Do you remember the first time you gazed upon Liurnia of the Lakes in Elden Ring? I do. That was when the titanic scale of FromSoftware’s magnum opus hit me: pools of glinting water stretched as far as the eye could see; mist curled around endless rock formations. Such was the sheer massiveness of the space, I felt as if I was being swallowed whole by it, experiencing a kind of horizontal vertigo. Momentarily, I felt the need to step back, to root myself in safe and familiar ground. But the pull of this virtual world was undeniable: it beckoned.
Impressive 3D vistas can evoke many feelings in us: a sense of the sublime; dread even. The writer Steven Poole identifies another emotion. “The jewel in the crown of what videogames offer is the aesthetic emotion of wonder,” he opined in his 2000 book, Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution. He was writing during the ascendancy of 3D games, the likes of Resident Evil and Tomb Raider presenting players with interlocking meshes of geometry – complex representations of space – to get lost in. “Such videogames at their best build awe-inspiring spaces from immaterial light,” Poole continued before unleashing an all-timer metaphor of games writing. “They are cathedrals of fire.”
Why is my mind on Poole’s 25-year-old book? Because “cathedral of fire” is precisely how I’d describe what I’m seeing in Sword of the Sea, the latest game from Matt Nava’s studio, Giant Squid. Nava, if you’re not aware, was the art director on Journey, that gem of a game whose sand dunes glinted with Gustav Klimt-esque flecks of gold. Having turned his focus to seascapes in Abzû and forests in The Pathless, Nava is back rendering deserts with virtuoso aplomb: great orange-burned landscapes whose particles shimmer and sparkle in the pristine sunshine. Only now the desert moves more vigorously, roiling like an ocean. And I’m gliding across it on a hoverboard, pulling grab tricks as I get air from each cresting sandy wave.
Nava agrees wholeheartedly with Poole: that games, perhaps more than any other artistic medium, are the preeminent transmitters of eye-widening wonder. “Games engage you in all your senses,” he says over a video call. “When I’m out in nature having a great time, a kind of transcendental, spiritual experience, it’s like I’m seeing something, feeling something – I’m there interacting with the environment. It’s all the things that you do in a video game.”
A little way into Sword of the Sea, the twinkling sand dunes make way for snowy mountains: essentially, the game turns into a new age SSX. Nava, a keen snowboarder himself, recalls one trip up a mountain (and trip really is the word). He looked up at a summit from the bottom, a little intimidated by the thick snow clouds swirling about its peak. As he ascended on the ski lift, Nava could feel the bludgeoning wind – the “power of the storm.” Then he started snowboarding down the massif. Nava describes emerging from said blanket of clouds into an “amazing vista of sunlight.” But as he hurtled downwards this heavenly sight disappeared almost as soon as it had appeared. Because snowboarding is so fast – and thrilling speed is undeniably part of the appeal – Nava’s experience of the mountain lasted little over a minute, a kind of warp-speed hike. “It’s the closest you get to being everywhere all at once,” he enthuses.
Sword of the Sea makes good on this alpine experience. The game is a quicksilver blur of colour, light, momentum, and texture. It is also pure fantasy: you grind along gigantic metal chains which stretch for miles across the land; you’re able to jump to the top of various buildings, upon which your board makes the most delightful clinking sound.
The far-out vistas and hallucinogenic prettiness which Nava has made a career out of is not the only way wonder manifests in video games. Sometimes spatial wonder collides with systemic wonder, as is the case with Outer Wilds’ clockwork cosmos. Each planet orbits around a gigantic sun in unison with one another and I, the player, can, at any moment, board my ship, fly seamlessly into space, and set foot on any of these celestial outposts. Or how about watching a high-level Dwarf Fortress run on YouTube (because I’ve never really got my head around the game), marvelling at the depth of simulation crafted by brothers Tarn and Zach Adams? These games take the breath away, maybe even more so than, say, the post-apocalyptic panoramas of the Horizon series. I think that’s because wonder in video games is often determined, to some extent, by a knowledge of the medium’s technical constraints (and I don’t tend to associate constraints all that much with the Horizon games). In essence, you’re enchanted because you have a sense of how hard the dev worked to pull something off.
Both the raw labour and technical wizardry of the 20-person development team is on show everywhere in Sword of the Sea, and especially in its shaders. Shaders are mercurial bits of code that determine how surfaces are rendered. There are many beautiful instances in this game: the waterfalls which run dry with sand; translucent emerald blue water that the player is frequently boarding across; the desert waves themselves which constitute so much of the game’s terrain – constantly churning, ebbing, and flowing, the game updating this surface data at 60 times a second as you careen across it. Video games are frequently lauded as existing at the nexus of art, maths, science, and tech; shaders seem to me where this is expressed most vividly. They are also maybe the closest video games come to having actual brush marks.
The idea of brush marks in a video game brings to mind a biological detail about Nava that has long stuck with me. His father is the renowned painter, John Nava. As a young man, Nava senior spent time studying in Florence, the glorious cradle of Renaissance art. But he doesn’t really create what we might describe as typically magnificent or transcendent art; he tends to paint people and faces in a pseduo-realistic style. One of his most famous pieces is a tapestry which hangs in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles; it shows a procession of worshippers in quiet reverence. The image has a beautifully earthy quality.
Nava junior would go on family pilgrimages to Europe to find particular Caravaggio paintings; they would hop between museums, ancient ruins, and basilicas, spaces that either deliberately or inadvertently express a sense of awe. It seems as if this sensibility has long been hard-wired into his brain; Nava is steeped in it. Almost all the surfaces in his games appear to shimmer with this emotion. In Sword of the Sea, the game maker’s palpable wonder for the world is expressed as a kind of pure visual ecstasy. The feelings only intensify the faster you go.
