Severed

Start with the premise everyone dismissed in 2016: a first-person dungeon crawler controlled entirely by swipes, on a tablet. On paper, this sounds like a tech demo dressed up as a product—the kind of gesture-controlled experiment that gave early mobile gaming its reputation for shallow novelty. DrinkBox Studios, fresh off the Guacamelee! games, bet the entire design of Severed on the opposite thesis: that touch isn’t a compromise, it’s a medium. The result later found a second life on the Switch in 2017, where its touchscreen-first design had to be re-argued for a hybrid console audience.

You play Sasha, a one-armed warrior wielding a living, sentient sword through a nightmarish afterlife in search of her lost family. The dark-fantasy framing isn’t window dressing—Sasha’s severed arm, her spectral guide, and the dungeon itself weave a surprisingly melancholy narrative that pays off in ways we won’t spoil here.

The structure is metroidvania: a non-linear labyrinth of hidden paths, side quests, and gated regions unlocked by new abilities. The progression is pure RPG—defeated enemies drop body parts you loot and equip, feeding five distinct skill trees that govern everything from off-hand magic to enemy-specific buffs. The soundtrack, a collaboration between Yamantaka // Sonic Titan and Pantayo, is a genuine highlight.

What makes Severed matter, though, isn’t the feature list. It’s that DrinkBox took on the hardest problem in touch gaming: making a screen feel like a weapon.

• Swipe-Based Combat: Directional slashes, defensive blocking gestures, and shake-triggered abilities replace buttons entirely. On Switch, the touchscreen is the only way to fight—there is no controller fallback, which is either a bold artistic stance or a baffling omission, depending on your commute.
• Loot-and-Level Progression: Enemies drop limbs and organs that function as equipment, feeding five skill trees. The upgrade economy—gems harvested from chests and corpses—creates a real risk/reward tension around which fights to take.
• Metroidvania Dungeon Design: A hand-drawn, non-linear world with secret rooms, backtracking gates, and environmental puzzles that also run on gestures—cracking walls, moving objects, lighting braziers.

The Combat Loop

The strength of Severed’s combat is that it converts spatial awareness into physical motion. Enemies telegraph attacks from specific positions on screen—a glowing limb, a charging shade—and you swipe toward them to parry or slash. Against multiple foes, you’re constantly rotating your view, prioritizing threats, and choosing between offense and defense in real time. At its best, it replicates the rhythm-section intensity of rhythm games while demanding the threat assessment of a bullet-hell shooter. The design leans hard on responsiveness, and the swipe-first scheme is built to register input quickly and forgive imprecise strokes, so misses feel earned rather than stolen.

The parry system deserves specific praise. Blocking an incoming attack with a precise downward or horizontal swipe, then counter-slashing in the same motion, is a flow state no button-press equivalent offers on a portable device. When an enemy telegraphs a purple phantom strike and you swipe through it at the last instant, the design makes the block something you feel in your wrist. That’s not gimmickry; that’s embodied design.

Where the Loop Frays

Here’s the honest critique: the loop is thin at scale. Severed’s enemy roster is small, and by the back half of the dungeon you’re performing the same block-slash-block choreography against recycled adversaries with inflated health pools. The skill trees add breadth—enemy-specific buffs, focus-generating upgrades, magic attacks—but they add power, not novelty. The twelfth spider-mother fight uses the same muscle memory as the third. Long stretches start to feel like grinding, and the game’s pacing quietly encourages short bursts, which is arguably its mobile DNA showing.

The boss fights partially redeem this, remixing the mechanic into multi-phase patterns that demand real mastery. The final encounters are tense, readable, and physically demanding in the best way.

Progression and Pacing

The upgrade economy is smartly tuned. Gems are scarce enough that choices matter, and the five-tree structure lets you specialize toward offense, defense, or utility without hard-locking. Body-part equipment adds a light layer of build customization that RPG veterans will find shallow and casual players will find approachable—a deliberate middle path that mostly works. Backtracking through the dungeon for secrets is rewarding early and tedious late, a metroidvania standard that Severed executes competently without improving on.

DrinkBox’s art direction is the second pillar of the game. Hand-drawn, vibrantly colored characters—Sasha’s design alone is iconic—pop against painterly, muted dungeon backdrops. The contrast isn’t accidental; it reads as visual storytelling, the living girl slicing through a decaying underworld. A 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, and the minimal UI stays legible without getting in the way.

The soundtrack is the secret weapon. Pantayo’s kulintang-driven percussion and Yamantaka // Sonic Titan’s prog-and-punk hybrid score give the dungeon an identity few indie games achieve. It’s atmospheric without being ambient wallpaper—combat tracks surge exactly when they should.

Technically, the design has one structural quirk: on Switch, the touchscreen requirement means TV mode is effectively useless for combat (a dash gesture exists but feels vestigial), leaving handheld and tabletop modes as the real ways to play.

iOS: This is the definitive version. The iPad’s real estate makes the combat readable and the swiping comfortable across long sessions. Touch is the native language here, and the game speaks it fluently.

Switch: The 2017 port preserves everything and adds nothing except portability within Nintendo’s ecosystem. Handheld mode is functionally identical to the iPad experience. If you own both, buy once, play there. The refusal to add button controls is defensible as a design philosophy but limits accessibility—players with motor difficulties are simply locked out.

Severed is proof that platform constraints, treated with respect, can breed better design than platform ubiquity. DrinkBox asked what a touchscreen is actually for and answered with a combat system that still has no true equivalent. The repetition in its later hours keeps it solid rather than special, and it’s a recommendation for the right audience—touch-first players, short-session commuters, metroidvania devotees—rather than everyone. For them, it’s an argument made in swipes, in color, in kulintang percussion, and it holds up.