Supernatural Pixels

Superbrother's Sword and Sworcery EP

Superbrother's Sword and Sworcery EP deals heavily with the supernatural. We are introduced to the game world by a Jungian Archetype who explains that we are entering a mythopoetic experiment. We guide the Scythian on her woeful errand through a strange land. The game makes it very clear that the player is not the Scythian, but rather a divine influence over her. We accept that we are to the Scythian as the Fates are to us. The jagged pixelated graphics come to indicate all that is Earthly and natural.

One of my classes this semester is focused on legends. A concept we have been discussing is that of center/periphery. The center is your home, and the farther into the periphery you go the more likely you are to encounter the supernatural, and the stranger things get. Sword and Sworcery uses this idea of center/periphery in two ways. The fact that the Scythian is referred to by where she is from (Scythia) and not her name (which we never learn) indicates that she has already journeyed far away from her center. Within the game itself there is also a center/periphery relationship between where the Caucus mountain people live, and Mingi Taw where the Scythian must venture to complete her errand.

In Mingi Taw the Scythian encounters a deathless spectre known as the Gogolithic Mass. The Gogolithic Mass is drawn as a smooth black gradient with blocky pixel hands and horned skull. The smooth gradient looks out of place in the otherwise 8-bit world, but it is hardly the only high resolution graphic in the game. The sky, and especially the moon are rendered with gradients, as are the Sylvan Sprites that the Scythian releases.  Even the shine on the Scythian's sword (shown above) uses a gradient. At first I did not much care for this mix of pixel graphics and gradients, but as I played the game I came to realize that just as the pixel graphics represent the natural, the gradients represent the supernatural. Let us then consider the Gogolithic Mass.  The deathless spectre is a liminal being, neither completely natural nor fully supernatural. The Gogolithic Mass haunts the Scythian throughout her errand, and serves as a constant reminder of the threshold between the Earthly and the supernatural through which she travels.

I've been reassessing my relationship to the supernatural lately. I was brought up in a secular household and have always held scientific reasoning as a value. I generally don't believe in ghosts or Bigfoot (then again, who am I to contradict Jane Goodall), but I am beginning to think that the literal existence of the supernatural is entirely beside the point. Believing in supernatural beings has an importance beyond objective scientifically provable reality. There is a truth to Bigfoot, even if he's not coming to a zoo near you.