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Review
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!
