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Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP is like re-listening to your favorite album
F
Francisco Dominguez
From Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP’s opening moment—when The Scythian bursts into existence from a radiant sunbeam on a mountainside in the Caucasus—it’s clear you’re in for a deeply strange time on your quest to dispel the ancient evil lurking on Mount Mingi Taw.
You enter a dream-like world in this point and click odyssey, a world that brims with an enduring sense of legend, mysticism, and sorrow. However, you're never far away from a welcome dash of sly humor, or a stirring song. Music forms a key part of the Superbrothers experience; it's no coincidence that the game opens on a record player, and its levels are called sessions, split into tracks A and B.
Jim Guthrie’s prog-rock soundtrack gives every idle moment a backdrop of epic purpose, heightening peaks of dreadful foreboding, lulls of eerie mystique, and moments of rapturous triumph. But it’s more than a fine backing track; this is a world that contains musical surprises everywhere you look. If you touch any one of the game's hundred bushes, it rustles. Touch one of the Sylvan Sprites you find, and it sings.
Every object is a jack-in-the-box, except instead of grotesque Victorian puppets, it’s inspiring notes that spring up at your touch as you navigate these environmental puzzles. (And you'll touch a lot, thanks to the game's beginnings on iOS). Abandon your task and disrupt The Scythian’s spell, you’ll hear a surprise record scratch—merely one of many musical cues hidden in the wings.
One moment that’s lived long in my memory is those Sylvan Sprites—charming, ethereal forest spirits reminiscent of Princess Mononoke’s tiny Kodama. You must find these sprites in order to avert total disaster. Each time you find a Sylvan Sprite, as they soar delicately towards the heavens, your clicks are accompanied by a rhapsodic choral harmony that rises in pitch before the sprite ascends into the clouds, buffeted by a blissful string of notes.
Early on, the game promises a cure for acute soul sickness. In moments like these, it pulls off that unlikely miracle. Your mouse clicks turn into delightful symphonies, your spirit follows the sprite to a higher place, chasing that incredibly implausible transcendence.
All of this is tied together with a deep sense of poetry. The game's pixel-art aesthetic, synth-heavy soundtrack, and sparse dialogue create entire worlds of meaning and feeling with relatively little. It rhymes—not just with itself but with what came before it, riffing on and echoing the mystery and boundless horizons of legendary games like The Legend of Zelda, Ico and Another World.
The parts are familiar, as Sword & Sworcery especially channels Fumito Ueda’s PlayStation 2 masterpieces, but it’s never just a 2D Shadow of the Colossus. However much The Scythian shares Wander’s sense of fateful destiny, this Caucasus fairy tale feels startlingly new.
As your session ends, you open your eyes. The trance that took you to such a peculiarly memorable place is over. Maybe you can’t be cured of soul sickness by vibes alone, but the journey can relieve the symptoms for now. And sometimes, that’s enough.
Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP is available on the Epic Games Store.