Interactive stories are an opportunity to connect with the experiences of other people and, in doing so, reflect on our own. For me any story is an occasion to empathize—to consider a perspective or a biography outside of my own normal sphere and find a piece of myself in a character, or sometimes in a storyteller. The interactive medium of games provides a unique advantage over other media in this respect because rather than watching or listening or witnessing events secondhand, a player is able to embody a role in the story directly, even in cases where the narrative operates in the abstract.
Puzzles are an opportunity to think outside the box and feel clever. A modular puzzle game will often iterate on existing knowledge, subverting the rules already introduced in order to induce the reward loop: temporary confusion, investigation and experimentation, and inevitable disentanglement. I consider the best puzzle design to be a light touch, giving enough guidance and clues to lead players to solutions without being too obvious. One could judge a puzzle by its moment of revelation: the moment when the solution clicks, or all the pieces click into place, as well as the accompanying euphoria. The “aha!” moment.
Being both a story and puzzle game, Swan Song wears both of these hats. The game seeks to provoke empathy through the tale of a family weathering the looming threat and fallout of a terminal illness, and it aims to offer the satisfaction of piecing together solutions to successive brainteasers. Unfortunately, it does not fully succeed in either endeavor.
In Swan Song, through letters, snippets of audio, and sterile photographs, all with disorderly chronology, the player navigates the feelings of a small family. Amber, a pianist and mother, suffers from a fatal disease. Tristan, her allegedly laconic husband, is some manner of artisan and craftsman. Edith, the child of Amber and Tristan, enjoys some amateur photography and shares her mother’s interest in music.
The game bills itself as being based on a true story “familiar to far too many,” and I assume that elements of this story must be personal to someone involved in development. So why then does the game feel so… impersonal?
Apart from the details I’ve already described, I don’t really know the characters in this story. By diving into grief from the starting gun, the narration gives no character baseline to contrast the grief with. I don’t know what these persons are like in their day-to-day, in their neutral or happy moments, and I don’t know what the characters mean to one another other than what I’m meant to implicitly assume from their familial connections and contextual sympathy. I don’t know what their values are or what drives them outside of the circumstances of their suffering and mourning. There are very few moments of directly witnessing the emotions the characters are apparently experiencing. I am not even given to know what it is that Amber suffers from or what her experience with treatment is like, other than it being unsuccessful.
Perhaps details were left vague in order to cast a wider net for the audience, as without these details, a player could potentially project themselves and their own experiences onto the game. For me, it had the opposite effect. Without more concrete details about these people and their experiences, it simply didn’t feel real. It lacked the depth necessary for self-analogy.
The writing and voice acting for the most part also did not help to immerse me. Not pulling any punches here: the voice performance for Tristan was flat and inexpressive, and it constituted the majority of the narration. Amber’s voice lines, in spite of being delivered more effectively (or perhaps because they were delivered more effectively), came off as unnatural. The script includes vocabulary one might expect from an old-timey gentleman. Amber tosses out words like “Nonsense!” and refers to her daughter as “my little muse” as if she’s cosplaying a Victorian English lord.
On the other hand, I found the voice performances for Edith to be touching and relatively organic where they were featured. I noted during the credits that at least one of the women voicing this character had no previous experience with voice work, which is impressive.
There is fortunately clear craft in certain other aspects of the game. The music box puzzles take place in a series of gorgeous tableaus illuminated by rays of light and accented by different household objects. Visually, the presentation is inviting, serene, and cozy, and musically, the soundscape is consistent with that quality, producing a tranquil backdrop for the gameplay. I can’t help but think there was a missed opportunity with the music, though, as I noticed no recurring musical motif throughout the six hours of playtime—a conspicuous non-inclusion for a game with a story revolving around an eponymous Swan Song.
While I believe the game prevails in ludonarrative harmony, weaving story and gameplay together through the emblem of a puzzle-filled music box, the implementation of gameplay, I think fairs only marginally better than the storytelling.
In a series of puzzles, Swan Song requires the player to place music notes on a small strip of sheet music, and the musical notes change the environment to guide a small swan through a music box from one end to the other. The puzzles do not deprive me entirely of my coveted “aha!” moments, but they are few and far between, and there is a bit of a pacing problem that brings the journey down, as puzzles move quickly from one to the next without offering any reward or downtime between efforts.
The challenges evolve smartly, adding gradual complexity, but many puzzles are quite simple. The solutions generally boil down to… counting. Counting is kind of the whole game. Whenever I would fail a challenge, the reason was because I miscounted, or more often because I didn’t bother to count, as it was frequently less tedious to guess and check a solution than it was to actually measure the number of steps from one note to the next.
Compounding the tedium, it would be hard for me to overstate how exasperated I became with the mechanical act of placing music notes. The notes have infuriatingly tiny clickable areas that require precision hovering and selecting. When you drop them, they do not reliably snap into place, and upon collision with another note, they bounce back to the pool of notes on the other side of the screen to be fetched anew. The visual feedback is a convincing fiction: many a time I hovered over a particular space that was highlighted, and the note would inexplicably end up in an adjacent spot upon releasing the button, requiring me to painstakingly mouse over the narrow selection area again to correct the game’s mistake.
I don’t want to dismiss the puzzle design in its entirety—there are strong points. I think different tools and mechanisms were introduced in a clever self-tutorializing way. The new elements were spaced out well and were always interesting enough to refresh my attention. But I think there were too many puzzles. Nine different sections each with twelve or so challenges using the same gimmick ended up being around twice as much as I wanted to engage with. With a shorter game intending to impart emotional impact, I believe concise is better. Introduce a gimmick, iterate once or twice, and culminate with the optimum execution. Cut out the excess and leave a streamlined experience, or you risk monotony.
Overall I was disengaged during my time spent playing. I sought to be affected and invested and found myself unmoved and weary. If a somewhat unspecific and shallow chronicle can move you and you don’t mind puzzling that is a bit repetitive, you might derive joy from the game, but I myself do not recommend it.
