A first-anniversary tribute to Giant Squid’s sublime surfing odyssey, and to the freedom an artist can find by returning to his own horizon.
19 August 2026
On 19 August 2025, a stone warrior opened its eyes when a single drop of water struck its brow. A flame stirred inside the armour. The figure rose in the silent Necropolis, threw its great sword into the air, stepped onto the flattened blade and began to surf. That opening contains the whole imaginative audacity of Sword of the Sea: rebirth expressed through movement, a weapon recast as a vehicle, and a dead world waiting for the player to remember what water feels like. Giant Squid released the game for PlayStation 5 and PC exactly one year ago today, with the PS5 version entering the PlayStation Plus Game Catalog on day one. Its premise could be written in a sentence—ride the Hoversword across rolling sand, snow and water to restore a lost ocean—but its real achievement lives in the sensation between the words. The blade leans into a dune. The Wraith gathers speed. A crest becomes a ramp, a chain becomes a rail, and the world briefly releases gravity’s hold. Then an Ocean Seed is awakened and an ochre wasteland erupts into an emerald sea, carrying fish, kelp, dolphins, orcas and immense spiralling shoals into a space that appeared lifeless seconds earlier. Few games make renewal feel so immediate, physical and joyous.
The obvious ancestor is Journey, the 2012 landmark for which Giant Squid founder and creative director Matt Nava served as art director, yet the most revealing story behind Sword of the Sea concerns Nava’s long reluctance to revisit its orange desert. After Journey, he co-founded Giant Squid and moved deliberately through other elements and palettes: the submerged blue wonder of ABZÛ in 2016, then the green forests and open skies of The Pathless in 2020. Nava later acknowledged that he had been avoiding orange because Journey arrived so early in his career and any return would invite a daunting comparison. With Sword of the Sea, avoidance gave way to recognition. He returned to the desert because he still had ideas that the earlier game could not contain, describing the decision with blunt clarity: “this is me.” That admission gives the game an emotional history before the Wraith has travelled a metre. It is the work of an artist ceasing to treat his most recognisable instincts as a shadow from which he must escape. The result draws openly from the desert and wordless visual storytelling of Journey, the living ocean of ABZÛ, and the velocity and heroic scale of The Pathless, while the Hoversword supplies the organising idea that belongs completely to this game. Nava has called it the culmination of his previous work. A year of distance has made that description feel exact.
Movement is Giant Squid’s true narrative language, and here it becomes both subject and verb. The Hoversword combines the carving of a snowboard, the line-finding of a skateboard and the surrender of a surfboard to a moving force. It accumulates momentum naturally, lets the Wraith catch enormous air, and turns ancient tombs, tiled roofs, broken statues and monumental chains into a sacred skatepark. The controls are generous by design. A shaky input still produces a graceful landing; the camera subtly finds the strongest line; nearby geometry nudges rather than punishes. Tricks, grabs, flips, wall rides and grinds give the player room for expression without converting every beautiful surface into an exam. This generosity was inherited from The Pathless, whose assisted archery allowed the player to feel like a master archer, and applied here to the fantasy of effortless surfing. Giant Squid removed the boost pads and overt rail systems from early prototypes because they made the world feel mechanically signposted. The finished game trusts shape, colour, distance and curiosity. Its ruins teach by invitation. A curve suggests acceleration, a high ledge suggests a secret, and a line of Tetra glinting over a chasm quietly asks whether the player is ready to fly.
That design produces a rare relationship between agency and surrender. Most traversal systems ask the player to defeat terrain through precision, stamina or repeated correction. Sword of the Sea asks the player to read terrain and join its motion. Nava drew upon a lifetime of skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing and scuba diving, particularly the sense that these pursuits place a person inside forces vastly greater than themselves. A surfer does not manufacture the wave; the wave carries the surfer who learns how to meet it. The game preserves that humility even at its fastest. Its distant camera makes the Wraith small against immense dunes and glacial slopes, while the shifting ground behaves like a living participant rather than a neutral platform. Restoring water changes the routes available, increases speed, raises kelp into climbable forests and summons creatures that become companions, lifts and moving paths. Land, sea and sky begin to share one visual logic. Fish swim through open air. Mountains retain their form beneath the returned ocean. The transformation reaches beyond decoration because play itself becomes freer when life comes back.
