It may be arty, but is so devoid of game-play; it just becomes a stressful chore to play
The game has gathered high praise from critics but quite mixed reviews from every day gamers. Fans say it should be slow because it's a point-and-click adventure. Well, that would be acceptable if it had clever puzzles. It does have some puzzles, it shows you how to collect sprite creatures, yet you try it and it doesn't work. The actual technique usually involves clicking on background objects in a certain order. What order? Well, I looked at a walk-though from time to time and it couldn't explain why, so you just accept it and move on, with the small hope to find better game-play later on. Sadly, this is only the style of 'puzzles' you are presented. When people complain at the lack of game-play, people say "it's artistic!" When people say the main part of the graphics could be easily done back in the SNES era, people say "play the game with headphones; the sound is good". Well, I'm sure most of us are playing the game for the gaming attributes, if you wanted music, you would either listen to music, or play a proper music based game. The music can be decent enough if you like electronic style game music, but sometimes even that sounded a bit mindless.
The game world is surprisingly very small, and even though the game length is only a meagre 3 hours, the game has serious padding throughout. Even the games' host knows this, since after the chapter, he suggest to quit playing and come back later, presumably in the hope you don't realise how short and ridiculously padded the game is. Also, the third chapter involves moon cycles which is based on real time. You need to play through the dream sequence on a full bright moon and a full dark moon which the game suggests to wait a week or so. You can find an item which changes the moon cycle which sounds very useful and should be the case of going into the menu and selecting it. Of course, the game insists of making you trek across the entire map in order to change the moon, then backtrack all the way back to where you started to enter the dream world. If you do enter the dream world with the wrong moon, the way of exiting the dream world is.....wait for it....trek across the entire dream world map!
Given that it is an adventure game, and your hero is equipped with a sword and shield, you would expect a lot of battles, but you will only do approximately ten or so. In these battles, your character is rooted to the spot and so you have to wait until you are attacked, then either hit the attack or block button to counter. The majority of the battles are so similar you won't need to change your strategy too much. Overall, 'Sword & Sworcery EP' is so devoid of game-play, length and entertainment that it just becomes a stressful chore to play, and the only redeeming quality is the graphics and music. If you want to play a game like that, dig up your SNES and put on an old Nintendo game like A Link to the Past. That has nostalgia, the music, game-play, length, and challenge.