From the first moment I played Sword of the Sea at the Summer Game Fest Play Days, I knew that it was like the game Journey, which led down from that wonderful game created years ago to the moment when I was playing the latest game from Matt Nava’s game studio, Giant Squid.
I played the beginning of the game. You start out as a nameless character in the sand. You start surfing through the sand, sort of like a snowboarder in SSX. Except you’re not riding on a snowboard. You ride on a sword, gliding above the sand as if you were on a hoverboard.
Oddly enough, the experience of snowboarding was the inspiration for Matt Nava, creative director on the game and founder of Giant Squid. He told me that he was inspired by being both a snowboarder and a surfer and the sensation of moving fast. When you’re in that moment, he said that these extreme sports become meditative. It’s about being back in nature and connecting with it.
We’ve seen these kinds of games in Flower, where you convert a city from gray to greenery, in Journey as you slide through the sand, and in other peaceful games as well. There are images from The Pathless and Abzu, the company’s previous games, in Sword of the Sea. While you wield a sword as a mysterious character in Sword of the Sea, you don’t use it in violence. As that character, you are searching for something, but I didn’t learn what that was in my short demo.
The game has beautiful music, but you play the game in silence. There’s no dialogue. No spoken narrative. It’s like the video game version of a poem, or a silent film. In the game, you move around, solve puzzles, and when you do so you convert the sand to sea water. It’s a very satisfying experience.
I noted it was odd how Giant Squid was hitting its stride with this game, while the rest of the industry was struggling due to lack of funding, high costs and changing gamer tastes. But Nava revealed in our conversation that Giant Squid was on the brink for a while until PlayStation backed the company. It was an interesting chat in the middle of a very chaotic demo day at the Summer Game Fest.
Here is an edited transcript of our interview.
Matt Nava is creative director and president of Giant Squid.
GamesBeat: What are some of the inspirations for this? I feel like I see a lot of Journey here, and your first game as well.
Matt Nava: And even The Pathless, which was our game after that. It was all about moving really fast and momentum. It’s all of those ideas. But really, the inspiration is just from being a snowboarder and going surfing myself. When you’re actually doing that stuff, you’re moving fast, and it’s extreme, but it’s really this kind of meditation. I’m really interested in the meditative, spiritual side of those extreme sports. Usually when video games portray extreme sports, it’s very much about just the surface level of it. It’s not about the real reason that people go back to surf. You want to be in nature. You want to connect with nature. You want to explore.
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