Swordbreaker The Game

Though some decisions are absolutely random, it's joy to explore the castle in search of new ways and fun or beautiful or glory scenes. Especially in a good company 💞

This is a great little interactive fiction game. That is, if you don't mind dying MANY MANY MANY TIMES!!!! If you don't like dying, you will get pissed off. Me, I suck and am used to dying so it was par for the course. I enjoyed the story very much--so much so that I played through several times to get all the achievements. The plot is definitely entertaining and the artwork is well done. This game is a great way to spend a few hours.

A poorly implemented choose-your-own adventure visual novel. The translation from Russian is poor, but its not like there is any really story to begin with. You don't even get a name.
The interface was clearly designed by a sadist.
There isn't any real story here, just a series of dead endings (literally, you die) until you figure out the random sequence to make it to one of the games 3 endings.
Not worth your time, her time, his time, anyone's time. You deserve better, internet friend.

Swordbreaker The Game is a hilarious "choose your own adventure" style visual novel game in which you are presented conundrum after conundrum ranging from simple tasks such as choosing the left, middle, or right hallway to venture down or more tension-fraught decisions including whether to ask an apparition a question or smack it on its ass. Your choices range from the practical (run up and kick a skeleton in the face before waiting for it to react...) to the more obscure, including trying on a dress to evade a creepy librarian later in the game.


After one initial playthrough (and admittedly brief as death literally lingers around every corner...) I chose to view the "castle map" to see an overview of the insane amount of branching storylines and scenes that are possible in the game. It helps that most of the art is all sleekly designed, with a broad range of enemies and situations from a tense battle with a shark that will make you wish you had a bigger boat to a suit of armor pleading for you to release it from the wall. The game's story doesn't take itself too seriously but is surprising as well, with flat-out allusions to nuclear armaments being developed by the blacksmith of the castle, aliens crashlanding elsewhere in the castle, etc...it's all a bit nonsense but it works. The story is absurd but intricate and had me reading each panel despite some noticable translation errors to ENG.


Swordbreaker The Game's "death music" is both hilarious and frustrating to see as you choose the wrong option only to see your character being eviscerated in the next panel. If you liked reading Choose Your Own Adventure books or know this style of gameplay Swordbreaker's art, music, and writing are all entertaining and often result in ridiculous death panels of your character being brutally mauled by some denizen of the castle whether on land, sea, or air.

A checkpoint system of some kind would have made the game a bit more appealing to rummage through with multiple playthroughs (i.e. skipping through X amount of panels that you've seen every choice for..) instead of having to start from the beginning each time. After having played through the game a handful of times (about 5) I did find myself clicking impatiently to skip / make the right decisions on the earliest, most often-seen sections that I already knew all of the results or the "correct choice" to. That aside, you are given 3 lives each main attempt at the story, so if you screw up and get your face eaten by a boar for attacking it too soon in an area you have never been before, you can try again with a different approach and progress from that point onward. Screw up 2 more times, however, and it's goodbye face and back to the entrance of the castle for you!


I picked up Swordbreaker The Game most for its art and comical violence after seeing a friend share screenshots of the main character's face being lasered off by a dude made out of wood and I haven't been disappointed at all with the full product. Though the trial and error gameplay here won't appeal to everyone, seeing how many branching panels / possible endings there are has me excited to go through the game several more times, laughing as I hear the "death music" and seeing what ridiculous reason there is for my choice being the incorrect one once again.

I wanted to like this game, but as it stands it is just a comic book that offers you a choice on how to continue. Which is what I expected when I bought the game and this would be fine EXCEPT the game doesn't provide any indication as to what the right choice could be. I still could live with that IF common sense came into play, but it becomes quite clear early on that the absurd choice that makes no sense at all like throwing a dress at a shark apparantly saves your life. So basically the 'game' is nothing but trial and error.

