Time Extend
Revisiting the concept album dreaming it’s a Zelda game
On Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, the concept album dreaming it’s a Zelda game
To play Sword and Sworcery is to wrestle with its myth. Not just the myth that unfolds within it – the tale of a nameless Scythian, whose search for an old forbidden tome unleashes a vaporous evil that can only be banished by gathering the pieces of a triangular artefact, the Trigon Trifecta – but the myth the game surrounds itself with, its theatrical and combative sense of its place within the evolution of an artform.
Witness the declarations of intent offered by its credits screen – a blend of stridency and spaced-out self-deprecation redolent of a 20th-century poetry manifesto – which labour to situate Sworcery’s innovative, music-led design against its adoration for canon-toppers like Zelda. The game is, variously, “a brave experiment in inputoutput cinema, whatever that is supposed to be”, “a crude videogame haiku about life, love and death”, “a fevered Famicom dream”, “a treatment for soul sickness”, “a choice cut of myth and dreams” for a “broad, literate audience”, and “a nifty little thing that I don’t really understand that I think everyone should play on their touchtronic machinery or PC”.
Far from aiming simply to entertain, Sword & Sworcery styles itself as a cultural intervention. Originally released alongside the iPad in 2011, it sets out to recalibrate expectations of a medium (one of the original trailers is, in fact, titled Audience Calibration Procedure) then bubbling with enthusiasm for the commercial and artistic opportunities of mobiles and touchscreens. It’s also an attempt to link to the past.
The credits reel cites a BoingBoing essay written by creator and former Koei artist Craig D Adams, which reads like something Ernest Cline might have penned after an afternoon playing Galaga and one too many Mountain Dews. Titled Less Talk More Rock, it rather reductively denounces the exposition-heaviness of so-called design-by-committee modern games while exhorting developers to follow in the strides of a cabal of pioneers who all “speak videogame fluently”, such as Eric Chahi and Shigeru Miyamoto.
All this may sound perfectly obnoxious and, well, it often is. The trick to much of Sword & Sworcery’s gnomic writing is that it was written for Twitter, where meandering edginess has a way of going viral. The original versions of the game let you tweet the script, which is broken into 140-character nuggets, as you play – a sly marketing gambit that earned it a few extra headlines at launch. But if Sword & Sworcery is peddling its own myth, that’s ultimately because it is as much in love with the process of myth-making as the gaming landscapes evoked by its sumptuous pixel art backdrops: the eroded alien planet of Chahi’s Another World, the forests and hollow-eyed monoliths of the early Zeldas. It’s a lucid dream, an interrogation of legend as a concept in the digital age, in which a quest for a book becomes an excavation of software itself as a sworcerous artefact.
One way it goes about this is by channelling David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, another fiction that knows it’s fiction, celebrated for its deconstructive handling of tropes from soap opera, horror and detective thrillers. The game’s story episodes are bookended by a lobby screen that recalls Twin Peaks’ extradimensional Red Room, where a dapper and cigar-wielding Archetype offers commentary on the Scythian’s fate, framing the whole saga as a cathartic social experiment.
Another crucial gambit is the game’s secondperson narration – it addresses the player as a player, sharing insights on features like the presence of an adversary you can choose to spare, which turns the story into an off-colour dialogue with the artistic choices that comprise it.
The game’s exploration of how networking platforms might support the writing of a fable, meanwhile, sees it recreating Twitter within its own mythology as the Megatome, a book that contains feeds (complete with time codes) for each character’s thoughts, including those of the protagonist and the dog that pops up occasionally to guide your steps.
Elsewhere, it integrates the hardware running the game into the performance of a ritual. One of the puzzles sees you waiting for the Moon, whose movements are calculated in realtime from your computer clock, to enter a certain phase. You can
hasten this within the game by visiting an enchanted grotto, or you can quit and change your time and date settings to trick it. Sword & Sworcery styles this ‘cheating’ – the Scythian encounters the ghost of a character who died of shame after trying it – but the Steam version also presents you with an achievement for doing so. Rather than taking its own dreamworld literally, the game regards its own supporting technology as a component of the fantasy; to tinker with that technology is, accordingly, to become something of a sworcerer yourself. The other major secret to Sword & Sworcery is that it’s not really a game but a piece of music, broken up not into chapters but ‘sessions’, its main menu a spinning phonograph record of the wistful main theme (place a finger or cursor on it and you can halt the track).
