Shredding Serenity in Sword of the Sea

By Garrett Martin | August 18, 2025 | 11:00am

Video Games Reviews sword of the sea

In 2012’s Journey, thatgamecompany gave us a timeless, wordless, mythopoetic adventure through the desert with unknowable online friends. In 2016’s Abzû, the former thatgamecompany employees at Giant Squid gave us a timeless, wordless, mythopoetic adventure through the ocean with a shark serving as guide and friend. In 2020’s The Pathless, Giant Squid added words—albeit in an unknowable language—but otherwise it was timeless and mythopoetic and all of that jazz, this time on a wooded island, with a falcon as our friend and active collaborator. And now, in 2025’s Sword of the Sea, Giant Squid returns with a game that references all of its previous work, while exploring the kind of design precepts and aesthetic concepts they’ve been known for since Giant Squid’s founders were still at thatgamecompany. When you find something that works, keep working it, I guess. And the good thing is, it does still work with Sword of the Sea.

The Pathless set itself apart from Abzû and Journey by being a little more openly game-like. You didn’t just explore, but had to dash through the environment and shoot arrows to accomplish your goals. Sword of the Sea ditches the ranged non-combat for, uh, a sword, and then adds an unexpected wrinkle by turning that sword into a vehicle instead of a weapon. The sword is a board—both skate and surf—and you’ll ride it throughout the entire game while trying to bring life back to another one of Giant Squid’s fallen, mysterious worlds.

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In Sword of the Sea you glide effortlessly over sea, sand, and snow while trying to turn the lights on across various environments that echo the designers’ earlier games. You start in a Journey-ish desert, where clusters of little clay braziers lie dormant, waiting for you to reignite them by skating in their general vicinity; whenever a new patch is relit, it untaps a hidden water source, restoring the ocean to its former glory in a cascading flourish of aquatic wildlife right out of Abzû. Tony Hawk games might be fun, but they’ve never let you ride on the back of a whale before—and Sword of the Sea does that multiple times.

Sword of the Sea

It’s all so esoteric, aiming for mythic status and avoiding specifics in the process. Your character’s name doesn’t matter. Your character’s friend’s name doesn’t matter. Nothing about the world is well-defined, and that’s totally fine, because Sword of the Sea strives for allegory more than anything else. All that matters is that you need to save this world from a disaster that definitely seems ecological, and to do that you ultimately have to quench the bottomless hunger of an insatiable beast fueled by endlessly churning flames.

It’s short. I like short games. Sword of the Sea might somehow be too short though–I wrapped up in barely more than four hours, and I feel like its story, as thinly sketched as it is, could have used another act. It also has a scoring system that feels nothing less than vestigial; for the most part it’s portrayed as an optional, insignificant metric only visible on the pause screen. But there are a few moments where it comes to the fore and you’re tasked with scoring a certain amount of points in a makeshift halfpipe or bowl, and it rattles the immersion the game otherwise aims for. The scoring system becomes more central in the new game plus mode, with the score now appearing on the main screen, and endlessly going up as you just explore this world once again. This really only underscores how totally unnecessary scorekeeping is in Sword of the Sea; it accomplishes nothing, it signifies nothing, it’s exclusively here for players who just need to see the numbers go up, or for Giant Squid’s developers to try out something new. It doesn’t hurt the game in any way, but it is just one big shrug.

The scoring’s a wash, but the new approach to motion is anything but. Slicing gracefully throughout the game on your sword, grinding on giant chains attached to ancient ruins, banking off of dunes or sea swells, doing flips and grabs and spins while soaring through the sky… it’s as poetic as the game’s oblique creation and destruction cycle, while also being physically satisfying to do. You are constantly moving throughout Sword of the Sea at a speedy clip, and eventually unlock a boost mechanic that adds a useful turbo boost, and it feels nothing like anything you’ve done in a Giant Squid or thatgamecompany game before. It’s more overtly game-y than anything in the company’s oeuvre, including The Pathless; it even has a collectible currency that can be used to purchase permanent upgrades. And yet it doesn’t sacrifice the mystique these games are built on.

For most of its run Sword of the Sea is essentially Tony Hawk’s Journey—or Giant Squid’s Pro Skater, if you prefer—but it’s a restless game that takes a few unexpected turns. Somehow it becomes a Jeff Minter-esque tube shooter by the conclusion, which, hey, I’m all for more Jeff Minter-esque tube shooters, so no complaints here. That restlessness is a result of Giant Squid trying to find ways to make Sword of the Sea stand out from its earlier games while still retaining enough signs of the studio’s distinctive style, and that’s admirable. The result might be a game that isn’t as elegant as the studio’s earlier works, but between the understated genre explorations of Sword of the Sea and The Pathless it’s become clear how Giant Squid can continue to make worthwhile games while preserving some of what made Journey such a revelation in 2012.

Of course there’s a risk when you continue to work with the same general aesthetic for so long. Sword of the Sea might play differently, but it still hits many of the notes you expect from this studio. You know how some people get apocalyptically annoyed by Wes Anderson for developing a distinctive style and refining it one movie at a time over a period of decades? There are no doubt people who feel the same way about Giant Squid games. Some might call it a lack of inspiration, or desperation, or a calculated decision to repeat what worked before, but artists shouldn’t be criticized for having their own style. Yes, Giant Squid continues to work with similar themes and similar visuals and similar Austin Wintory scores, but they’re not simply repeating themselves. Every one of their games, going back to thatgamecompany works like Journey and even Flower, does something new and unexpected even if the general territory is familiar, and Sword of the Sea is no different.

You probably won’t think about any of that while you’re actually playing the game, thankfully. You’ll be too entranced by the speed and grace of your sword, the epic land and seascapes, the joy of a sudden rush of fish and rays and dolphins, and the contemplative bliss of silently riding on the back of a whale, simply because you can. Skaters and surfers talk about the serenity they feel when everything comes together and they feel as one with their board, and that’s a high you’ll feel often in Sword of the Sea.

Sword of the Sea was developed and published by Giant Squid. Our review is based on the PlayStation 5 version. It is also available on PC.

Editor-in-chief Garrett Martin writes about videogames, theme parks, pinball, travel, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.