I didn’t expect to feel this giddy on a weeknight. I booted up Sword of the Sea on PS5 “just to sample the glide” before bed, and three hours later the credits rolled, my DualSense buzzing softly in my palms like a purring cat. I stared at the screen in that post-ride calm you get after a perfect downhill run or a sunset surf. And then I hit New Game and took another lap. That’s the kind of experience this is: not big, not long, but precise, poetic, and deeply tactile. It makes you chase momentum in a way most games only talk about.
For context, I’m a sucker for flow-state games. Journey is tattooed on my brain, Abzû lives rent-free in my ambient playlist, and I still boot up The Pathless when I need to remember what elegant movement feels like. Sword of the Sea sits exactly at that junction: Matt Nava’s art direction paints the world in clean, saturated lines, and Austin Wintory’s score breathes on your neck, rising and falling with your speed. But this one leans harder into surfing and skatepark logic-half-pipes sculpted out of dunes, ramps tucked between ruins, and currents you can drop into like bowls. It’s familiar and new at the same time.
I played on PS5 with a DualSense, headphones on, OLED TV at 60Hz. No performance options popped up for me-just straight into the world-and I’m glad. Less tinkering, more flow. The build ran butter-smooth the whole time: loads were blink-and-you-missed-them, and I didn’t hit a crash or stutter in my run or on my immediate replay. The haptics and adaptive triggers are subtle rather than showy, which I’ll get into, but the headline here is: technically, it just let me ride.
The opening is a small miracle of clarity. A single droplet lands, a stone figure stirs, and you’re handed a sword that doubles as a hoverboard. No text walls. No arrows shouting “Go here.” Ahead, a horizon of sand shaped like ocean swell, a far-off mountain crowned by a pyramid silhouette, and a tower that anchors the skyline. The first time I eased the nose of the board down a dune, the sound design—a dry whisper with a soft, glassy undertone—made me grin. Tap jump at the lip of a wave, feel the board catch air, then tuck into the next trough and you’re off. Within ten minutes, I’d learned the only rule that really matters: rhythm makes speed.
By the end of that first half-hour, I’d found my first trick challenge tucked behind a collapsed archway, tripped a few accelerators that slingshot you forward if you hit them at the right angle, and uncovered a tablet etched with a fragment of the world’s past. The pacing in this early stretch is bright and generous. It’s like the game is saying, “Here’s the sandbox. Here’s the surf. Go make shapes in the air.”
Sword of the Sea’s movement model is simple to learn and deeply expressive. Carving with the left stick has a pliable, longboard feel: you can lay into a turn and still snap back up the face of the dune if you’ve banked enough speed. Jump timing matters. Hit the lip early and you’ll pop; hit it late and you’ll vault. Land clean and you keep momentum; get greedy and over-rotate, and you’ll scrub off speed as the board kisses the sand with a scratchy shiver. It’s not punishing, but it does nudge you to respect the physics it’s sketching.
What surprised me was how many of the environments are laid out like giant skateparks. You’ll spot ancient half-pipes carved into canyons, natural quarter-pipes formed by wind-scoured cliffs, and ribbon-like rails of energy that hum above the ground, letting you thread lines across chasms if you approach with the right speed. There are also accelerators—think of them like subtle launch pads—that pulse in the sand and give you a boost if you hit them on a clean line. The joy is less about mastering systems and more about reading terrain: that ridge is a spine to transfer over; that ruined aqueduct is a manual line from one bowl to the next.
Two moments sold me completely on the mechanics. Around 50 minutes in, in a sunken amphitheater by the sea, I spent nearly twenty minutes doing nothing “productive.” I kept looping a sequence: drop into a wide bowl, carve hard right to skim a line of glowing fish, pop onto a rail, then float into a slow hangtime 360 and land back into the bowl. It was completely optional. It felt like sketching with motion. Later, in a volcanic section where black glass ribbons over molten rock, I figured out I could chain three accelerators in a row by not taking the obvious path. The reward wasn’t loot; it was that intoxicating sensation of speed, with Wintory’s percussion ramping underneath.
The art direction is Giant Squid at its cleanest and most confident. You’ll slide from ochre dunes into cool blue shallows, skim past forests of bone-white pillars, weave through submerged ruins that feel like they were sandblasted yesterday, and crest into zones where magma paints the world in glowing calligraphy. Flora and fauna aren’t just decoration; schools of spectral fish coil beneath the surface, and kelp-like fronds sway under the sand as if the whole desert were breathing. The game never lingers too long in one palette or shape language—just when I thought, “Okay, I get this biome,” it introduced a twist: a new current type, an architectural motif, or a setpiece that nudged my technique.
Narratively, it’s more explicit than Journey but still mostly told in gestures. Stone tablets whisper about a place once full of water, now thirsty. You resurrect patches of life as you pass, turning dry coral back into living color. It’s a quiet ecological fable that trusts your imagination. Personally, I prefer when these games let the world do the talking—and Sword of the Sea mostly does—so the moments where it tries to push the story forward with harder pauses didn’t always work for me. A couple times it parked me in front of lore I was still too amped from the last downhill to absorb. The intention is good; the timing can be a tad clumsy.
