An Experimental Treatment for Acute Soul-Sickness: On the Fifth Anniversary of Sword & Sworcery

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery came out five years ago today. 

I think often–probably too often–of how Kafka wrote: 

We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

I don’t think that every book or film or game must do this, but I think there is way too much of everything that is utterly disposable, that doesn’t strive to affect us in any way or leave any mark on us at all. Things that try to do nothing more than exactly what so many other things have already done. That want nothing more than to devour our time and for us to be grateful for the privilege of having our time devoured. 

Sword & Sworcery leaves its mark. It takes its toll. Unlike most fantasy adventure games, it is no power fantasy. Indeed, you become weaker as you progress on your quest, a woeful errand through and through. 

In the end, the hero known as the Scythian perishes, sacrificing herself to obliterate the Deathless Spectre that dwells in the darkness beneath Mingi Taw. Her ragged, used-up body drifts down the river. And yet the music by Jim Guthrie, in this moment of profound loss, is celebratory. 

Her body is lifted from the river and she is burned. There is no single gesture in all of video games that I find more devastating and cathartic and beautiful than the moment, in Sworcery’s final seconds, when Logfella, standing by the Scythian’s funeral pyre, kneels down. It’s just so human, and humanity is exactly what is missing from so many games. This man, paying respects to this woman. Honoring her sacrifice. Acknowledging that her life mattered. 

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This comes not long after the game has said,

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and I am not a religious person, but I believe that our lives matter, and that we are connected in ways that we cannot always fully see or understand, and that there are bonds that exist that can never be broken, not by distance or death. Sworcery lets me touch this idea. It lets me see it and feel it.

I have no use anymore for disposable games. Sworcery was one of the first games to spoil me and make me realize that this was true, to make me yearn for games that could be the axe for the frozen sea within me, and for that, I will always be thankful.