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.

Note: This review was written during Spring Thing 2025, and originally posted in the intfiction forum on 2 May 2025.

Ok onto this parser game now. And the first thing I want to say is probably a bit provocative, but the blurb

"You’ve been wandering for a while now, searching for something worthy of your blade."

really didn’t encourage me to play the game! It feels so unfinished, and “so what”. But I’m playing it despite that.

And it’s delightful. A rather trippy series of episodic fantastic moments, where you have a sword that you can use, and the question is what to do with it. Each of the sections are short, some shorter than others, but evocatively written. I especially enjoyed the Jack Vance like encounter in a forest.

On the downside I had quite a lot of fight the parser moments. If you have a reduced parser like this, it probably needs more playtesting to smoothe things. I see there were a lot of testers, but I wonder if even more might have helped. I’m going to list some bits I had issues with in a section for the author at the end of this.

But other than that I really enjoyed it. Yes it needed smoothing in quite a few places, but overall it was a magical experience to play through. And I loved the fantastical descriptive storytelling throughout. I played for about an hour.

Highly recommended.

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.