Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP
Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP has been hailed as an artistic masterpiece and I have no idea why.
It’s strange. Many independent experimental games–usually termed “Art games” for their ambitions to be something more than simple entertainment–are lauded by critics simply for that ambition without any consideration of the content of the actual game. People have cried over Jason Rohrer’s awful mess Passage. I’ve seen Rod Humble’s bewildering The Marriage gushed about as proof that videogames are capital-A Art. Rez is a lame if somewhat stylish shooter, but the way people talk about it, it’s the Second Coming.
All the time, I see games like this get near-universal praise. We seem to want Meaning so badly. Deep down, I think there’s a genuine feeling of shame over videogames–a feeling that’s only voiced in hushed tones, a feeling that, Hey, maybe all of this genre stuff is kind of puerile. Sometimes we want to play games for simple escapism, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But we don’t always interact with media for escapism–sometimes we want a book or a movie or a videogame which has something to say about life, about the world around us, about something other than its own mechanics.
I understand the impulse. I believe that any medium should aspire to be Art–whatever your definition of the term is–and that, while fun relaxing genre exercises will always have a place and will always be welcome, I don’t want to spend every videogame simply shootin’ stuff. The desire to find and promote meaningful games should be, as critics, one of our goals. The goal becomes problematic when we do not exercise our critical facilities, when we see something which has the pretense of meaning without examining it to see if it indeed follows up on that promise.
Sword and Sworcery, from the very beginning, oozes a desire to say something more. I first became interested in the game from watching its trailer, which seemed to depict a Legend of Zelda game as directed by David Lynch. That blend is a fairly accurate description of what the game looks like–add in some basic Jungian symbolism and you’ve got the majority of the motifs on which the game relies.
And it was at this face value that nearly every review I’ve seen has based its judgment. Sword and Sworcery is many things–it is a stylish mashup of some elements that aren’t often put in context together–and if you judge it solely on its ability to be those things, then maybe it’s interesting. But when I see IGN’s Levi Buchanan describe the game as a “near-perfect polyamorous marriage of brilliant 8-bit visuals, clever puzzle-solving, and an unforgettable soundtrack” and then go on to sputter out how speechless the game’s made him; when I see Destructoid’s Sean Carey call it “a game that takes real chances to stretch the gaming medium without sacrificing the joy of play and discovery that makes the medium great“; when Rob Dubbin, writing for Kill Screen, actually thinks the phrase “a transportive, cunningly woven adventure game that oozes confident work from every pixelated crenellation” is not only an apt description of the game but also a pile of words that’s fit for human consumption, I have to wonder–are we so desperate for intellectual stimulation in the medium that we’ll cling to anything that looks like it might remotely have some substance to it?
Sword and Sworcery is a mashup. It is–as I mentioned before–equal parts Legend of Zelda, David Lynch, Carl Jung, indie rock, retro pixel art, and social media, all put into a blender and swirled around a bit. Someone more cynical than I might even suggest that all of these elements were carefully assembled together to appeal to the sensibilities of a certain type of gamer in order to manufacture an instant indie game hit. I think of Jaron Lanier, writing in You Are Not A Gadget:
Even the most seemingly radical online enthusiasts seem to always flock to retro references. The sort of “Fresh radical culture” you expect to see celebrated in the online world these days is a petty mashup of preweb culture. (131)
That sounds a lot like Sword and Sworcery to me. The game has nothing new to say about any of its elements, is nothing new, can only be interpreted in light of its various parts, all of which come from somewhere else. It’s the kind of game which hopes its referential cleverness will be mistaken for profundity. I’ve rarely seen a game court critics this blatantly. Its allusions are intended as in-jokes. It doesn’t make references to Legend of Zelda, doesn’t quote Twin Peaks, doesn’t throw out bits of Jungian philosophy in order to make a point of these things–it makes these references so its audience can see them and feel smart for recognizing them, so its audience can feel like they’re a part of a special, elite community of those smart enough to catch all the namedrops.
On the surface level, Sword and Sworcery has it completely right. It understands the Hero’s Journey. It has at least an undergraduate-level familiarity with Jung. It’s creepy in some places. The pixel art is gorgeous. The music–one of the main focuses of the game, as the title implies–is beautiful and well-done. While the writing style comes off as grating and overly-forced, it’s definitely distinct. The game has a genuinely palpable atmosphere. The game’s sound design is better than most high-budget titles. Some of the battles–I’m thinking the Trigon Fights in particular–are genuinely intense, based on a masterful combination of color, sound, music. They feel like the end of the world–they need to feel this way.
It’s very clear that the team behind the game knows the how–they know how to combine these elements in a skillful way in order to get a message across. The problem is that they’re not exactly sure what message to convey. The Superbrothers manifesto “Less Talk More Rock” advocates immediate action over endless discussion and talking. Any of us who are in a heavy corporate environment where any project is subject to endless meetings and approvals can get behind this sentiment. Even in more creative fields, it’s a welcome message–sometimes you need to just stop dwelling and make art. But Sword and Sworcery is an example of a pitfall that this kind of thinking can fall into–what they’ve created is a very surfacey piece.
