Sometimes a game arrives that delivers a simple idea on the surface, and then it proceeds to stretch and bend it in ways that pull you in fiendishly. It grips you with its ripple effect gameplay, beautiful and stylish aesthetic and heartfelt narrative. You plan to spend an hour on it, and then you realise it’s 3am and you still don’t want to put it down. That was my experience with Swan Song, which has been utterly transformed since I played its demo months ago.
Swan Song is a spin on turn-based labyrinth puzzles. Each level takes place inside a music box. The music box opens to reveal a swan and a variety of floor blocks of different shapes and colours. The goal is to arrange the floor blocks to allow the swan to move forward with each step it takes, and if arranged correctly, the swan will land on its swan tile to complete the level. At the lower half of the screen is a piece of sheet music with four lanes relating to the four colours of the floor you can manipulate. Each level provides you with various musical notes to place on the music staff. The game is turn-based (or beat-based) because, as the music is played, it alternates between floor movement and swan movement. The player needs to ensure the floor moves to the right spot to allow the swan to move every second beat.
Initially, levels revolve around moving floor tiles along conveyor belts to build the floor ahead of the swan. Next up, rotating floor circles require you to rotate the swan to get around corners and avoid walking off the platform. Pretty soon, guards are introduced who shoot off beat, and so you’ll need to rotate them away from the swan or ensure the swan can move out of range quickly. Breakable floors can only take a short waddle, but that’s when golden notes arrive. Golden notes ring out and stun guards, but shatter floors. Then, by halfway, we’re introduced to dark notes that don’t trigger on their first playthrough, and silver notes that only play once. At this point, the 8-beat piano staff is too short for the level design, and players now need to arrange notes for longer journeys. Of course, whilst all this is going on, the type of notes you receive stops being singular and ends up becoming triplets or ones that cross octaves and therefore cover multiple colours.
If that sounds like a lot to juggle, surprisingly, it doesn’t feel like it. Swan Song only provides you with a few notes per level, and players can trigger a level to play at any time, giving you insight into how close you are to success. As the note placement area is quite small, that also limits the range of possibilities, so whilst there’s a lot to consider, testing and tweaking is incredibly simple to do. It makes Swan Song incredibly approachable, and the graphical art style is soft and comfy to boot.
There are over 100 puzzles across 9 chapters, with some bonus hidden levels to discover, too. This is wrapped up in a story about a family breaking apart over grief and loss. The story is sensitively handled through cassette recordings of family discussions and key moments, and souvenirs found inside the music box as it opens. These moments are brief and scattered throughout the game, as each chapter tackles a different time period in the family’s journey towards healing. It’s one of the best integrations of visual and short-form storytelling in a strictly puzzle game I’ve experienced for some time. My only minor quibble is that you can only place notes according to where the highest note on the staff is placed. Occasionally, I’d forget to try to line my notes up by clicking and dragging the bottom note on a multi-octave note, and it’d slot into the wrong place, even if it is lined up correctly. It is the tiniest niggle in what is otherwise an effortlessly fantastic game.
Swan Song is a superb puzzle game that had me hooked for hours. Sensitive, thoughtful, and with gameplay mechanics that ripple out to keep you thinking like a pond of music box twinkles. A level editor is coming in a post-release update before its console launch. I can imagine that being a treasure trove of brain-taxing joy, too. If you like puzzle games, music-related games, or anything that makes you think and feel, buy this. Swan Song is a revelation.
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