The project began life prior to Capybara’s involvement as a collaboration between Adams and Jim Guthrie, the composer who would later score Indie Game: The Movie. If Adams’ manifesto on how games are “choked” by exposition is clumsy, Sword & Sworcery itself makes a strong case for how diverse elements from different genres – hidden-object puzzles, boss battles, lock-and-key quests – may be unified not by narrative or text, but through music.
The game’s twilight forests and sheer, screen-dwarfing ruins are to some extent just cover artworks for its glorious soundtracks, a scruffy alchemy of guitar, drums, piano and electronic effects created using an original PlayStation. Its puzzles aren’t so much puzzles as opportunities to jam with Guthrie, who actually appears within the game to stage a concert.
While scouring the mountainside for the sprites who expose pieces of the Trigon Trifecta, for example, you’ll pluck torrents of water and press on tree trunks to create melodies, luring your quarry out into the open. Struggles for control of each Trigon piece, meanwhile, take the form of gorgeously wrought rhythm-matching operas in which you bat energy balls back and forth to a drumbeat.
All this still feels very novel, but as with the game’s shrines and magic artefacts, one of the chief inspirations is the venerable Zelda series, with its fondness for instruments as tools and use of musical phrases to mark the completion of a puzzle. Rather than solving puzzles to trigger these phrases, Sword & Sworcery generally asks you to recreate the phrase in order to solve the puzzle (it also gives you a little leeway with composition, allowing you to bend the tune out of shape). It’s a lovely reversal and an apposite tactic for a game releasing on iOS, a platform that owes its rise to music. Sword & Sworcery’s masterstroke as an album dreaming it’s a Zelda game, however, is how it re-imagines the dual-world mechanic made famous by Link To The Past. This is represented not as passing through a portal or casting a spell, but by flipping the
WITH ITS METAFICTIONAL STRUCTURE AND TWITCHY GRANDIOSITY, SWORD & SWORCERY CAN BE HARD TO LOVE
record over to expose eldritch ‘B-side’ environments and additional tracks.
With its metafictional structure, off-key hipster jokes and twitchy grandiosity, Sword & Sworcery can be hard to love even at its most intriguing, but there are times where it manages a certain poignancy. While on one level a parody of the mute lead in thrall to the finger of an unseen god, the Scythian is a curious figure – her sword arm dangling below her waist before she strikes, her legs arching on tip-toes when she walks.
The game is also notable for delicate character animations, such as hair whipping sideways when you dodge a strike, or the way the Scythian’s elbows move when she pulls off her boots. These elements have stood the test of time; the same can’t be said for certain light and particle effects, which float against the pixels like smudges on a lens.
Sword & Sworcery was the game that launched Capybara, a seasoned creator of licensed titles like Might & Magic: Clash Of Heroes. Both its gleeful self-referentiality and morbidity can be traced to 2014’s Super Time Force, a temporally disordered scrolling action game in which you fight alongside the displaced spectres of prior playthroughs. But it’s the long-awaited Below, once pegged for release in mid-2016, that comes closest to the status of a spiritual successor, with a lone adventurer exploring a misty subterranean necropolis and a score composed by Guthrie. Like Sword & Sworcery, Below looks to pay homage to the classics while distancing itself from them.
Capybara president and co-founder Nathan Vella has described it as a “Roguelike-like”, inasmuch as it aims for the feel but not the precise execution of the ’80s and ’90s dungeon crawlers it evokes. But Vella has also described Below as a “super-video-gamey videogame”, inspired by the success of the Souls series rather than any grand designs for the medium at large – a game less concerned with how it plugs into the culture and history of its artform, disinclined to mythologise its own contribution, or explore the relationship between its fable and the supporting technology. The results, as and when they see daylight, may prove less obnoxious than Sworcery – if nothing else, we’ve yet to see any jokes about internet memes – but they might also be less enchanting.