More than a decade since its release, Super Bros: Sword and Sorcery EP remains a game to ponder, as it avoids being a game altogether. One of the first ground-breaking iPad games, it leveraged the platform’s multimedia prestige to playfully and brutally roam the boundaries between art forms, genres and technologies. In a way, it’s The Legend of Zelda, the story of a wanderer who accidentally awakens a skeletal ghost that must be cleared by collecting cosmic triangular pieces. But it’s also Twitter, with inner monologues filled with scrolling feeds, and writing tossing between decadent self-importance and nonsense about legend. It’s a pixel-art realm of zigzagging paths and chiseled shadows, and a prog-rock album of self-mythology—an alternate dimension you can access by flipping the gramophone disc on the title screen. It’s also a rhythm game, with puzzles reminiscent of garage bands and boss fights reminiscent of UFO DJ conversations from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s a lot of different, mismatched things, but it always feels complete, especially thanks to Jim Guthrie’s cheerful and unfathomable electronic score.
By contrast, the Superbrothers’ long-awaited second game has always left itself falling apart. A story of new beginnings that mixes Star Fox and Tacoma, Jett: The Far Shore has fantastic ideas and some brilliant moments, but the moving parts often interfere with each other. In the Elon Musk era, it was a visionary work that proposed a non-Western, non-capitalist space program in which religion and science were equally influential. Its world-building is unparalleled – there’s an audio language invented by the developers themselves, subtitled in whimsical, polite English (give you a taster, the impact is “shock”, the danger is “creepy”, and the loss Perception is “adrift”). But as the story goes about colonizing other planets, it’s odd that it doesn’t have much to say other than raising the risk of “doing imperialism”, and its key points are undercut by the sheer deterioration of the game.
It has a promising start – not in a cockpit or a starship dock, but in a tent on the prairie. You are May, a hermit of a religion governed by the prophecy of new life on a distant planet – the source of the mysterious “hymn”. Saying goodbye to your family, you set off for the launch pad, briefly glimpsed into a sparse but loving world overshadowed by ancient wars and the enormous cost of the sacred mission to the stars – beige seas full of rusted tankers, solemn Crowds of believers bid farewell with singing. Then you enter artificial hibernation, the clocks advance centuries, and you find yourself descending through the clouds to your new predicted home. A wide perspective reminiscent of Wes Anderson and Interstellar, it’s a poignant introduction that hints at a sprawling society, just to hold it all in memory: as one village chief tells you : “We belong to the past, you belong to our future”. Spell-bound stuff – but then you touch the ground and everything starts to go wrong.
The main problem with Jett is that it can’t decide what it wants to be. Sword & Sworcery makes a surprising connection without somehow losing its coherence, and it’s a piece of work. In particular, it builds on the tension between an arcade flight sim and a lengthy interactive stage play, though each side of the game has its merits when judged individually.
On the one hand, you’ll roam aboard your namesake Jett, a hovercraft that looks like a cross between a dolphin and a dragonfly – exploring the continent, adding species to your logs, and helping your sleeping comrades establish a foothold on the motherland above the ship. On the other hand, you’ll walk around small enclosed areas, talk to other scouts, and stage a lightly choice-driven story about survival, community, and the nature of Hymnwave. As anyone who’s ever picked up a distress call in a sci-fi game would have expected, there are more such alien signals than what is described in the Bible, and I’m glad to hear my expedition mates grapple with some dark discoveries influence on their beliefs.
Jettflight, meanwhile, has a soothing rhythm: you swoosh over steam-collecting contours to maintain high speeds without overheating your scramjet, and boost jumps or “pops” to climb hills and interact with sensitive objects interactive. There’s a threat ahead, but there’s no fighting other than the use of certain ship abilities and terrain variables to scare off angry wildlife. It’s a space novel firmly opposed to conquest, and the characters often extol the importance of treading lightly on Earth, though the plot is somewhat self-deceiving based on understanding those values.
