That 'Cathedrals of Fire' Feeling: Sword of the Sea and the Magic of Gaming Vistas
AI Gaming News Author · Eurogamer ·
Dive into Sword of the Sea, Matt Nava's latest visual masterpiece, and discover how it conjures that rare 'cathedral of fire' feeling. This game blends breathtaking vistas with clever tech like dynamic shaders, creating pure, unadulterated gaming wonder.
Right, so you know that feeling, don't you? That moment in a game where the sheer, colossal scale of it all just hits you like a pixelated freight train? Like when you first stumbled into Liurnia of the Lakes in Elden Ring, and your brain just went 'whoa, hold on a minute, this is *vast*.' The mist curling, the water glinting, feeling like the world itself was trying to give you a big, horizontal hug – or maybe swallow you whole, depending on your vibe. It’s that curious mix of awe and a mild case of digital vertigo. Fair dinkum, it makes you want to step back, root yourself, but the digital pull is just too strong. It *beckons*, mate.
Turns out, there's a proper term for this. Back in 2000, when 3D games were just really hitting their stride – think Resident Evil scaring the pants off you in blocky corridors or Tomb Raider flexing its polygon muscles – a writer named Steven Poole called it the 'aesthetic emotion of wonder.' He reckoned that games, at their best, build these awe-inspiring spaces from pure, immaterial light. And then he dropped an absolute banger of a metaphor: 'They are cathedrals of fire.' Bloody hell, eh? Twenty-five years later, and that phrase still hits different.
Now, why am I rattling on about a book from the turn of the millennium? Because 'cathedral of fire' is precisely the phrase that popped into my head when I first clapped eyes on Sword of the Sea. This is the latest mind-bender from Matt Nava and his crew at Giant Squid. If Nava’s name doesn’t ring a bell, think Journey – that utterly transcendent desert trek with sand dunes that shimmered like a Klimt painting. He’s been dabbling in seascapes with Abzû and forest-scapes with The Pathless, but now he’s back to the deserts, and mate, he’s painting with fire.
Only this isn't your grandma’s desert. This desert *moves*. It roils like an ocean, all orange-burned landscapes, particles sparkling in the sun. And you? You're not slogging through it; you’re carving lines on a hoverboard, pulling grab tricks as you launch off cresting sandy waves. Imagine that – gliding across a moving landscape, catching air off a dune that shifts beneath you. It’s like snowboarding on liquid gold. Nava, a keen snowboarder himself, completely gets this. He talks about how games engage all your senses, just like being out in nature, having one of those 'transcendental, spiritual' experiences. You're seeing, feeling, interacting – it's all there, packaged in pixels.
And speaking of snowboarding, a little way into Sword of the Sea, those twinkling sand dunes apparently give way to snowy mountains. So, yeah, it basically morphs into a new-age SSX – but probably with more existential pondering. Nava recounted a 'trip' (and mate, sometimes 'trip' really is the word for those mountain excursions) where he was intimidated by a snowy summit, felt the 'bludgeoning wind' on the ski lift, then emerged from the clouds into an 'amazing vista of sunlight' as he blasted down. That experience of speed, of the world blurring around you, seeing everything and nothing all at once – Sword of the Sea seems to bottle that feeling perfectly. It’s a quicksilver blur of colour, light, momentum, and texture. Pure fantasy, too – grinding along gigantic metal chains stretched across miles, jumping atop buildings just to hear your board make that delightful clinking sound. It's the kind of chaotic elegance I can get behind.
Now, this far-out visual ecstasy that Nava’s perfected isn’t the only way games conjure wonder, is it? Sometimes that spatial awe collides with what I’d call 'systemic wonder.' You know, like Outer Wilds, where its entire clockwork cosmos orbits a sun, and you can just seamlessly jump in your ship and land on any of those celestial outposts. Or, if you’re brave (or just watching on YouTube, like me, because who truly *gets* Dwarf Fortress?), you can marvel at the absurd depth of simulation Tarn and Zach Adams have crafted. Those games take your breath away in a different way than, say, the utterly gorgeous but perhaps more 'traditional' panoramas of the Horizon series. And I reckon that’s because part of the enchantment in games often comes from a quiet understanding of the technical constraints. You’re blown away because you can almost *feel* how hard the devs had to work to pull it off. It’s not just pretty; it’s a magic trick.
And that sense of raw labour and technical wizardry is absolutely front and centre in Sword of the Sea, especially when you look at its shaders. If you're wondering what the heck a shader is, think of them as these mercurial bits of code that decide how everything on screen looks – how light bounces, how textures appear, basically the paintbrush of the digital artist. And in Sword of the Sea, they’re working overtime. Waterfalls that run dry with sand? Translucent, emerald blue water that you’re boarding across? And those desert waves themselves – constantly churning, ebbing, flowing, the game updating this surface data 60 times a second as you zip across it. Bloody amazing, isn't it?
Games are always lauded for being at this cool nexus of art, maths, science, and tech. And honestly, for me, shaders are where that cocktail really fizzes. They're like the actual brush marks in a video game, the visible evidence of the artist’s hand – or, in this case, the wizard’s code.
Which brings me to something fascinating about Matt Nava himself. His old man, John Nava, is a renowned painter. And get this: Nava senior studied in Florence, the birthplace of Renaissance art. While his art tends to be more pseudo-realistic, depicting people in quiet reverence – like the massive tapestry in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in LA – that deep appreciation for awe-inspiring spaces seems to have been hard-wired into Matt junior from a young age. Family trips to Europe, pilgrimages to see Caravaggio paintings, hopping between museums, ancient ruins, and basilicas – all these spaces that deliberately, or sometimes accidentally, just punch you in the gut with a sense of awe.
It’s no wonder, then, that almost all the surfaces in Matt Nava’s games seem to shimmer with this very emotion. In Sword of the Sea, it feels like his palpable wonder for the world is expressed as pure visual ecstasy. And the faster you go, the more intense that feeling becomes. Sounds like a proper journey, mate. One I’m certainly curious to take.
Tags: indie games, art direction, adventure games, game design, visuals
Original article: Eurogamer