Do you like fonts? If you like fonts, you must play Swordship. (After Pentiment.) Swordship gets fonts. It loves fonts. And it’s not just the fonts themselves, but what the game does with them. Finish a level and “LINE CLEAR” is laid out on the ocean. Finish sorting your earnings and “SHIPPED” is splashed across the screen. This is a game where the fonts make things beautiful. It’s even a pleasure to die, because “GAME OVER” is arranged so artfully.
Beyond the fonts, Swordship is still rather excellent. This is pure arcade brilliance, actually, a fast-paced avoid-’em-up with a maritime larceny twist. Your Swordship is a dinky yellow mischief-maker, a needle-thin arrowhead of a craft that can open its tiny jaws to grab containers lost to the ocean, and then pinch them. It can’t shoot, not really anyway, but it can trick nearby enemies into killing each other. Collect containers, get the enemies to kill each other, all within the narrow confines of a single top-down screen, which is given a bit of zip by the fact that everything on the screen is actually racing over the surface of endless waves. That’s Swordship’s whole deal. But as with the fonts, it’s not the rules of the game so much as what the game does with the rules.
Okay, so collecting containers. You’re racing along, moving left and right and up and down and a container is approaching. You know this because a bright yellow line appears on the screen – a shipping lane. Get into that and collect the container! Zing! I don’t think there is actually a greater feeling in any game I’ve played this year. Pure connection. So now, you have a container in your mouth. You can use it as a bomb to wipe the screen of enemies, or you can bank it, which means waiting until a drop-off point appears on screen and hovering there for a few seconds.