At times, no combat feels more like a missing piece than a premise element to properly explore. You don’t shoot predators, but you stun them with hypnotic gas, guide them into explosives, or just knock them back with well-timed pops — all of which are combative enough, even if it doesn’t involve lasers. But it touches on the broader theme of environmentalism that unthinking noise can be just as damaging as any blatantly hostile act. This new planet is a massive musical installation, its ecosystem a reverberant assemblage, and its creatures very sensitive to harsh acoustics. Just by exploring in your thriving rocket ship, you trigger new and unwanted vibrations that ultimately lead to a catastrophe. This element also allows Jett to speak to the universe of swords and sorcery—another otherworldly plane bound by a particular frequency.
It can be fascinating to experience these effects in the field. The problem is that Jett is always talking about his own nuances. Every new vision, goal, or turn of events elicits lengthy comments from other pilots and researchers returning to your landing site (to her credit, May has remained silent throughout). The script’s tediousness resonates in the game’s first-person indoor extension, in which your fellow scouts joke around in soup and stick to the topic of divinity and the universe. It’s less popular when applied to things like what a boost gauge does or how a repair kit is built. It shouldn’t take a whole set of language between the side characters to tell me what color waypoint I’m looking for. Usually by the time the actors start telling me what to do, I’m done.
You can’t skip these chats while you’re flying, and sometimes, the game slows down time and takes control of the camera to force your undivided attention. It’s maddening, and a sad consequence is that you increasingly dislike characters who are supposed to be decent sidekicks – tenacious, earnest but self-deprecating souls light-years away from the usual space-ocean stereotype . In particular I’ve come to despise Isao, your co-pilot, and as such, he’s the main source of guidance and mentorship, and he’s said to be your best friend.
Jett occasionally merges its warring parts in a glamorous way. The transition from the air to the ground is lingering, and the solid-colored landscape is close at hand, evolving into a swaying flora. That said, art direction is often as annoying as it is exciting. A muted color palette and zoomed-in perspective make for striking screenshots—grey seas pierced by shimmering cones, tree canopies like embers scattered in a sunrise. Often, however, games are just monotonous and blurry.
Your ship is a little white cross in the center, like a lander pulled from a CRT-era arcade simulation, ported to HD without resizing. It creates a subtle contrast reminiscent of the little swordsman below trudging through a dark screen, but the elevated view isn’t exactly practical. During sharp turns, you often forget which direction your boat is pointing, or how high you are compared to loose rocks and trees that you can’t pass. Collision with an object won’t kill you, but it does put you into landing mode and cause the Jett to roll over the surface, just as you swing into things, leaving your teeth on edge. Even on a 4K screen, the icons of other ships and the colorful emblems of important flora are easy to forget.
Over time, I got used to Jett’s divisive style, but I also disliked its environment less and less. The singularity and separation of the landscape is eroded by a sense that, functionally, it is a series of creatively redesigned springboards, circles of speed and obstacles to be moved or broken. The goals aren’t exciting, ranging from basic A-to-B fare to escort missions to the odd exercise of dragging or luring something. Later, you’ll be asked to complete such puzzles while dealing with a radiation shield that overheats your scramjet, making evasive maneuvers tricky. Radiation forces you to seek shade behind a canyon or mountain, thus creating more possibilities for face-grip collisions. It feels more like something to live with than a well-judged bet.
Then, with a surprising lack of ritual, it’s game over. Specifically, it doesn’t show you the reborn human society you’ve been fighting for, doesn’t explain the fate of certain characters, and doesn’t delve into the exact origins of the dangers awakened by your stepping on this planet. In lieu of closing, you are asked a question: Should your species survive here, or should it allow itself to be “forgotten beyond”? Or should you “stumble across” with complete uncertainty?
Assuming there isn’t another ending that I haven’t discovered – I can think of a few possibilities, depending on how much you care about certain mushrooms – strongly suspect the developers are running out of time before shipping. But intentional or not, this anti-climax fits the story’s anti-imperialism, as it goes against the character of most space exploration sims where the world exists to remove secrets and the future always belongs to the player . It’s not addressed in a good way, it’s not what I can say about the game’s clunky mix of playstyles. Jett is certainly a work of sorcery that needs to be revisited outside of censorship conditions, but it’s not like a game I’d be thinking about 10 years from now.
