Sword of the Sea shows that life is precious and perservering
It’s difficult to put into context what playing through Sword of the Sea leads me to feel. It’s still a game, it’s still in the voiceless hero action genre, but but no means does its story complete when the credits roll. Giant Squid’s intent for the project is part conservation and part self actualization, where we enter by pushing forward and we exit by looking forward.
Over my years I’ve become a little bit of a conservation buff. I do my best to recycle, to gorw my own food, to take care of the land around my home and neighborhood. I tell people about the value of saving the planet, I show them how much money I’ve saved and how I feel physically better when I do all of it. It’s a lot of information that I/we assume is going to change minds. To quote Don’t Look Up, “We really did have everything, didn’t we?” We really had all of that information. We really can tell everything.
But they can’t feel it.
They can’t experience words or pictures. They don’t even connect to it, it’s just a jumble of phrases and Facebook posts they can doomscroll through.
Fuck if Sword of the Sea doesn’t make me feel it.
It doesn’t try to blast it at us in the eventual hurricane strength dust winds that will cover the earth in the coming decades, but it does it subtly enough where when we do see the slightest influence our actions leave we are tantalized, called, to do more.
A “Call to Action.” Maybe that’s the best SEO-friendly way to put it.
It’s constantly dangling a carrot in front of us, showing how actions even small can lead to change. Sword of the Sea‘s world is desolate. Dusty. Desert and deserted. We’re the only ones there, save for totems and statues and a lone figure that watches us at arm’s length. The planet is in a stasis, life at that tipping point, waiting for the Sea to come back. Someone needs to bring it back, and that task falls to us and our trusty giant sword-board. We hover around the planet and its many environments looking for clues as to why the Sea is gone and how to help its return. We don’t necessarily surf on our board, at least not yet. Without water we can’t surf; our motion, from hitting speeds to jumping to making quick turns, is much more like snowboarding. We head down a dune and up the other side, launching is unto the air high enough to land on a ledge, perhaps doing a kick flip along the way for good measure (we have a board, this is a video game, why the fuck not have tricks?) and score some points.
The planet, although we’re told is dead by the layman’s terms, is still alive. Even the sand dunes flow and shift, rise and fall. Even the snow banks move with the wind. It’s dead? Naw, dawg, it’s just waiting. Until then it’s breathing. We’re breathing, with the planet.
As we move and explore, we’re activating lights or spreading flowers or any number of seemingly small and unrelated actions, until we start creating water. Well, we’re not creating it, it’s always been there, it just starts to flow again. Whether a drip of drops or a torrential geyser, water returns, little by little, finding and combining with itself.
And with that water comes LIFE.
There is no moment greater than standing in the middle of a whirlwind whirlpool of water emenating from nowhere as fish, squid, orcas swim around us, seemingly dancing in joy that we can see them again. They know they’ve always been there, but it took us opening our eyes to finally witness them. We’re witnessing life. My god, it’s beautiful.
We keep going through the game, realizing and witnessing life in all of the unfolding levels, with the explicit concept that it’s there, it’s everywhere. Life is everywhere. The minimalism of the plot and its gorgeous visuals and soundtrack allow us to focus on life, to experience life as it wants us to experience it.
This past Summer left us with drought-like conditions in Michigan. Lawns turned brown. Plants lost color, dried and faded. My vegetables didn’t grow like in years past. I was spending more water indoors to make up for the lack of water outdoors. I felt bad, it was bad, everything felt wrong.
Then one day, it rained. Just one day is all it took for my begonias and petunias to lift their heads, to raise their leaves, filled with green, towards the sky as if ecstatic in prayer. The flowers were there, the life was there, always, waiting. It just needed that nudge. That little bit of water.
Sword of the Sea lets us feel what that is like. It lets us experience how life is precious and wonderful. We are fearful today, often we are hopeless, but life hasn’t given up on us. It’s there, waiting. Perhaps it’s giving us a nudge now, too.
This review is based on a PlayStation 5 code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. The video originally appeared on The SideQuest Live for August 19, 2025.
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