Swan Song's humble and inviting atmosphere creates an environment for an emotional narrative and challenging puzzles. Despite a simple premise, its music box delivery evolves in clever ways to ensure the player has a growing sense of accomplishment.
Swan Song‘s emotional and mechanical framework rests in the confines of a solitary music box.
On approach, the game is appropriately simple. A lid pops open to reveal the contents inside: dozens of puzzles that grow in complexity and a narrative about loss.
A gripping story that tugs at the heart isn’t mutually exclusive to one genre or another. When delivered appropriately, players can often feel just about anything, even when the mechanics don’t always align.
What charms me most about Swan Song is that it is emblematic of its premise. Small, contained, yet when looking inside, it houses hidden compartments of meaning.
Developer Business Goose Studios has accomplished a lot in its bite-sized game. It never wears too thin, which can often be difficult for puzzle games that wish to test players’ grey matter. I never found the game aggressive in its difficulty or its messaging. And perhaps that could make it slightly weaker than intended.
Swang Song hopes to tackle the weight of loss and the tendrils of grief that stretch into every corner of our lives. Countless games have used trauma, illness, and death as the foundation for their stories and how the gameplay revolves around these themes. While it can be a difficult needle to thread, emotional honesty is always the most sincere approach that will resonate with an audience.
How many of us would expect to stumble into a game about a music box that addresses losing a parent, a spouse, a loved one? Well, if you’ve spent any time in the independent games scene, probably most of you.
Much of Swan Song is delivered under the guise of a “cozy”-coded game. The music is delicate and rarely sweeping, playing to an audience of one to keep a check on the inquisitive nature of its puzzle solving and its slowly doled-out narrative. Warm, almost muted tones color the game. This is a brown, wooden box with gold accents. Each of the nine chapters finds the music box resting on the surface of a new scene. Wilted flowers, a rainy day, packing peanuts during a move. A mood and a place is hinted at and implied but never emphasized.
Inside of that music box, the player’s progress will be rewarded with snippets of the lives of a family. A husband, a wife, a daughter. The wife, the mother, has passed from a terminal illness. The music box is a design of the family’s patriarch who is confronting this loss in a way only he knows how.
Meanwhile, the player is granted glimpses into the lives of these three before, during, and after the death. We see the parents before they had a child. We witness hospital visits. We hear of the flailing grades of the daughter. These snippets are delivered in the form of mementos like postcards, letters, objects. Some have voiced narration. At times the player can hold up a frame and voyeuristically look into a scene: a hospital room, a dinner table.
There are no cutscenes and no visible people in Swan Song. Everything is a mostly static object that the player can sometimes manipulate and rotate but not much else. And, for the most part, it is genuinely effective. There is a kind of mournful sadness that blankets the narrative moments. Even the mechanical hook of getting a wooden swan from one end of the box to the other has this kind of finality to it. As someone who has experienced similar loss, it did touch me. Even though it is described as a story based in truth, one wouldn’t need that obvious signposting to understand someone at the team of Business Goose Studios is writing from a place of personal experience.
As sincere as Swan Song is, I do think its throughline does falter a bit. While the interstitial bits do reveal the family’s struggle, it maybe feels too generalized. And, honestly, it feels wrong to say that.
Grief is not a straight line. It is one that can sharply curve years after the line began to smooth out. Expressing that grief and talking about that loss is never easy and even harder when showing it off to the rest of the world. I knew where Swan Song‘s final emotional beat would go because I’ve felt it and I’ve read about it numerous times. Truly, that does make it an exceptionally honest work. But shifting between moments focused on the mother’s terminal illness to the husband’s inability to cope and heal with his daughter lost a bit of weight.
Maybe the impact would have been better if in one chapter each solved puzzle uncovered a small bit of the timeline to the player. Each new piece would culminate in a heavy, painful moment, ramping up to that emotional struggle.
To be fair, maybe that simplicity and that direct nature is good enough. Loss is not always profound. It can be dull and typical. It can hurt or make one numb. By not grandstanding, Business Goose Studios captured a slice of life all too many families have had to experience and for that, I applaud them.
By dragging a key into the side of the music box, players will attempt to solve nine chapters of evolving puzzles. Unsurprisingly, each new chapter introduces a small twist to the formula, a new thing to consider.
The goal is to guide a wooden swan to its destination. Does it sound simple? It is.
Swan Song is deceptively uncomplicated but, like the best puzzle games, continues to ramp up the challenge using a controlled, limited toolset.
A tray juts out from the core of the music box, showing a series of beats the puzzle will take. Every other beat the swan moves in the direction it is pointed. The player is given a set of music notes that are placed on any four of the colored lines. These lines indicate which colored platform or thing will react when the beat hits it.
A single note on the green line will cause the green platform to move. Place another note on the same line at a different point in the timeline and it will move back.
Players are granted a generous learning curve as the first puzzles of any new chapter incorporate the new mechanics into the pool of what’s available. The primary goal is to understand how to coordinate the every-other beat of the swan with the every-other beat that manipulates what a musical note is placed on.
Each of the four colored lines only has four available spots a note can be placed on. This constraint seems limiting but Business Goose Studios makes the most of this real estate. Swan Song is compact by nature and its puzzles are bite-sized to be easily digestible and just convoluted enough that a number of them are head scratchers.
New musical notes are introduced that can cause two reactions at once or back-to-back ones. Though players will always need to use every given note to succeed, they won’t always be placed on a line with a corresponding use.
With such a simple premise for a puzzle game, I was surprised at the new ways Swan Song would challenge me. There are unexpected twists in the process that make the player go through the mental gymnastics of thinking ahead, trying to visualize the steps the swan will make and how their note placement will work with every new crank of the key.
I do think the game would have benefited from an option to speed up gameplay slightly. And there were times dragging and dropping notes felt a little inaccurate or clumsy. But I honestly can’t fault Swan Song for much. Delving too much into the game’s mechanics outside of the basics would dampen the overall feeling of discovery for others.
Though I immensely appreciate games like Portal or The Witness for their sheer scope and vision, puzzle games like Swan Song are refreshing. They challenge my brain for a few hours and leave me feeling accomplished. The creativity in the approach to solving puzzles and the length of the journey means that players are never going to feel that the mechanics are too stale. Coupled with the heartfelt narrative, there is enough kinetic energy here that I could imagine revisiting the game again just to test my mental faculties once more.
Swan Song‘s humble and inviting atmosphere creates an environment for an emotional narrative and challenging puzzles. Despite a simple premise, its music box delivery evolves in clever ways to ensure the player has a growing sense of accomplishment.