There are adversaries, but they’re more like living obstacles than bosses. Sentries drift across certain channels, forcing you to reroute or outpace their patrols, and occasionally the game cues up a light chase where staying in rhythm is the entire win condition. I appreciated that failure just dings your flow and pops you back a few boards’ lengths rather than yanking you to a checkpoint. The stakes are your momentum and your pride, which feels exactly right for this world.
It’s Austin Wintory, so yes, the score sings. What I loved is how it breathes with your speed. In the mellow zones, strings hang like heat in the air; as you chain a line, percussion sneaks in, then swells. There’s a particular cue in the mountain approach where a low cello drone underpins a high, glassy motif, and the moment I cleared a long rail, the orchestra lifted like wind filling a sail. You feel conducted. Not controlled—just held. I recommend headphones; the spatial detail of sand, stone, and surf layers is easy to miss on TV speakers.
On PS5, the DualSense is tuned with restraint that I appreciated. Sand hiss translates into fine-grain haptics that thicken when you hit denser surfaces like carved stone. Water-like zones have a more elastic, undulating feel. The adaptive triggers get a slight tension when you’re banking hard or charging a jump, then ease off as you release. It’s not a gimmick, and it never distracts; it simply adds an extra brushstroke to the sensation of carving.
Beyond pure movement, there’s a light layer of objectives and goodies that give you reasons to explore the corners. Golden fragments glint in tucked-away pockets of the world. Feed them to an eerie, elegant Collector idol and you’ll unlock new tricks—stylish flourishes that don’t alter the fundamentals but let you imprint your own signature on a line. They also feed into simple trick challenges: “land these moves in one run,” that kind of thing. Nothing in here will stump a Tony Hawk veteran, but it scratched the same part of my brain that loves nailing a clean sequence.
The puzzles are more “nudges to look around” than Rubik’s cubes. Rotate a few mechanisms to redirect a current, assemble a path by animating pieces of an old machine, read the flow of symbols to unlock a gate. If you’re allergic to block-pushing, breathe easy. These are gentle palate cleansers between rides, not roadblocks. Still, once or twice I wanted them to be even more embedded in the terrain reading, because the best moments in Sword of the Sea are when puzzle, path, and movement become the same thing.
I have two meaningful gripes, both about pacing. First, there are a handful of lore beats that ask you to stop and take in a story panel when all your body wants is to keep carving. I love the theme—desertification, loss, restoration—but the delivery occasionally squeezes the brakes at the wrong time. Second, exploration and flow sometimes elbow each other. This is a world full of tucked-away nooks, and yet the act of really hunting them can feel like stepping off your board. I often chose the flow over the secret, then backtracked later, which works, but it makes the “go anywhere” curiosity a separate mode from the “ride everything” mode. Not a dealbreaker; just a seam you notice if you care about momentum as much as I do.
My first credits roll hit at just over three hours, with a healthy handful of fragments left uncollected. My second run was shorter—muscle memory is a hell of a drug—but I still detoured to mop up secrets I’d clocked the first time. I can already hear someone asking: “Is that enough?” For me, absolutely. These kinds of games bloom in a single sitting, the way a memorable hike does. Stretch it and you risk repetition; keep it tight and you deliver a clean arc. Sword of the Sea opts for the latter. I left satisfied and still tempted to re-ride favorite segments like playlist tracks.
I didn’t have a single hitch on PS5. No frame drops that I could feel, no streaming stutters as the camera swung wide across open spaces, no crashes. Quick loads between zones kept the cadence up, which matters in a game built on momentum. The file size is modest by modern standards, and it’s the kind of title you’ll be glad to keep installed for those evenings when you want to glide for twenty minutes and reset your head.
If you loved Journey, Abzû, or The Pathless, you already know whether this is your wavelength. Sword of the Sea is an art-first, sensation-forward ride that prizes feel over friction. You won’t find deep upgrade trees, fail-state-heavy boss fights, or a challenge curve designed to humble you. What you’ll find is a focused, gorgeous playground where mastering the terrain turns the world into an instrument—and you into the player.
If you need a 20-hour checklist, a map cluttered with icons, or combat that tests your parry timing, you’ll probably bounce. If you get antsy when games ask you to slow down for a moment of wordless reflection, the pacing bumps I mentioned may loom larger for you than they did for me. But if the idea of surfing a desert sea to a swelling score makes your chest loosen a little, clear an evening. This is your jam.
By the end of my first session, I had a new mental category: “games I replay just to feel a specific sensation.” Sword of the Sea belongs there with a tiny, privileged few. It distills Giant Squid’s strengths—art direction that feels like a warm light, music that knows when to lead and when to lean back, mechanics that you can learn in minutes and inhabit for hours—into a three-hour glide that never wastes your time. The story beats occasionally put a toe on the brake and exploration sometimes squares off with flow, but those wobbles don’t dent the ride. On PS5, it’s smooth, gorgeous, and honest about what it wants to be.
Score: 9/10
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