Superbrothers Sword & Sworcery EP

I’m going through my Steam library and giving abandoned games a second go before I toss them into the BYE pile for good.

I can’t figure out if the developers of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP actually want people to play the game or not. It’s designed in such a way it’s very easy to disengage and walk away. There is an ongoing discussion thread on Steam called Why do people not finish this game? that is 18 pages long. 

I picked it up in a bundle some years ago and promptly finished the first chapter. There was an intermission in which a character invited me to take a break. So I did. For like two years. I tried again and did the same thing: took a break and forgot about it for years. The cheevos indicate I’m not alone.

My third attempt has me halfway through the game, but I’ve got this sense of general annoyance I can’t quite put my finger on. There is a section of the game that is tied to real time, certain events can only occur on certain days. The player can either change the PC date/time (the game explicitly tells the player how to “cheat” in this way), wait until the appropriate day (for me, four days hence), or utilize an in-game mechanism to change the day. The in-game mechanism must be retriggered if you turn the game off, which requires going back to the dream world and walking all the way out to the grotto again, then waiting for the moon to reach the right phase again.

These issues alone aren’t necessarily deal-breakers, but there’s something about the design issues and uninspired puzzles in combination with the pixel art and overtly-quirky dialogue and the Twitter interactivity gimmick that rubs me the wrong way. I’ll either pick it back up in four days or another two years, we’ll see.