If you’re unfamiliar with S&S EP ($4.99), then join the club — I’ve played through the whole thing and I’m still not entirely sure what it’s about. It resembles a three or four hour point-and-click adventure (like the Monkey Island series), but with a funkier soundtrack and amazingly stylish pixelated graphics.
The pacing in S&S EP is very deliberate. The protoganist, the Scythian, walks, talks, and fights her way through the whole storyline. She never ever runs (even though you’ll sometimes beg her to).
That means there is always time to stop and tap on the flowers, create ripples in the eerily still water, and listen to the incredible soundtrack that Jim Guthrie put together. I’d estimate I spent about 10% of my time fighting things, 80% walking or standing in wilderness, and 10% tapping aimlessly on the screen just because it was a fun thing to do at the time.
But S&S EP isn’t all roses. There were a number of times where the kickass soundtrack simply stopped as I walked across screens and left me wondering what I had done wrong. Was the choice really “stand still and listen” or “go explore the forest in silence”, or was it a bug?
Then there is the fact that the game doesn’t seem to multitask at all. What’s more, S&S EP doesn’t always seem to save your game correctly, and I often found myself replaying five-minute stretches over again because of this. I have a feeling this will eventually be fixed in an update, but it did hurt my Zen a little.
The last bit I want to mention is the Twitter integration: I still have absolutely no idea what purpose it serves. You can choose to tweet any bit of dialogue or in-game description alongside a #Sworcery hashtag, but all this seemed to do is very vaguely describe to other people where I was in the game, and even then, only if they had already been to that exact spot and seen that bit of text. At worst, this is a little spammy (I don’t like game tweets much), and at best, it’s a very obscure way of saying “look where I am” in this awesome indie game.
Despite these issues, I still think that S&S EP is well worth a purchase for anybody interested in iOS gaming. The catch is that you have to be in the right frame of mind to really enjoy it. You won’t need incense and candles, but I found I liked S&S EP most on a slow afternoon or a sleepy evening – times when I was simply in the mood to wander.
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S&S EP was purchased by the author for review on iSource. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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