Sword & Sworcery – emotional connection through music and touch

Sword & Sworcery is a point-and-click game originally made for iOS. It has an amazing, almost etherial soundtrack composed by Jim Guthrie. While the soundtrack easily stands on its own, merely listening to it is not at all the same as experiencing it in-game.

Being a point-and-click game, on a mobile device, you must touch the screen in particular locations in order to progress. The game takes advantage of this – after melding the expressive soundtrack with the mechanical result of touching the screen, the end result feels almost cinematic. The mechanics of defeating a boss might just boil down to touching the screen along with the beat, but in-game, the Scythian swings her sword, clashing against the enemy’s projectile, choreographed to match the swelling music. This choreography gives Sword & Sworcery an epic feel, and the physical touch you make in order to enact this choreography connects the you as a player to the Scythian in a way that prose and other non-interactive forms of character development cannot.

When the game was ported to PC, touching became clicking, and I felt like some of this connection was lost. When clicking, you are no longer getting quite the same tactile feedback as when you touch the screen; you interact with the game through the proxy of the mouse pointer. The choreography still exists but its effect is slightly diminished. I suspect the effect might be restored if the mouse click were replaced by a key press, but I’m not sure.

tl;dr: The choreography of Sword & Sworcery combined with the requirement of physical touch in order to enact that choreography engages the player in a unique and powerful way.