I would be even as forgiving to overlook all of the above if the GUI was even a little bit useable and I could quickly go through the game. But alas, the GUI won't let you:
1) Text: only 3 lines of text are visible at a time (!), so you have to scroll through text. So when the game offers you over three choices you can't even see them all at once on your screen. You also can't even use on the keyboard or something easy like that. And the font is pretty big as well so even for a little bit of text you better get used to scrolling. Granted, as I was playing on a touchpad I could not use a scroll wheel on a mouse so I don't know how that would have worked out.
2) When the GUI offers you a choice, you cannot click on the choice directly but for some reason have to click on a corresponding number at the top of the screen. This might have been acceptable to me except see point 1.

For a simple 'game' like this a simple GUI would suffice. Instead I'm not sure how anyone could mess this up so badly but here we go. I'm sorry for being harsh but this was just plain bad in my book.

Swordbreaker is an interactive fiction adventure visual novel both developed and published by DuCats Games Studio. As chance would have it, a down on his luck battle-hardened adventurer receives an old scroll from a dying man just as he manages to take his last breath. Furthermore, the scroll actually turns out to be an old map with a clearly marked location. With no other prospects on the horizon, the hero known as the Swordbreaker sets out on a perilous journey across dangerous territory until said map leads him to an apparently abandoned old castle. What awaits our hero on the other side of the door? Could it be glorious adventure and untold treasures or terrifying horrors and certain doom? How the story of the Swordbreaker unfolds is entirely up to you in this clever non-linear story!

The great thing about this visual novel is that it plays much like the old "choose-your-own-adventure" books from back in the day. For anyone not familiar with these books, it was a series that literally let you choose your own path as you read the story. For example, your character comes to the end of a long dark corridor with two doors exiting. Do you choose "Door #1-go to page 12" or "Door #2-go to page 20"? The fantastic thing about these books was that any choice could lead to the continuation of your adventure or a very gruesome death and the end of the story..."Whoops I'm dead let me quickly flip back to page such and such.". This V.N. does an excellent job of re-capturing that wonderful series but in videogame format. Much to my chagrin, I have an innate ability for making poor choices in life. This also seems to have translated to my gaming habits as well because most of the time I always made the absolute wrong choices in Swordbreaker although I must state that some of the options given to you in this particular story did seem rather illogical. I WISH that I could give you some examples because there are MANY but I don't want to spoil the story for you. With that said, Swordbreaker manages quite well to bring back a nostalgic storytelling method for this terrific adventure that you embark on.

Visually, Swordbreaker looks wonderful with a really nice artstyle that is, drum roll please, not anime or manga-inspired which is a breath of fresh air considering that most of the visual novels that I've read to date on Steam have been. The art is beautiful, has nice colors and shading as well. The U.I. for the novel is very simple and easy to follow. Sadly there are no ambient sound effects or any sound effects at all other than the soundtrack which isn't very memorable in my opinion. Also, I can't say for certain but some of the words and phrasing seemed odd and out of place so I'm assuming that English is not the writer or translator's first language maybe? In conclusion, while the visual presentation is very good sadly the aural quality of this V.N. leaves much to be desired.

This was a really great but short read and a little different from the typical visual novel experiences that I tend to have on Steam so that was quite refreshing. I enjoyed this story so much that I'm going to make it a point to keep my eye out for more V.N.'s like this one because I really miss the "choose-your-own-adventure" books. Sadly there are very few options for Swordbreaker other than selecting the language and turning the sound and music on and off. However, there are quite a number of Steam Achievements to hunt down and Steam Trading Cards to collect as well. Also the replayability is quite high as there are a number of outcomes and death sequences to discover as you take alternate paths and make different decisions throughout the castle walls. To summarize, even though it can be highly frustrating at times, Swordbreaker is RECOMMENDED to visual novel and choose-your-own adventure fans.

Well, the pictures are fantastic, and the music is...erm...decent, if a tad "inappropriate" at times. But the writing is, let's be honest, downright juvenile on the whole. Which would normally be a fairly fatal thing for an interactive novel, if the quality (and sheer quantity) of the illustrations didn't make up for a good deal else.