The Wraith is a fitting centre for this idea: an empty vessel awakened after the war is over, searching for purpose in the consequences left behind. Its great sword initially carries the silhouette of violence, although almost every use of it concerns travel, play and connection. The game’s few confrontations with leviathans draw upon the flowing scale of Shadow of the Colossus, but combat never takes command of the whole form. The enduring image is a warrior standing on the weapon rather than swinging it. This conversion from instrument of conflict to means of passage gives the title its deepest charge. Renewal cannot undo the ancient catastrophe recorded in murals, tombs and fragments, and the Wraith cannot return to the identity for which it was made. It can move differently through what remains. Even the structure of each chapter follows that thought: encounter barrenness, search through ruins, release the Ocean Seeds, then feel the same space acquire colour, speed, sound and possibility. Restoration becomes a playable act, repeated until the player understands it through the hands.
Austin Wintory’s score completes that understanding. His fourth major collaboration with Nava is built around an electronic soundscape enclosing a solo piano, gradually joined by woodwinds, strings, percussion, soloists and voices. The Phoenix Boys Choir accompanies the Wraith’s awakening and early innocence; fragments of mixed adult choir appear as experience gathers; the deep sound of London Voices gives the opposing force its gravity. This musical growth follows the character rather than looping as a fixed label for each location. Wintory and the development team shaped score and play together from early builds, allowing each to alter the other until momentum, revelation and music seemed to breathe in one rhythm. The origin of the choral idea is wonderfully strange: Nava shared Werner Herzog’s thought that a skating film could carry the sacred feeling of Orthodox chant, and Wintory followed the provocation until it became the score’s spiritual spine. In February 2026, Sword of the Sea won the Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media. Journey had made history with Wintory’s 2013 nomination before a dedicated games category existed; thirteen years later, this return to the desert carried their collaboration all the way to a win. The award feels almost uncannily suited to a game about cycles, recurrence and a single surviving drop becoming an ocean.
Its elegance can obscure how precariously the project reached release. Sword of the Sea spent roughly five years in development, and Giant Squid faced a point at which the independent studio did not know whether it could finish. Support from PlayStation Indies and the agreement to launch through PlayStation Plus provided the funding and time required to bring it across the line. Nava later said the arrangement “saved the game.” That knowledge sharpens the final work without requiring the player to romanticise hardship. The clean transitions, responsive movement, enormous animated surfaces and hundreds of creatures flooding restored spaces came from sustained technical and artistic labour by a small team. The same context also complicates casual complaints about length. The central journey can be completed in roughly three hours, with further time available for hidden areas, Tetra, trick challenges, upgrades and New Game Plus. Some reviewers found the puzzles simple, the creature-riding sequences heavier than the Hoversword, and the story’s emotional reach uneven. Those reservations are fair. They also describe the edges of a work with extraordinary concentration. Sword of the Sea knows the sensation it wants to create, carries it through a complete arc, and ends before repetition erodes its force.
The response confirmed that this compactness found an audience. A year after release, the PS5 version holds an 88 Metascore and an 8.3 user score on Metacritic; Steam lists nearly 1,600 reviews, 89 per cent positive, under its “Very Positive” designation; OpenCritic records an average of 87 with 96 per cent of critics recommending it. The numbers support what the game communicates without speaking: pleasure can carry serious artistic intent, accessibility can coexist with expressive depth, and visual splendour becomes stronger when the player’s body understands it through control. The game earned further recognition across music, art and independent-game categories, yet the Grammy remains the clearest emblem of its first year because the score cannot be separated from the movement it accompanies. Even so, critical affection does not automatically settle the economics of independent development. In April 2026, Giant Squid said it was beginning to examine ports and would love a physical edition, while remaining focused on recouping development costs. As of this anniversary, the released versions remain on PS5 and PC. A wider future would be welcome for a work whose central metaphor is the return of water to places it could not previously reach.
One year on, Sword of the Sea feels increasingly valuable because it believes motion can contain thought. It does not pause the player to explain flow, renewal, surrender or self-acceptance. It gives those ideas weight, velocity and texture, then lets them arrive through the fingertips. The game also stands as a quiet statement about artistic identity. Nava’s return to orange did not diminish Journey, repeat it or compete with it. He carried thirteen years of new craft back into a colour he once feared, and found another world waiting there. Wintory returned with him and wrote music that began with one drop, one flame and one childlike voice before expanding into a choral ocean. Giant Squid gathered its history into a single blade and pointed it towards the horizon.
The perfect wave in Sword of the Sea is therefore larger than a spectacular final run. It is the moment when memory, skill and instinct align; when an artist stops resisting the current of his own work; when a player feels the world move beneath them and chooses to trust it. Games often represent power as the ability to dominate a space. Here, power is the ability to enter a relationship with it. The Wraith begins as a hollow remnant of war and becomes a source of life by learning to ride.
A year later, the sea still rises.
