game is set in a world mostly rendered in a lush, detailed, pixel art style. The characters aren’t very defined or detailed, just enough to be recognizable. The cosmic and supernatural objects in this world are easy to recognize, as they do not abide by the pixel art. The story frames itself like a fantastical epic, and yet has characters peppering their speech with modern slang and turns of phrases. The tone of the story is playful as a result. Stranger might be the framing device, in which a narrator called the Archetype introduces the game, almost like it’s a therapy or an experiment (calling chapters "sessions"), and uses terms reminiscent of psychology (Heck, Carl Jung is cited as an inspiration…).

MacGuffins normally don't try to kill me!

Use the arrows or WASD to look around; everything else is done with the mouse. You click and hold the mouse in one direction to move the character, and can double-click to see a message about an element of the game or to pick up an item or select an element of scenery or a character. You can take out the Scythian’s sword at any moment by right-clicking, and can then brandish it or slash with it. When a combat situation arises, you get the option to defend yourself with a shield as well. The toughest battles are against the Trigons, three triangles that the Scythian has to collect.

That grizzled boor is ugly as sin and it's
tempting to kill it, but... we don't have to.

This one is… peculiar, to say the least. The presentation is odd, the way the characters talk is odd (for the setting, at least – valley talk in high fantasy?), the overall design is odd (pixel art with non-detailed characters). Some of the ideas are really out there, as well. The dream world is fair enough as far as gameplay mechanics go, it’s just another world to explore with areas not accessible in the real world; the weird part is how the game treats this like… two sides of a vinyl, for some reason, hence the “EP” part of the title.

Then, there’s the focus on “Sworcery”. Yes, with a W. And what about the Megatome allowing you to read the important thoughts of every other character in the story in real time, including the narrator's? Oh, and what about the game's irritating insistence on you connecting your Twitter account and "tweeting your discoveries"? How about no.

Back when Twitter was a relatively decent
platform, maybe I would have said yes.

The moon is almost full.
Not full enough to progress, unfortunately.

Similarly, the game takes the trope of “moon logic puzzle” to its logical extreme, where the moon shifts exactly like in the real world, and some chapters can only be played at precise phases of the moon. That’s... impractical, to say the least. And also annoying when, like me, you want to get through short games in as little time as possible – at the time of writing, I am stuck on the third “session”, because the next full moon is the same day this review is being published. What? Cheat by changing the date on my computer? Nope – the game can tell.

Bonus of visiting the dream world:
You have some power over things around.

What I played was pretty cool, I’ll give the game that. I wished I could have seen more. It was getting to interesting places, to say the least. I did feel that a lot of the controls were clunky, probably due to being a game thought for mobile as well as PC; the combat mechanics, in particular, were pretty bothersome and made some fights a lot tougher than they should have been. As an example, you can hold up the shield to regain HP lost in battle, which is useful since you will restart with only 1 out of 5 HP a battle you’ve just lost; but that process takes several seconds and is cancelled when the enemy attacks, preventing your regeneration against an enemy that's too quick.

So yeah, more of a mixed feeling for that one, to be honest. Maybe at some point I’ll see it to the end. In the meantime, I’ll move on to other games. Still, if that sounds interesting to you, Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP is available on Steam for 7.99$ USD.