Following the huge success of Hades in 2020, we’ve seen lots of games attempt to follow in its mighty footsteps; even Supergiant has broken from its tradition of new ideas for a sequel. Sworn, meanwhile, takes the basic concepts and structure of one of the best roguelike games in recent years and lovingly adopts it to the fantasy realm of King Arthur’s Camelot, creating something that feels at once reassuringly familiar and distinct enough to justify its existence. At Gamescom 2024, I sat down to check it out with game director Sam Leonard and art director Sean Evans of Windwalk Games, and came away ready to play a lot more.
On a surface level, Sworn has all the key check marks you’d expect from a game in the Hades mold. There are four biomes you have to progress through as you challenge the corrupted King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Your character has a basic attack, a special attack, a spell cast, and a dodge, and these are amplified with various abilities bestowed upon you by the Fae Lords. Yet, aside from how perfectly the world of Camelot fits this roguelike structure, what really sets Sworn apart is the sheer level of depth on offer.
To start with, Sworn gives you four different characters to choose from: Vigilante, Rook, Spectre, and Monk. Each of them comes with four base weapons to choose from and four distinct spells, giving you a pretty dramatic number of potential combinations even before you set out on the run and start picking up all those build-defining upgrades.
I opt for the Spectre: among her weapons is a bolt-blasting Armillary Sphere and a wide, sweeping Scythe, the latter of which immediately catches my eye. On the spell side, there are a range of choices including a beam attack and a short-ranged teleport that explodes as you travel, but I opt for Spirit Guardians, which I can summon to float around her, automatically firing off attacks at any nearby enemies. There’s a fantastic amount of variety here, and each of the options feels well thought-out.
Every weapon gets its own branching upgrade tree, and pleasingly each is shaped to fit the weapon in question. As you unlock the various nodes, each offering incremental boosts to its potential, you’ll encounter two ‘major’ ones that offer a choice between two more potent upgrades. For the Scythe, I can choose whether I build up souls over time or whether they’re earned as I attack enemies, and then determine how I spend them – my special attack can either consume them all to heal me proportionally to the amount gathered, or deal bonus damage based on my gathered souls, with the benefit that they won’t be spent if the strike kills my target.
As you head through the regions, you’ll encounter the various Fae Lords who will offer you their blessings – during our demo, I count eight Lords in total, at least to start with. Each has their own theme: King Oberon offers you fury bonuses and the ability to summon damaging whirlwinds; Banshee Cliona lets you weaken foes or fire out additional soul missiles as you attack; Frozen Witch Beira inflicts chills and freeze effects. As a lover of critical strikes for those big damage numbers, I’m partial to the boons of Lugh, the Hand of Fate. Each Fae Lord also has a matching companion you can earn that will follow you into battle.
You’ll start out in the forest, but the environments get increasingly interesting as you progress. The second zone, the Cornwall Township, is filled with Skaven-style rat beasties and features sludge puddles that will restrict your ability to dash around safely. Beyond that lies the Deep Harbour, where things get more eldritch and unsettling, with monster designs inspired by the Lovecraftian Cthulhu mythos.
Here, Leonard points out the team’s experimentation with enemies in the negative space, something I’m a particular fan of. In practice, this translates to platforms separated by water that you can only cross using dashes or traversal skills, and foes that live in that water. It’s a design decision that gives each zone a distinct feel – something that’s further amplified in the final area, the castle of Camelot. Make it there and you’ll find that even the regular enemies feel more like mini-bosses, each boasting multiple attack patterns to watch out for.
Much like Hades, it’s in the boss fights where Sworn’s combat really shines – I get to see a showdown against Gawain, one of Arthur’s leading Knights. The visual design of these is excellent, and there are some clever attacks that are designed to adapt if you’re playing in co-op, such as a series of tracking projectiles that will each lock onto separate players when you tackle him in a team.
Between runs, there are even more ways to grow gradually stronger along with the aforementioned weapon tweaking. There are five further trees you can pursue – Life, War, Devotion, Treasure, and Wealth – each providing permanent upgrades to everything from your starting stats to the chance that you’ll encounter rarer boons.
As much as Sworn is very much like Hades, to the point it felt immediately familiar in my hands from the moment I started, I can’t deny that, between the setting, the ability to play in co-op with up to three additional friends, and the sheer amount of depth and variety on offer, I’m rather excited to play it. There’s clearly been a lot of careful thought and love put into how to make every aspect tick, and as someone craving a new action roguelike Sworn already has me hooked – I kept playing far beyond my original appointment time, and would have stayed even longer if I didn’t have other bookings to get to.
Sworn is set to launch in 2024. If you’re tempted to check it out for yourself, you can wishlist it on Steam to receive a notification when it arrives. Alternatively, take a look through more of the best fantasy games in 2024, along with the best action games on PC right now.