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IndieCade 2010: Superbrothers' Sword and Sworcery EP preview
I first saw Superbrothers' Sword and Sworcery in person back at GDC earlier this year. This past weekend, developer Capy's Nathan Vella met up with me at the IndieCade festival in Culver City, California to show off the latest build of the game. It's much farther along in development these days. While the GDC demo was more of a working prototype, Vella said the title is basically content-complete, and the creators are just polishing out the kinks at this point. What they've created is one heck of an experience. The concentrated story that I saw at GDC has grown into a gorgeous, expanded universe for your Superbrothers-style warrior to explore and interact with, and the game plays like an interactive piece of art, with mystery and magic around every turn. It's a game that's hard to categorize; there's not much text, and what's there is pretty incoherent, with phrases like "she knew whence we had come," and a quest for a book called the Megatome. When I asked Vella what genre he considered the game to be, he said it was "inspired by old-school adventure gaming, but we call it an exploration and experience." The basic mechanic is this: touch. Almost everything you touch in the world reacts in some way -- if you touch plants or animals, they will shake or run and hide. You can drag to move your character, or double-tap to send him around the screens. The general theme is exploration -- find caves, meet people, and learn about the world you exist in.