The "story" itself also has its moments: at the very least, for every slightly naff idea, there's a half-decent one. So fuck it, I kind of enjoyed it. There's certainly a huge variety of choices on offer, though the "three lives, fuck you, start all over again" policy is a bit harsh considering how easy it is to die (and we're not always talking "logic" here, either...in the finest Fighting Fantasy tradition, trial-and-error is just as likely to get you kilt as it is to reward you generously).

When all is said and done, though, you really can't fault the price. For three bucks, you get a whole lot of interactive novel, a bucketload of bad humour, and an absolute slew of lovely images (which you can even choose to view by themselves, both within the game and in a separate gallery; there's a nifty map of all the areas as you explore them, too). The shit-tonne of Achievements are also a wise idea on the behalf of the devs, as they'll no doubt give many a player the motivation to replay the darned thing again and again, trying out every single option on offer just to see what happens (and what nifty pic accompanies said outcome).

Bottom line: don't go in expecting too much for your moolah, and chances are you won't be too disappointed.

Verdict: 7.5/10.

Note: when you start the game for the first time, the openning is played in Russian, and you will only be able to change the language of the game on the main menu screen after that.

On the first several playthroughs, the game Swordbreaker seemed to be a fine visual novel with unlimited choices and each mattered. However, when you have experienced all three ends and get used to the way it works, this game become a game for memory and for traversing a huge fixed selection tree by trials and errors, aiming for 100% scenes.
You can probably complete all three ends in about one hour which may be exiciting in some extent, and the rest belongs to the achievements time (or boring rubbish time for this game), due to the inconvenient UI (your need to click on the text and scroll down EVERYTIME to see what the choices are, unless you can remember all of them/their numbers) and the inability to save/load (if you made a wrong choice, which of course happens a lot, you will have to start over from the beginning).

In summary, this game is a tiny dessert enjoyable for the first runs and its trading cards worth its price when discount. Not recommended for those who is looking for a fantasy visual novel with a good story.

I'm a long-time enthusaist of gamebooks, and I've tried many digital ones.

Pros:
* Lovely art.
* Simple UI, short paragraphs - easy to play through.
* Lots of things to discover.

Cons:
* Subpar writing. Uninteresting, lacking any sophistication, sexist and sometimes misleading. Includes such things as: Wearing a dress makes you "a pervert" and leads to your death; trying to avoid harming an old toothless dog is "not manly" (and you have to kick it in the head), one of the three choices you get right at the beginning is "slap the ghost maid's ass", etc.
* Most choices aren't informative, and lead to almost random consequences.
* Bad translation from Russian. "The adventurer became animated because he needed money very much".

There's a lot of potential in the presentation, but the writing ruins any chance of rising to that potentinal.

Pros:
+ Great art.
+ A lot of choices.
+ Good ost. Even though there are not many tracks, they fit in pretty well.
+ High replay value.
+ Dark humor.
+ Some hilarious death scenes. There are unexpected ones, but most of them are obvious and easy to avoid if you use common sense and logic.
+ It's not expensive.
+ Dedicated devs. They are always willing to help (just check the discussions of this game).

Neutral:
* It's a short game. If you are just going to do a single playthought it won't take you more than 20 minutes, even less if you end up taking shortcuts. For completionists: it took me 4.8 hours to 100% it.

Cons:
- There are just 3 options: change language (rus/eng), turn on/off the audio or play fullscreen/windowed.
- The audio is too high and you must leave the game in order to lower it. It would have been nice to have the option ingame.
- You can't save middle scenes and load them later after a bad choice. If you want to change your path you must start from the beginning.


I really enjoyed this game, it's cheap and with a lot of content, highly recommend it.

Simple choose-your-adventure game with nice images and a little bit of reading. It's interesting to discover all the right, but also all the wrong paths, by selecting various options and waiting to see the outcome. There's a lot of unexpected turns, NPC's who can help, characters you can save or kill, even help them if you're willing... and all your decisions end up deciding what kind of ending you may get - if you survive to see it.

It looked like a good game. A great art style, had amazing reviews for it, but it just was not for me. If you notice, I didn't play the game very long, and for good reason. The game is really well translated from Russian to English, but the choices didn't really vary. It was either sudden death, which was usually the option I picked, or the other option which ended up being the correct option. No real branching choices. It took me forever to get this game to work on my computer, only for me to be disappointed.

