Grade A-
When an animated sword and ooze combine their strengths to fight the ogre invasion.
Released in 2019 as Possum House Studio’s inaugural game, The Sword and the Slime is a short, sweet, funny platforming adventure with surprising complexity. Our story begins when faeries animate a sword to fight against the invading ogre horde. This animated blade is unstoppable but only has one weakness. If it leaves the light sources, the weapon falls to the ground and loses the fairy enchantment. In the latter levels, your ooze companion becomes your light source to keep you afloat. The ooze creature relies on the sword for protection, and the blade depends on the ooze for light. It’s a beautiful symbiotic partnership. The game time is a short 1-2 hours, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this surprising gem of an indie game.
Never takes itself too serious
I’ll rarely laugh out loud playing a video game. The Sword and the Slime got me a few times, though. My favorite character was the bones of the ancient first faerie queen. An epically formal “‘SUP” introduces the queen to the stage. These queen’s bones emanate the radiant light needed to keep the sword animated and are required to defeat the ogre. Of course, it’s hard for bones to get around independently to help our divine blade savior, but this is solved by our Ooze grabbing up the queen and carrying her around in its slimy core. The Queen finds this to be a rather undignified state of affairs and continually comments on her plight.
Complex and interesting level design
Within the 2d environment, I was impressed at how the puzzles evolved throughout the game. At first, the challenge is simple. You need to stay in the lit areas and avoid things that might knock you into darkness and losing mobility.
Later though, you are leading your slime through platforming challenges between moving ledges. Unfortunately, slimes have no acrobatic abilities and are NOT proficient at this genre.
Making it even more difficult, there are times when you need to grow your slime to activate pressure plates. To grow the slime, you can feed it the corpses of your ogre enemies (or just apples, those work too!). At other moments, you need to reduce the size of the slime to fit through narrow passageways. Every time your slime gets hit by an enemy or trap or the sword, it gets smaller. Too many hits, and it dies, which means level reset. It’s a lot to keep track of!
Unpolished game menu
I did have a bit of trouble with the game’s interface. I was bugging out on what I suspect was a video resolution issue at one point. The characters were below what I could see on screen. But, there were no video settings to update in the game to try and self-service fix. This bug didn’t stop my gameplay completely and only happened when my slime platforming went poorly.
I also didn’t see a “controls” menu for a list of game controls. I looked for this in the menu when I felt I was missing something to reset the level quickly. Ultimately, though, only 20 minutes after posting my question to the Possum House discord, some kind soul sent me an answer to hold “right-click” for a level reset. To be fair, the only reason I was confused is that I didn’t read the intro text in the tutorial. Whoops, and thank you for the quick answer, Possum House!
Overall impression
The Sword and the Slime is a short-time investment and is great for both a laugh and a puzzle challenge. I felt interested and engaged throughout the levels without it ever feeling unattainable. I didn’t know before this game that an animated sword and ooze could be perfect partners to fight evil, but now I will never forget!
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