And this is my problem with the game: The various resonances between aspects don’t seem to add up to anything. Making the adventure game Lynchian doesn’t provide a new perspective on the Hero’s Journey. Having an awareness of Jung doesn’t add anything–the narrator is called The Archetype but doesn’t appear to be an archetype of anything in particular, the characters don’t map onto any of the major Jungian archetypes, the unconscious realm does not appear to be collective, etc. That the characters’ thoughts are encountered on a screen which represents a Twitter feed–we are reminded throughout the game that we should be tweeting the in-game text, all of which is short enough to fit in a tweet along with the #sworcery tag–comes closest to something, implying that such instant and immediate communication is akin to telepathy, but does so little with the idea that it’s likely such resonances are accidental–the only reason for that interface seems to be because it’s easy to tweet from the same device that you’re playing the game on. (A more cynical critic would suggest that the only reason the social networking feature exists is to provide free advertisement for the game.)
I’ve been sitting for the past week or so since I finished the game wondering what, exactly, I experienced. What the ultimate Point of it is. Art is, of course, subjective, and we could debate the subject for years without coming to a conclusion–we’ve been doing just that since the beginning of civilization and we’re no closer to a final answer–but I firmly believe that, in order for a work to have anything resembling soul, it needs to have some intent, some Message that the artist is trying to convey. I don’t require a Moral at the end, a pithy sentence summing up What I Should Have Learned–I’m fine with a work simply being a meditation upon a certain topic or series of topics. But if a work doesn’t go deeper, if a work isn’t sure what it’s trying to say, and frankly doesn’t care about anything more than the surface–then I can’t tell why I should be interacting with it.
There’s a term work a work which may be technically well-executed, which may have an immediate appeal to the senses, but doesn’t say anything deeper, doesn’t touch the soul: Kitsch.
So as a holistic piece of art, Sword and Sworcery fails–but do the parts stack up? I’ve thought about the game as a sort of art gallery–perhaps the whole point of the game is simply to provide a framework to hang some admittedly gorgeous pixel art and music on. Given that Superbrothers has described the game as “an album you can hang out in”, I’m not able to discount the possibility. This is not without precedent: Particularly in the mid-90s, when CD-ROM technology first became popular (and cheap enough that developers could take a chance on experimental works), several artists, including Primus, Laurie Anderson, and The Residents, released essentially interactive albums. Sword and Sworcery could fit comfortably into this category.
When all of the elements–the Trigon Fights in particular–come together, they do come together brilliantly. The music becomes intricately linked with the emotions and the tension of the scene. In these moments, Sword and Sworcery contains Meaning, and its status as a videogame does help to carry its intentions across. But for every moment like that, there are bits where you’re wandering aimlessly through silence, trying to figure out where to go, or you’re struggling with a pixel-hunting puzzle, or waiting for the character to complete the painfully slow walk from point A to point B. If Sword and Sworcery is an album, then these bits are like the skits on a rap album, the songs that drummers write, the irritating novelty singles, or the quickly-written phoned-in performances included just to up the running time–in short, it’s filler.
Where Sword and Sworcery fails is in its gamic bits. Most of its fights are repetitive exercises in simple pattern matching–tedious enough on their own, absolutely mind-numbing in the later stages when you have to fight the same enemy over and over on pretty much every screen. Its puzzles are pixel hunts crossed with a Simon-type pattern recognition, where in an attempt to pretend to be challenging, it doesn’t tell you the pattern beforehand, so you must click on an object in the hope that it’s the first step in the pattern, and if it is you click on another object in the hope that it’s the next step, and so on until you’ve completed the puzzle, starting over if you make a mistake. Its plot is a warmed-over Hero’s Journey that puts you through the usual adventure game paces–collect some macguffins, fight a dude, the end–while making snide, oh-so-cleverly-written asides about how lame it is that we’ve, like, got all of these fetch quests and how tiring the whole thing is, amirite? Protip for the Superbrothers: The typical Hero’s Journey exists for a reason, it has existed for thousands of years across cultures and societies–I’m fairly sure it won’t go away any time soon, no matter how ironically you treat the subject. Rather than adding anything, it comes off as complaining. If you find it as cliché as your tone implies, then try to come up with a new plot structure. Embodying something in such an insincere, winking manner feels like a freshman-level creative writing assignment. If you aren’t able to take your game seriously, why should we?
My ultimate problem with both Sword and Sworcery and with its reception is that it all feels so complacently self-congratulatory. It’s almost a feedback loop of mediocrity. Superbrothers makes a game that isn’t Enough because the blogs will consider it a work of unparalleled brilliance. The blogs consider it such because Sword and Sworcery is, for the most part, the best we usually get. No one is asking for anything more because no one is creating it; no one is creating it because no one is asking for it. We all deserve better.
I do appreciate Sword and Sworcery’s ambitions. I agree with Richard Clark, writing for Paste Magazine, who states that “Sword & Sworcery EP could have been somewhat of a life-altering experience, if only we were allowed to invest ourselves in it without the forced irony, the constant winks, the iPad-awareness and the social network anxiety“. Ultimately, I believe that Sword and Sworcery isn’t enough–that it’s a triumph of style over substance–and I’m disappointed that most critics seem to be taken in by it. I think the team genuinely does have a game in them that’s interesting and creative–a game that’s meaningful, important, something more than a shallow bit of pulp. But at the end of the day, the product that we have hedges its bets. It seems almost afraid of itself–that any time it approaches genuine, sincere meaning, it recoils at what it’s about to do and covers up its vulnerability with a quip. Sword and Sworcery does exemplify the cooler-than-thou, ironic, unserious, insincere hipster aesthetic. If Superbrothers want to create a work which has meaning behind it, they need to stop being ashamed and allow themselves the vulnerability needed to truly express what they want. Otherwise, we get a tedious, confusing mess. Otherwise, we get Sword and Sworcery.
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