Tony Hawk's Journey: Giant Squid Is Back With Another Artful Adventure With Sword Of The Sea

I love that you can always instantly recognize a Matt Nava game. The art director of Flower and Journey and creative director of Abzu and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Pathless has curated an iconic art and gameplay style that has practically become the official look of indie games over the past decade. 🦄While Journey remains hi🦋s most lauded, each game under Nava’s direction has offered a unique and unforgettable experience in its own way.

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Nava and his team at Giant Squid are set to release their next project this August, Sword of the Sea, which I got to play at 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Summer Game Fest earlier this month. It’s everything you want from a Giant Squid game, with an action sports element you would never expect. It’s like if 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was an ecopunk a📖dventure about the beauty of the world all around u💖s. Skating and conservation might seem like an unlikely pair, but Sword of the Sea feels like the game Nava and Giant Squid have been working towards all along.

Riding The Hoversword

Sword Of The Sea Hero Grinding On A Giant Chain.

In Sword of the Sea you play as the Wraith: a faceless, voiceless hero (as is Giant Squid tradition) who has been re✃surrected on a quest to perform a resurrection of their own: unveiling a buried sea. Across dry deserts and frozenꦐ mountains, the Wraith ride upon a magical hoversword, carving a path from which the lost sea will follow.

It’s impossible not to think of Journey the first time you see Sword of the Sea in action. The journey (wahey) begins in a vast desert marked by dunes, ancient ruins, and lit🍷tle else. You cruise around aimlessly for a while until something catches your attention: a little collection of what looks like clay pots sticking up out of the sand. As you ride over you hit the interact button, and a sm꧃all burst of light emanates out of the sword. As the light touches the pots, they light up in turn. A moment later, a gateway rises out of the sand. Where does it lead? Only one way to find out.

The pull of exploration is a defining characteristic of Giant Squid games, and that has never been more true than it is in Sword of the Sea. While The Pathless put an emphasis on speed and mobility that made exploring more exciting, Sword of the Sea takes it a step forward by turning the entire world into a skatepark. The hoversword operates like a combination of a skateboard, snowboard, and surfboard, allowing you to launch off of dunes and makeshift ramps, grind on narrow surfaces, pull off tricks, and build combos. I expected this studio’s next game to be an engrossing ad♕venture, but I didn’t expect it to rip this hard.

The hoversword isn’t only for getting around the desert quickly while pulling sick tail grabs (hilt grabs?) along the way. It’s also integral to the platforming puzzles found throughout the game. One of the early challenges involves making your way to the top of a temple to activate a switch that will pull on a giant chain to open a sealed door, giving you not just a path to the next area, but also a chﷺain you can grind on to get around the desert faster. To get to the top of the temple, you start by using the interior walls as a halfpipe, skating back and forth until you’ve ඣbuilt up enough momentum to launch yourself onto what’s left of the roof.

Several secret areas throughout the temple require you to hit jumps and land on small platforms. You can wallride to access new areas, and use massive jelly🥃fish as jump pads. There are even high-score challenges set in little skateparks. Sword of the Sea fully embraces the convꦍentions of the skateboard genre while making them its own.

Return Of The Sea

Sword Of The Sea Whales And Fish Flying Through The Air.

The goal is to bring the sea back to life, which you do in the most Giant Squ💖id way possible. Rath💮er than flooding the desert with water, the desert itself becomes the sea. Dunes turn into waves as the sand beneath your sword transforms into water trails. Ocean life, including huge shoals and killer whales, swim through the air above. It’s easy to think of the studio’s underwater adventure Abzu here, but it also has a lot in common with Flower due to the way you slowly bring sections of the world back to life.

Sword of the Sea has elements of all of Nava’s games, making it feel like the culmination of both his artistic career and the Giant Squid’s ambitions in games. It’s just as breathtaking and spiritual as any of the studio's other games, with more gratifying moment-to-moment gameplay. Sword of the Sea is as profound as it is exhilarating. I’ll be diving head first into this 🐟em-ocean-al adventure when it launches August 19.