The game would be better with more choices for scenarios that didn't just lead to sudden death. I may be just picky though. I'm not upset about how much I spent on this, considering it was on sale for pretty cheap, but I think you should look elsewhere before spending your money on this game.

I really enjoyed this game! The art was really nice, and there are tons of possibilities depending on each choice you make. I hope to see more games like this one soon!

Good luck to the developers on their next releases. I’m looking forward to play them!

10/10.

7.1/10 - A PURE/HARDCORE Choose Your Own Adventure Game.

I have mixed emotions about this game. It was pretty awesome and was filled with an immense amount of content but you really have to work for it! There are literally hundreds or options, paths and story conclusions you can pursue as your journey unfolds. The graphics and translations are good and nothing prevented me from enjoying this title. It does start in Russian but can be changed easily... so don't stress.

I wouldn't really classify this as a visual novel; there is no linear progression in the traditional sense and gameplay makes it difficult to create a fluid experience. I found that each session would last about 15 minutes; I would then make bad decisions, die and have to start from the beginning. This is where I start to get antsy and want to give up on the game in general. In order to advance in the story you will end up playing the first few stages 50+ times in order to pursue different paths in the story. That alone prevents me from loving this title.

Worth the $3; a solid game with a hardcore emphasis on choices matter.

Accidently Reviewed

This game is absolutely awesome. There is so much to explore, so many creatures, so many ways to kill and ...die. Great art too. It is not your usual VN where you can just skip through the story. There are a lot of images and deaths you need to unlock so if you are searching for a fast easy game..this is not for you. If you want a great choose your own adventure game with humor and horror..then by all means go ahead and buy this.

Imagine TellTale game without necessary listening for dialogues, without (unskippable) animation (but game does have beautiful pictures), with bigger variety of story, where choices made does matter and for small price - this will be Swordbreaker.

Game is good and mostly it's visual novel where incorrect choices lead to hero death. Game is all about remembering correct ones and can be completed in under 1 hour. Keep this in mind, because this may disappoint some people who think that every game should look like Mass Effect and cost less than 5$.

So there I was... A nameless adventurer traveling through this mysterious castle when I come upon a classroom. Intertesting I think to myself, and hey there is a note from a previous student. it reads " The black tiles are rigged with land mines." I think to myself damn what a close call I'm glad I read that note. Hey there is another note the first was so helpful I better read this too! (my last thought before I lay dead. A mysterious adventurer in a mysterious castle!

Okay for the review... Let me start off by saying usually what I spend on
a game is roughly the amount of hours of enjoyment I expect to get out
of a game. (there are exceptions of course, but in this case a $3 game,
and I got well over 10 hours of enjoyment.) You could easily play through
this a few times in a couple hours, but I left no stone untouched through my journey(s)
in the mysterious tale(s) of Swordbreaker. You are a nameless adventurer traversing
through a haunted castle in searce of riches, and glory. So now I'll get to the point:

Pros for me -
1. Plenty of paths to get a good amount of play time for the money spent.
2. Perfect for an hour, or two, or if you only have a couple minutes to play.
3. Cool comic book like graphics/art I really enjoyed it, and thought it set the theme well.
4. Plenty of achievements for the achievement perfectionists out there.
5. Cards
6. I read in several topics where the dev was always willing to help people
in need of technical, and gameplay help. (I got some help with my last
couple scenes from the dev myself) I love to see a smaller dev, so dedicated
to not only thier work, but also thier fan base. I am extremely impressed by how
they stand by this game.

Negative -
1. The only real thing that's negative imo is occasionally the english translations are
a little poor. Not so bad where you can't catch where the story is trying to taking you it's
just a strange way of wording things etc, but by no means does it take from the story.

I really can't recommend Swordbreaker enough. The stories are fun, and interesting. A lot
of times comical. If you enjoy choose your own adventures, or games that aren't going to
take up hours of your time in a sitting then I think you will really enjoy this game. I am really
looking forward to seeing what Ducat brings to the table in the future.

