SWORN

My first thought when loading SWORN was a quiet, knowing grin: Windwalk looked directly at Hades, loved it, and asked what would happen if you could bring three friends along. That instinct turns out to be the game's greatest strength and also its most reliable limitation, and both things are worth knowing before you commit to a run. The setup is a satisfying inversion of Arthurian legend. Arthur is the tyrant, his once-noble Knights of the Round Table are the bosses standing between you and a liberated Camelot, and you respawn each death in a hub rooted in Carmarthen Castle, where Merlin, Nimue, and figures drawn from wider British folklore greet you between runs. The lore delivery is minimal and cryptic rather than expository, peeled back gradually through character dialogue and environmental detail. If you came for a dense narrative, you will find threads rather than tapestries. If you came for the world-as-backdrop-to-combat, the atmosphere holds. The four playable classes cover a clean spread of fantasy archetypes. The Vigilante is your starter sword-and-board fighter with access to a bow, staff, and chakrams alongside the shortsword. The Rook leans into stun mechanics and heavy armour, with a Great Hammer or Halberd that rewards patient, punishing swings. The Monk is a harder-hitting close-range specialist, and the Spectre is a fragile but devastating spellcaster built for players who want to feel genuinely reckless. Each class carries four weapons, each with alternate moveset variations, plus a personal pool of spells unlocked via Crystal Shards. You then layer Fae Lord blessings on top of all of that: Titania for fire-based cleansing damage, Oberon for wind-speed strikes, Gogmagog for crowd-control stuns, Beira for freeze setups that feed the Shatter mechanic when paired with stagger. Over 200 blessings means the build space is genuinely wide, and a recent 1.2 patch added three alternate bosses on Knight difficulty and higher, alongside a Boss Rush mode set in a single Camelot arena, which goes some way to address the criticism that boss variety was too thin in the base game. Where SWORN earns its place on the install list is the co-op feel. Reviving teammates costs gold or health, forcing real moment-to-moment negotiation. Certain Fae blessings buff the entire party, so your Rook building Gogmagog can effectively shield the whole squad. The synergies between classes in four-player are genuinely surprising and are clearly what the design is oriented toward. Solo play is functional and the difficulty scaling holds up, but the game lights up when you have even one other person on voice chat calling out when they are down. The honest critique is that SWORN plays it safe in ways that hold it back from being truly memorable on its own terms. The combat is a beat slower and enemies slightly less reactive than Hades, and the early progression wall, where without meta-progression investment you hit a hard ceiling around the third area, can make the first few hours feel more frustrating than inviting. The 3D character model presentation when picking up blessings jars against the otherwise confident hand-drawn, Mike Mignola-influenced comic aesthetic. And the soundtrack, which mixes medieval strings with sudden bursts of heavy metal guitar during boss encounters, is one of the game's genuine surprises and almost nobody talks about it, which is a small tragedy. Steam reception at launch settled at very positive in the English-language pool, which feels about right. This is a game that knows its audience precisely: roguelite fans who want a co-op session game they can run repeatedly over a weekend, class-builders who enjoy weapon and spell theorycrafting, and anyone who has stared at the Hades co-op mod and wanted something built for it from the ground up. It does not transcend its reference points, but it executes them with enough craft and enough genuine love for the mythology that calling it derivative and walking away would miss the point.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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