Sword of the Sea

There’s a lineage here, and Giant Squid wants you to know it. Studio founder Matt Nava was the art director on Journey — arguably the most influential “small” game of the 2010s — before founding Giant Squid and shipping ABZU and The Pathless. Sword of the Sea, released August 19, 2025 on PC via Steam, is the most confident synthesis of that catalog yet: Journey‘s sand-swept melancholy, ABZU‘s oceanic reverence, and The Pathless‘s obsession with uninterrupted velocity, all fused into one game about riding a sword across the desert.

The premise is deliberately strange. You play the Wraith, a resurrected wanderer astride the Hoversword — a floating blade designed to handle like someone spliced the DNA of a snowboard, a skateboard, and a surfboard. Your quest, told entirely without words, is to restore a buried ocean. As you progress, dead wastelands flood with water and marine life, and the transformation is the game’s emotional engine.

Market positioning matters here. The “meditative indie adventure” space has calcified into a genre with predictable beats: wordless story, swelling strings, three-hour runtime, a cry at the end. Sword of the Sea’s wager is that it can keep those beats while borrowing its moment-to-moment feel from Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and SSX. That’s not a small bet. Trick systems demand precision and feedback; meditative games demand frictionlessness. Getting both in one control scheme is the whole ballgame — and, mostly, Giant Squid pulls it off.

The complaints — brevity, light story, low challenge — are real. They’re also, arguably, beside the point.

• The Hoversword: A momentum-based traversal system where terrain is the level design. Dunes roll like ocean swells; you pump downhills for speed, launch off crests, and carve glacial slopes and ruined architecture that doubles as an ancient skatepark.
• A Genuine Trick System: Flips, spins, and grabs chained in mid-air, pulled straight from the skateboarding and snowboarding canon. It’s optional, it’s expressive, and it’s the reason this game looks different from every other contemplative indie.
• World Restoration: Progress physically transforms the map — barren sand becomes living sea, complete with whales, rays, and schooling fish surfacing around you as you ride.
• Austin Wintory’s Dynamic Score: The Grammy-winning Journey composer returns with an orchestral score that swells and recedes with your momentum, functioning less like background music and more like a speedometer for your soul.

The Movement Is the Game

The core design bet is specific and rare: the gameplay loop is self-rewarding. There are collectibles, secrets, and achievements, but none of them are the reason to keep playing. The reason is that carving a line down a dune, catching air off a lip, throwing a lazy 720 with a grab, and landing into a speed-boosted transition is designed to feel good in a way that bypasses conscious evaluation entirely.

The physics model deserves credit. Sand behaves like water — waves ripple through the dunes in real time, and reading the terrain becomes a skill in itself. The design teaches you to spot the swells that will launch you, the troughs that will feed you speed, the half-pipes hiding in ruined temples. The best comparison isn’t Journey‘s sand-sliding sequences, which were scripted rollercoasters. This is closer to SSX or the original Skate: a system you can get better at, even though the game never demands that you do.

That last clause is where the criticism lives, and it’s fair. Sword of the Sea almost never pushes back. There are no fail states of consequence, no trick score gates, no time trials with teeth. The optional challenges reward exploration more than execution. Compared to even The Pathless‘s light combat pressure, there’s less here. Giant Squid clearly made this trade on purpose — friction would puncture the trance — but it means the trick system, the game’s boldest idea, is never tested. You perform tricks because they’re beautiful, not because anything asks you to. Some players will find that liberating. Others will bounce off the lack of stakes.

Structure and Pacing

The wordless narrative — restore the ocean, uncover the Wraith’s history through environmental storytelling and mural-like vignettes — is serviceable rather than devastating. It doesn’t reach Journey‘s emotional payload, and Giant Squid likely knows it. What the story does do well is justify the game’s single best trick: transformation as reward. Every major beat floods a dead zone with ocean, and riding through a space previously crossed as a wasteland, now teeming with breaching whales, is the kind of payoff no cutscene could match. The world-state change is the story.

Pacing is tight across the short runtime. Chapters alternate between open, secret-dense zones and linear high-speed descents, and the descents are the highlight reel — sustained multi-minute runs where terrain, camera, and Wintory’s score lock into sync. These sequences are the closest a game has come to the Journey mountain-slide in over a decade, and arguably better, because you’re actually driving.

The Wintory Factor

Austin Wintory’s score isn’t decoration; it’s systemic. Instrumentation layers in as you build speed and thins out when you stall, which means the music is constantly giving you feedback on the quality of your line. It’s a smart use of dynamic scoring, and it papers over the trick system’s lack of mechanical stakes: the orchestra is your combo meter.

Nava’s art direction is the studio’s best work. The painterly, flat-shaded aesthetic — bold color fields, minimal texture noise, silhouettes doing the heavy lifting — is built to read at speed, which is the operative constraint. Detail-dense realism would smear at this velocity; this style composes while moving fast. Palette shifts between zones (rust-orange dunes, blue-white glaciers, bioluminescent depths) do the narrative work the absent dialogue can’t.

A stylized game with disciplined scope like this is light on hardware by design, and the modest system demands suit that. The UI is nearly nonexistent — no HUD clutter, diegetic prompts only — which fits the game but occasionally leaves collectible tracking vaguer than it needs to be.

On Steam, the mandate is simple: use a controller. The Hoversword’s carving depends on analog stick gradation — leaning into a turn at a fraction versus a full tilt — and keyboard’s digital input flattens that expressiveness into on/off steering. It’s playable, but it amputates the game’s best quality. The achievements are exploration-oriented rather than grindy, and a completionist run should add a few hours beyond the base runtime.

Sword of the Sea is a game with one idea, executed with real conviction. The idea — that traversal itself, tuned finely enough, can carry an entire emotional arc — isn’t new, but few games have committed to it this completely since Journey, and few have made it this kinetic. The brevity and the absence of challenge are real limitations, not excuses to be waved away; a trick system this good deserved at least one mode that demanded something of it. But judging this game by its runtime is like judging a song by its length. For a few hours, Sword of the Sea aims at something most long games never touch: making you feel the game in your hands, your chest, and the pit of your stomach, all at once. We recommend it to the right audience — buy it, play it in two sittings, use a controller.