(s)wordsmyth

It doesn’t take long to realize that the plot of (s)wordsmyth is indicated in its title. You’re a samurai who has been training in the way of the “bladeless,” studying ways to resolve conflict without bloodshed. While you do carry a sword, and you’ll fight a succession of opponents over the course of the game, the battles will all be with words rather than with weapons.

These verbal battles are quite like physical battles, too. I imagine that swordfights in the era of the samurai went something like this: You meet a new opponent. Then your fight begins somewhat tentatively, with each of you trying to discover the other’s swordfighting style, strengths, and weaknesses. Once you’ve understood your opponent you strike at their weak spot, hoping to defeat them. That’s exactly what happens in (s)wordsmyth, just with words. When you first encounter an opponent, you spar with them verbally for a bit, getting a feel for who they are and what they care about. Once you’ve engaged them enough to understand them, you then pursue the conversational options that get you what you want in a manner that aligns with who they are. If you chase your goals too quickly, or in a way that that doesn’t fit their goals or desires, then you’re going to lose the verbal battle. That generally means that your opponent attacks you physically, and since you’re too unskilled with the sword to adequately defend yourself, it also means your death.

The opponents that you fight are quite different, too — including a man who wants to defend his village, a ghost girl, and a bloodthirsty warrior — so that the tactics you use on one may not be effective on the next. You really do have to understand who each of your opponents is. Fortunately, your sword — even though it’s of no use in physical battles since you don’t know how to wield it — actually is helpful in the verbal battles, as it talks to you and comments on your conversational strategies. Eventually you learn why you carry a talking sword, as well as why you’re on this quest in the first place: (s)wordsmyth is rather cagey initially about your goals and backstory, only slowly revealing them as the game proceeds.

You can’t save your game in (s)wordsmyth, but dying does take you back to the beginning of the current encounter so that you can try it again. This fits the CYOA model that the game’s blurb explicitly states it is going for. (After all, how many of us, when reading one of those old CYOA books, marked a space in the book when we weren’t sure about a particular choice, going back to it when our initial decision didn’t work out?) I found myself doing this more in the later encounters, as the opponents became tougher and it was harder to determine what exactly it was that they wanted. I think for a couple of opponents I died multiple times before I managed to understand them well enough to pursue the right conversational options. For some of these, maybe it could have been a little clearer what they wanted. On the other hand, you do expect the opponents to become tougher as you proceed. And some of the solutions are nicely counterintuitive at first, only making sense once you start to understand who you’re fighting.

I also think (s)wordsmyth can be understood in terms of an inner quest that I associate with Asian thought and religion (although of course it’s not exclusive to Asia). Successfully defeating each of your opponents without bloodshed requires you to learn and put into practice this particular samurai path, so that the game’s story arc essentially entails the process of you becoming a true bladeless master. The final encounter is particularly well-done and even involves a kind of enlightenment, at least with respect to this path of peace that you have chosen. Thus the game’s title actually has another level of meaning: You’re choosing to be a wordsmith rather than a swordsmith, but you’re also recreating a mythical journey — a words myth — in which you wield words rather than swords. (Here “myth” means “story that gives meaning” rather than “story that’s not true.”)

Overall, I think (s)wordsmyth is tightly designed, especially with how its challenges reinforce the game’s theme. They’re not just there to give the player something to do; they’re actually essential to the PC’s character arc. The ending is really nice and quite appropriate for what the game is trying to do as well. I do think that the difficulty in fighting some of the later opponents means that most players will be dying and retrying the same encounter multiple times, which blunts some of the story’s emotional effect. So the game could perhaps be improved in that area. But overall, I think (s)wordsmyth is well-done, I enjoyed it, and I even found myself admiring its design while playing it.

(Disclaimer: We played the first part of (s)wordsmyth at the Seattle IF meetup yesterday, with the author, Tristan Jacobs, reading the game aloud. That was quite a treat, by the way; he’s a trained actor! We only saw the first two encounters, and I finished the rest of the game on my own last night.)