Deepest Sword
Year: 2021
Rating: E
Time Played: 41 minutes / 0.68 hours
There are plenty of reasons I like Deepest Sword. It’s a simple gameplay gimmick with wide-ranging applications. It’s a quick play-through that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Most of all, it has a cute pixel art aesthetic and amusing dialogue for the dragon at the end of each level. There was a lot of love and care put into a game like this, and it shows. It almost feels nostalgic for the little freeware games I used to play growing up and I can half imagine it sitting on some floppy disk in my parents’ basement.
As a physics-based puzzle game, the challenge scales with the size of your weapon. Each level increases the length—and by proxy the weight—of the sword. After the first few levels, I was hooked. While it uses basically the same layout for each level, the limitations of my sword forced me into different paths that led to the dragon I was meant to slay. I quickly had to learn different techniques to move around the level, as the massive sword became more of a hindrance than an asset. Of course, this was not without its challenges.
My only qualm with this game is that it didn’t have the proper platformer “lead-up” technique that’s common for those kinds of games. A few of the puzzles stumped me and had to look up how to accomplish them. Some were only solvable by some very precise movements, others used techniques I hadn’t considered using with the sword because there wasn’t anywhere to learn or practice them before I had to use them. Still, despite this difficulty curve, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the solution before I finally gave up and looked it up.
A cute and unique physics-based puzzle platformer, I give Deepest Sword 4.5 stars out of 5.
1/2
