Sword of the Sea review: The best PlayStation Plus game you'll play this year
PlayStation Plus Premium and Extra subscribers should be on high alert, as one of the year's best games just launched right into the subscription service's catalog : Sword of the Sea , the latest from Abzu and The Pathless maker Giant Squid Studios.
Sword of the Sea excels for one simple reason: it taps into the joy of movement. It's a game that emulates the feel of snowboarding or surfing, but has the player do so at high speed through a fantastical world. It offers the same sense of exhilaration that games like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 do, but almost never tries to kill the player's momentum or let them fail.
It's a brief adventure that can be completed in under three hours, but that works to the game's benefit. It's an artistic piece about the beauty of nature and the freeing feeling of movement. While no character mutters a word of dialogue during its movie-like runtime, Sword of the Sea is an experience I won't soon forget.
Price and Availability
Sword of the Sea will launch on August 19 for PC and PS5. It will be available digitally across Steam, Epic Games Store, and PlayStation Store for $30. For those unsure about paying for a three-hour game they haven't played before, it's also available to PS Plus Premium and PS Plus Extra subscribers as part of the game catalog at no additional cost.
A minimalist but meaningful story
I'm still thinking about my experience with Sword of the Sea
Like Abzu and The Pathless before it, Sword of the Sea mostly avoids the spoken or written word, simply delivering its story through gameplay and the immaculate vibes felt while exploring its beautiful world. Players control a Wraith on a quest to bring life back to a world buried beneath sand, snow, and dirt.
Of course, the best way to do this is by riding around and doing tricks on a giant Hoversword, occasionally using its abilities to turn the surface into water and bring wildlife back. There is some deeper lore to Sword of the Sea 's world that can be found on tablets scattered around the environment, but I found it mostly to be window dressing to the otherwise visual storytelling the game was doing.
I turned the sand dunes into a sea of waves, experienced the beauty of shooting stars falling all around me as I sword-surfed with a friend, and felt satisfaction in bringing life back to the darker corners of its world. For a game that's even shorter than movies like Avengers: Endgame or Oppenheimer , this experience leaves quite a lasting impression.
Thematically, the game leaves a lot up to the player's interpretation. In addition to the more obvious environmentalist themes, I felt that this was about creativity and the joy that comes from both creativity and exploring the world around me. There are many beautiful places to discover, living beings to interact with, and ways to create something that has a lasting impact.
Whereas a game like Mafia: The Old Country elicited a lot of emotion from me through its dialogue, S word of the Sea accomplishes something similar just through the feeling of playing and looking at the game. As a visual and interactive medium, it's the kind of metaphorical story that's perfect for a video game.
A meditative adventure
This is a calming game about surfing around at high speeds
It is shockingly easy to enter an enthralling flow state while playing Sword of the Sea . You can play almost the whole game just holding forward and occasionally pressing X to jump with your Hoversword, entering a meditative state as you ride over sand dunes, up snowy mountains, or through schools of fish you just brought back to the world.
Occasionally, you can even ride on the back of a sea creature like a dolphin. For those more familiar with extreme sports games, there are ways to perform tricks on the hoverboard, with the game keeping a score you can see in the pause menu during your first playthrough.
A golden currency called Tetra can also be found scattered throughout the game's levels and can be redeemed at a vendor to enhance the Wraith's abilities further. The placement of Tetra encourages exploration, while the world design directs me to play Sword of the Sea like I would an extreme sports game.
Ramps, half-pipes, grind-rails, and other elements you'd experience in an extreme sports game are incorporated into the environment naturally. Sword of the Sea' s colorfully vibrant cel-shading is always pleasing to look at, so I was always eager to see in what clever way the game would reinterpret a classic extreme sports game mechanic.
The one downside of playing on the PS5 is that there were some occasional frame rate dips in some late-game areas, which were more visually intensive areas. That would snap me out of the flow-state trance Sword of the Sea otherwise consistently kept me in. Thankfully, there was never much in the way of input delay, and this only happened occasionally, so that's no reason not to check out this otherwise refined game.
Like Journey, but as an extreme sports game
It reinterprets classic extreme sports game mechanics for a more relaxed adventure
Sword of the Sea is taking mechanics from games that often have players performing a set number of tricks for a high score within a time limit and applying them to something that plays more like an atmospheric action-adventure game. While a sword is pivotal to gameplay, and the word is right there in the title, I commend Giant Squid for not putting much in the way of combat in the game until its final encounter.
Instead, the action in this action-adventure game is just surfing, and the game can fully explore that concept before overstaying its welcome in under three hours. For those who do want to push their Hoverswrod-riding skills further, there are some areas scattered around the game where players can complete high-score combo challenges for a reward of Tetra.
After beating the game once, it's possible to add a speedometer and score counter to the game's otherwise minimalist UI. That simple addition has encouraged me to replay the game, experiencing its immaculate flow-state vibes and the exhilaration of going for a high score.
Once you beat the Sword of the Sea once, the game is more than content enough with letting people play it like it's the latest title in the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series. That's a tricky balance to strike, and impressed with just how well Giant Squid accomplished just that here.
Should you buy Sword of the Sea ?
If you're subscribed to PS Plus Extra or Premium, Sword of the Sea is absolutely a must-play as it will likely go down as one of the best games to launch into the subscription service this year. Even if you only play games on PC or aren't subscribed to any of PlayStation's subscription services, I still think Sword of the Sea is worth picking up if you enjoy a game that almost feels like therapy while you're playing it.
It takes mechanics typically reserved for extreme sports games and applies them to an experience that's a lot more like the indie game legend Journey . That gambit pays off spectacularly, leading to an experience that leaves a lasting impact without ever speaking a word to players or inundating them with tutorials, messy UI, or other fluff. Ultimately, Sword of the Sea gives Donkey Kong Bananza another real competitor for the best game of 2025.
