Cut the Sky

This game has you play as a travelling warrior equipped with a legendary sword.

Everywhere you go, you can talk to people, look at things, wait around, and, most importantly, CUT things.

Most of the puzzles revolve around a combination of talking and cutting the right thing at the right time.

Gameplay-wise, this game reminded me (positively) of the games Gun Mute (a linear sequence of fights with a powerful weapon and limited verbs), Tales of the Travelling Swordsman (a powerful sword-bearing hero defeats one challenge after another with their trusty sword), and a little bit of Forsaken Denizen and Attack of the Killer Yeti Robot Zombies (strategically defeat enemies with a lot of action). This isn't to say the game isn't innovative; its combination of melancholy, conversation, world-building and mechanics is good and new.

I especially like the conversation. Gun Mute and Tale of the Travelling Swordsman both went out of their way to have non-speaking characters as a major plot-point, leaving combat as the focus. In this game, conversation and cutting take up roughly equal roles.

I love the storybuilding here, which manages to give a good sense of progression in scale and understanding despite the (relatively) brief length of the game. It feels weighty, like the story of a much longer commercial game.

The puzzles were fun. I got stuck two or three times. Once, it was a fun fakeout. Another time, I thing the game funneled me into an alternative puzzle, which worked well. The last time I used the in-game THINK command for a hint.

Fun game, fun story.

Wow.

Sometimes a work of IF is so absorbing that when you finish, it feels like waking up from a dream. You sit there, blinking, and it takes a few moments to re-orient to the real world.

Cut the Sky is one of those works.

That's not due to the setting, which is a vaguely Vancian far future environment, of the type where the line between sufficiently advanced technology and magic has been functionally erased by a succession of epochs which have left the world studded with incomprehensible ruins and wonders. It's not due to the plot, which is about as basic as they come -- a drifter's journey through a weird world in search of a goal half-imagined, half-dreamt. It's the writing, which is of a class that author SV Linwood has not previously demonstrated in published works, that makes this work shine, coupled with a deep understanding of craft that intimately supports that writing in ways large and small.

The story here is minimalism done right; everything non-essential has been left behind, correctly deemed as irrelevant. Linwood wields a virtual pen like the protagonist wields a blade (or something like it), not as a tool or even as a weapon but as an extension of will. With a flick, a location is cut into virtual existence, the few sentences slashing lines through your attention like a razor. They seem like nothing, you barely feel them -- but then the associations start to well up, and the imaginary place blooms into a bright and compelling scene in your mind.

Everything is like that. Characters are archetypes, but you know them instantly because they are made up of everything your subconscious insists they must be. Machines and creatures are evoked in a handful of words, conjuring forms that match the contours of every assumption you hold, every connotation suggested by the author's choice of vocabulary.

With respect to craft, other reviewers point out the most interesting feature of the gameplay: The story progresses only when you, the player, are satisfied with the outcome of each scene. The frequent need to choose between the commands >WANDER (to move on) and >RETURN (to replay) elevates the interactor to a role that in some ways approaches that of co-author -- as your sense of the story develops you are given the power to continuously refine it as you go. Each scene seems to support several distinctive resolutions, allowing you to pick one that matches your own sensibilities about the tale being told. It's not clear that any of these differences have an effect on the game state that creates consequences for the evolving story, but it's definitely clear that they allow the player to at least partially shape narrative elements other than plot (e.g. mood, theme) in the evolving experience of the story.

It's an extremely powerful effect, one that changes the nature of the gameplay significantly because it puts the game in the position of having to try to align itself to your intentions. The skillful writing plays a substantial part here, guiding you toward the types of interactions that the program is prepared to offer like a magician forcing the draw of a card.

It took me a while to decide on a star rating for this one -- for several weeks I've thought of it as being on the cusp between four and five stars. In the end, its landmark/king-of-the-hill status as a story about a wanderer protagonist (a definite genre) earns it the highest marks. Definitely don't miss this one... as either player or would-be author there are things to marvel at here.

Adapted from a SpringThing25 Review

Played: 4/8/25
Playtime: 1.75hr

Notwithstanding Clint Eastwood’s descent into deplora…bility? Yeah, deplorability. (Proving yet again, as if needing further corroboration at this point, that we will all “die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.”) Notwithstanding that, there is a slice of his filmography that I find compellingly mythic. His western Man With No Name character was featured in only a very few of his movies, but I find them the least poisoned by time. Dirty Harry reads as a parody, but at some point both the actor and the culture decided, no, that was GOOD, ACTUALLY. Bleah. MWNN rather embraced an existential unknowability of mythic forces apart from human concerns, but nevertheless imposing on them a code of justice that is as compelling as it is terrifying. A pressure-relief valve for the universe that makes us question ‘justice at what cost?’ and ‘is Justice actually about us at all?’

Cut the Sky evokes that archetype. Better, it evokes it by letting us inhabit him (just gonna go with ‘him’ here, in deference to the iconography, sorry) but never really UNDERSTAND him. What a fine tightrope to walk! We are the motive force for the character, but the guardrails are firmly universe-driven to keep our human concerns and responses at bay. This is driven home both in the text, which resolutely refuses to expose any inner life, and in the interactivity, which limits our possible actions to less than two hands-worth of options. There is no nuance to the MWNN, everything is one of 9 actions, of which only 4-5 are actually ACTIVE. This artificiality of constraint, more than anything, engages us with the mythic protagonist, reinforcing his unknowability to humanity. It is a use of interactivity I hadn’t seen before.

There follows a series of puzzly interactions, steps on the protagonist’s journey, where we are encouraged to creatively use these 5-9 actions to resolve a series of conflicts. The fact that, ultimately, every problem IS resolvable with those actions underscores the mythic nature of the role. MWNN doesn’t NEED more actions. Armed with those 5, he is immune to nuance and human complication. He CUTS through it if you will. (What, did you forget who was writing this review?)

Even the journey he is on, through a far-future, post-apocaplyptic landscape, we only vaguely understand as weigh points. Both the motivation and consequences are revealed to us so casually, so off-handedly, it is clear our understanding is tangential to the protagonist’s work. Yes, we direct him, but we don’t DRIVE him. It’s all we can do to keep up.

All in all, I found this a dynamite evocation of this compelling mythic archetype. The ability to put us IN this character but not diminish the mystery of him is a really cool approach, very successfully realized. If I had one quibble – and petty as I am, it loomed large – it is that, despite one of 5 active verbs being KISS, infuriatingly, one could not (Spoiler - click to show)KISS THE SKY.

In. Ex. Scusable. Wisely, this unconscionable oversight seems to have been corrected in subsequent release.

Horror Icon: Pinhead
Vibe: Man With No Name
Polish: Smooth,
Gimme the Wheel! : If this were my project I would never have let it escape into the wild without that final action. IT WAS JUST SITTING THERE, RIGHT THERE!!! HOW DO YOU NOT PRESS THE BIG RED BUTTON???

Polish scale: Gleaming, Smooth, Textured, Rough, Distressed
Gimme the Wheel: What I would do next, if it were my project.