Genre - Choose your own adventure

I was a lover of these type of books as I was growing up as they were a great alternative to board and computer games. This game tries to follow a similar platform but with a lot less reading and more art style.

There is no combat system so each choice will either lead to one of three lives lost or progression towards the end goal. You don't have an inventory, but certain interactions will benefit you later on, or decide your fate.

The first completion should be quite quick. However, there is scope to go back and try different paths for achievements but also the pure enjoyment of failing and succeeding by various means.

It doesn't take itself to seriously and the parodies come thick and fast. As the price is fair for what you get. It is worth grabbing for a quick slice of choose your own adventure fun.

A nice CYOA game with many, many ways to die, pretty cool art, 3 endings, and a lot of achievements to collect. For some reasons, it reminds me of Shadowgate, as a modern Visual Novel Adventure.

Swordbreaker, developed by DuCats Games Studio, is a unique visual novel with some of the strangest, yet interesting designs I’ve ever seen.

The story is fairly simple. You play as a nameless adventurer who goes by the title Swordbreaker. After an evening at the pub, the weary adventurer witnesses a murder. The killer escapes, yet the dying victim hands Swordbreaker an old map before sputtering his last. The map leads to an ancient castle, packed with a limitless supply of treasure! Like most adventurers would, Swordbreaker sets off on a journey that’ll put his skills to the test, and change his life forever.

The entirety of the game takes place in this castle, and it’s got to be the most bazare castle ever portrayed in gaming. Just about anything you can think of dwells here; Giant arachnids, aliens, ghosts, orcs, killer squids, warlocks, princesses, zombies, skeletons and so much more. There are over 300 different scenarios to encounter throughout the castle, all of which result in different outcomes. It’s addictive as hell, and each new playthrough will unveil new fights, encounters and choices.

But, this game’s true saving grace is the artwork. Every single picture, from the most mundane death to a breath-taking fight sequence, throbs with detail. Creatures look frightening and the castle’s twisted interior will make any adventurer soil themselves. The amount of effort and dedication put into this art is unfathomable.

Apart from its random story and breathtaking visuals, it’s hard to believe how much replay value Swordbreaker contains. With hundreds of different encounters and possible ways to die, topped off with over 60 achievements, you’ll be surviving this game’s brutality for quite a few hours. Just playing through once would be a huge disservice to what Swordbreaker achieves.

Translation from Russian to English is fine, and it won’t be the most enticing thing you’ll ever read, but it gets the job done. Sadly, it’s Swordbreaker’s pure reliance on luck that irritates me. Almost every decision made can get you killed, and to survive… well, you’ve just gotta hope for the best. You’re normally given two or three different options to make during scenarios, and it’s never clear which one will keep you alive. You’ve got three lives, and once they’re all depleted, you restart from the beginning. It can be pretty aggravating at times, especially when the game cheats you during a climactic boss fight, but with Swordbreaker’s endless amount of replayability, I’d say that makes up for it.

It’s cheap, it's innocent, and it’ll make for a fun pastime. I see no reason to miss out on something as cool as Swordbreaker.

Die a hundred times? In Swordbreaker you can do exactly that!

This very basic, russian fantasy Visual novel, let´s you as adventurer explore one deadly castle on the search for the ultimate treasure.
While the story is not really impressive, you have some different routes you can follow and three kind of choices for the persons you encounter (cowardly, hero like and aggressive).
From over 300 scenes, there are over 100 death scenes, so one can imagine, that death really comes swiftly here.

You have three lives per playthrough and the end also is relating to the kind of decisions you have mostly chosen.

One playthrough doesn´t take that long, and as to be expected, the scenes repeat themselves after some time, but the graphic is well done, and the music is ok too. This with some (weird) humor, makes up for an enjoyable, if short story.

Conclusio: Swordbreaker is a nice VN snack, for fans. What you get is ok for the price it is offered for and fun enough for a few playthroughs. Completionists also have quite some achievements and extra gallery art to unlock. Some kinda crude translations add to the very special charme .. "you was hero"

Point Scale: 6/10