Cut the Sky

--“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
Stephen King, The Gunslinger (Dark Tower series pt 1)

Meanwhile, across an unfathomable distance in both time and space, in a world with a Black Tower of its own piercing the glowing sky, a Master Swordswoman sets off on a quest of her own…

--“Under the golden glow of the noon sky, a sea of withered stalks sways in the wind. A rusty crossroads sign post rises from the ground before you, leaning slightly. Whatever roads it once pointed towards have long been lost to the grass.”
SVLinwood, Cut the Sky

Now, I don’t know if Cut the Sky was (intentionally or subconsciously) inspired by Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. I don’t even know if the author has read any of King’s books. But to me, even if it’s completely unintentional, Cut the Sky feels like a tone-perfect interactive novella set in a world closely connected to that of King’s magnum opus.

Cut the Sky drastically limits the allowed parser inputs. This narrows down the possibilities for interaction, providing a clear way of solving the puzzles and investigating the surroundings. There is still considerable difficulty in finding the correct target and the exact timing. A number of solutions depend on an intricate sequence of commands.
I found the limited parser especially successful for the evocation of movement through the setting. The game consists of a linear series of events, confined to one location, with an unknown but considerable distance between them. NESW are disabled, so instead of going in a compass-direction after finishing an event, there is only the WANDER command. This simple change works perfectly to suggest the wider world, and the protagonist’s uncertain search for a way forward.
Early in the game, I found myself worrying if the limited parser was going to succeed in carrying a full-length game, as I felt increasingly distanced, almost mechanically typing the same few commands. However, the puzzles soon became more complex, forcing me to focus not on the command, but on its results on the environment, and on combinations of those results.

Even more important in holding my attention were the fantastic storytelling and writing. I was truly involved in the setting and its colourful characters.

Throughout the main character’s journey, interesting bits and pieces of the surrounding world and its history are revealed. Ancient technology alongside magic, revolvers and swords, a cult based around a half-forgotten Oracle,… (Speaking of technology, magic, and swords… What is your own blade made of?)
The environment changes a great deal from scene to scene, from desert to mountain to lush jungle to city, enhancing the impression of a complete world outside of our own limited experiences.

The narrative is structured as a collection of small vignettes, self-contained scenes with one or a few obstacles. The mood differs greatly between them, with the relentless pull of the wandering serving as connection.
Almost all of the vignettes feature an encounter with a stranger, and it’s the personalities of these characters and the interplay between them and the protagonist that give Cut the Sky such a special feeling. Depending on the NPC, the feel of each vignette can be threatening, comedic, dramatic,… All of the scenes are small stand-alone miniature stories, with a touching human connection as their kernel.
About that human interaction, I loved the lightness with which physical intimacy and sexuality were portrayed. The meetings with strangers can often lead to lovemaking, and it’s quite easy to steer the encounters toward such an outcome. However temporary or casual these amorous adventures are, they never feel tacky but always sincere and warm.

Amidst these wonderfully evocative images of the setting and the haphazard encounters with interesting strangers, the protagonist remains an enigma. You can enter a name at the beginning of the game, and you can project a gender of your choosing onto the PC. Aside from that, it seems that your protagonist’s personality and appearance are hardly determined at all. The player’s choices will fill in some of the blanks, but the PC’s core will remain out of grasp.
This does not mean at all that the main character is an AFGNCAAP, a blank slate of cardboard. Quite the contrary, through the unknowability of the protagonist shines an enigmatic depth, a sense that if only you could get to know them better, you would be astounded by the stories and experiences they could relate. But that’s not possible, and they always stay at a distance, always out of reach.

A wonderful setting, some very memorable characters, and one of the most intruiging protagonists I’ve met. Very good game.

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.

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.

The Story

In Cut the Sky, you’re a nondescript person with a blade that can cut almost anything within reach. Your goal, as the title suggests, is to Cut the Sky.

In each chapter, you encounter characters who are defined mostly by their archetypal roles: a gunman, a wizard, a thief, and the like. These are simple roles, but they’re always well-sketched.

About the gunman...
(Spoiler - click to show)Is the gun-spinning gunman who tells you you’re pretty good “really something” a Revolver Ocelet reference? I don’t know, but I guess it says something about how archetypal these characters are.

But describing how Cut the Sky relies on archetypes undersells its originality. It’s somewhere between a grand-scale myth and a fully fleshed-out sci-fi/fantasy story with real worldbuilding. It’s just the right amount of detail for a game of this length.

The Puzzles

Playing Cut the Sky is just as unique. It’s made almost entirely of “think outside the box” puzzles, which are, again, centered around your cut-anything blade.

From the start, you’re given a way to solve a confrontation directly or indirectly, i.e., using brute force or not. Violence is the answer to this one, but only if you really want it to be.

From there, the story puts you into gradually more complex situations. There are about a dozen or so chapters, most of which are pretty thoroughly-drawn setups. The marketplace chapter is a particularly fleshed-out scenario. Then, once you reach the tower at the end, things get a little simpler again and the game enters its denouement.

Overall, the puzzle solutions are pretty straightforward, but the game does challenge you by reframing things. Each puzzle solution is similar, but not exactly the same.

In other words, “thinking outside the box” means something different each time. By the time the game threw the color spectrum riddle at me, it got the better of me — I was overconfident in my expectations of what I was supposed to do.

Technically Spotless

This game is almost technically spotless. Parser rejection messages are broad and make sense in context. For example, you never hear “that’s fixed in place,” but rather something along the lines of “that’s absent or not important.”

More importantly, there are basically no overlapping keywords. The game never asked “which one do you mean?” unless I was actually interacting with similar objects.

On top of that, many of the commands are diegetic — ie. framed as in-game actions. To be fair, you’re not going to do much apart from cutting and talking (and optionally kissing) in Cut the Sky. But even saving and restoring are framed as remembering things. Plus, you “wander” instead of using compass directions, and you need to “think” instead of typing hints. I liked this a lot.

I have only one complaint: a few of the puzzles had overly specific requirements, especially the thief and wizard puzzles.

In the case of the thief, it’s unclear how her pattern of movement reacts to your actions. Similarly, the wizard would have been a little more straightforward if his spells were ordered instead of cycled. But these are minor complaints.

Themes

I’ve saved this section for last because I’m not too confident in my ability to analyze the game’s themes. What is Cut the Sky about?

Other reviews have described it as atmospheric and cathartic, which seems spot on to me. The game’s meaning has to be approached indirectly.

(Spoiler - click to show)Cutting the sky at the end of the game is a powerful act, but it’s not really backed by anything. It’s not really righteous or rebellious, nor is it justified or unjustified. It’s just what you do. What else would you do with a sword that could cut anything?

Yet the final action does have weight, mostly due to the span of time and scale of civilizations portrayed in the game.

So you can project any motives you want onto your quest. Maybe I’m wrong here and the author had more specific intentions — in which case it’s my fault for glossing over in-game information that I thought was peripheral.

The bottom line is: this is a really one-of-a-kind game. I rarely vote, but I’ve nominated this for best in show, and I hope it wins. Admittedly, I was swayed by the existing reviews and IFDB scores, but Cut the Sky certainly deserves the attention it’s getting. Best of luck to the author!