Beautiful looking and sounding, but pretentious and unfun.
I'll start with the good things. First, the game has an incredible soundtrack. It's not necessarily something that I'd listen to independently, but it sets the tone for almost every scene perfectly. There are happy songs, lazy songs, sad ones, and reflective ones. The atmosphere is set beautifully by this, and it compliments the visual style well. The graphics are a minimalistic sort of pixel-art that harkens back to the 8-bit era. It almost has an impressionistic vibe, with everything feeling almost blurred around the edges and surreal. While it isn't much to look at from a technical standpoint, artistically it succeeds in setting an almost ethereal and whimsical tone.
However, I can't say with certainty that this is an ethereal or whimsical sort of game. Sword and Sworcery is intensely confused about it's own identity. The story itself had the potential to be intensely dark, but it is undermined in several ways throughout the game. First, the impending weight of the endgame is never really pushed until the very end, and you just sort of figure it out for yourself while wandering around nonchalantly before someone simply mentions it. This ruins the drama of what could have been a touching story, since the main character (The Scythian) is easy to connect to identify with
Secondly, and much more importantly, is the fact that the writing of the game tries too hard to be tongue and cheek at times. The majority of the game is written in a sort of hippie stoner-speak that just comes off wrong to me. This is juxtaposed against the narrator, who is always articulate and serious. The tone just swaps back and forth, repeatedly pulling you out of the game and breaking the fourth wall. It would be great if the game's writing was more clever, but it simply isn't. Instead it comes off as pretentious and self-satisfied, like a at snob at a party that thinks he is far funnier than he really is.
Immersion breakers are all over the place. The game is split into 4 episodes of varying length. Each begins with the narrator spouting off some occasionally cryptic dialogue before launching you into the chapter. This also means that every time you finish a chapter, you are taken back to the main menu, as though the game is trying to completely remove you from the experience. All this manages to do is pull you out of the narrative even further, weakening the game's impact in the end. In another case the game even encourages you to stop playing for weeks on end as you wait for the cycles of the moon to change real time. You fortunately don't have to do this, but I can only imagine how little I would care after returning to the game several days later. Many other immersion breakers exist, such as the use of soundtrack composer Jim Guthrie as a character and it's frequent solicitations for you to tweet about the game on twitter.
As a game, there actually isn't much to Sword and Sworcery. You point and click to find your way around, navigating the same two areas for the majority of the game. Within about an hour of play you will have seen the vast majority of locales that the game has to offer, after which point it's just a matter of watching your character slowly (and sometimes briskly) walk from point A to point B. The walking speed isn't terrible, but it can become very frustrating at certain points in the game. In particular, I had to take a few too many 5 minute trips to chamber that can be used to change the cycle of the moon at will.
This isn't helped by the fact that the game insists on letting you figure out most things for yourself. Very late in the game it lets you know that you click and hold on a destination to walk faster to it. You were supposed to simply figure this out by then- the game does not have a list of controls available. It gets worse when you get the "song of sworcery," Where you have to click on different objects in the background in a certain order to main certain things happen. This would be cool, but sometimes there are no hints for what you should be doing in a particular context, reducing the "puzzle" to random clicking until you figure out what you need to focus on. It isn't fun and it isn't satisfying to play like this, but the game design encourages it. Too often in the game you are left with no clue what to do, wandering aimlessly in hopes that you'll find another clue. It's even worse if you take a break from the game for a few days.
Combat is a combination of cool and dull. Cool because it has a fantastically dramatic soundtrack. Dull because you are only pushing two very simple buttons with your mouse while fighting the same two battles over and over for the majority of the game. The first trigon battle is actually exhilarating (until it cheaply one hit kills you). The second and third trigon battles are almost identical, ruining the challenge and the excitement.
I know it doesn't sound so bad on paper, but the bad well outweighs the good here. This is because the inconsistent writing undermines whatever tone was being conveyed by both the narrative and artistic design. The end product is something that has potential, but ultimately feels tedious and self-absorbed instead of engaging. This would have been a much better game if this had been improved alongside a more clearly explained and implemented set of gameplay mechanics.