The Swords of Ditto hands you a hero, a sword and a countdown. Mormo is coming, and the island will not wait.
Released on 24 April 2018 for Linux, macOS, PlayStation 4 and Windows, The Swords of Ditto is an action role-playing game from British studio Onebitbeyond, published by Devolver Digital. It arrived on Nintendo Switch on 2 May 2019, and on Android and iOS on 23 October 2019.
Director Jonathan Biddle, formerly of Curve Digital, led the project. He would later found All Possible Futures and develop The Plucky Squire.
The pitch is compact: a unique adventure for each new hero of legend in the relentless fight against the evil Mormo. You explore a delightful but dangerous overworld, brave menacing dungeons, and improve your hero in a charming village. Grab a co-op friend, unleash the mystical Sword of Ditto, and the island is yours for a run.
It is a good pitch. It is also, in practice, a game that keeps asking you to start over.
Trailer, via DevolverDigital.
A Random Hero and a Clock
The Swords of Ditto is played from a top-down perspective. You control a randomly generated hero character. The task is fixed: defeat Mormo within a certain amount of time.
That time limit is the whole design. The game has a cyclical structure built for iterative playthroughs. Once the clock runs out, the main adventure repeats with a new character and an altered world.
Two-player cooperative play is supported throughout.
So the loop is not a campaign in the usual sense. It is a series of attempts, each one carrying something forward, and for this player the returns thin out faster than the design seems to expect.
The randomly generated hero is the smartest part of the structure. You do not get to settle into a build. You get a stranger with a sword and a deadline.
What the Island Gives You
The overworld is described as delightful but dangerous, and that pairing holds. The dungeons are menacing. The village is charming. The loot is extraordinary, or at least the game wants you to think so.
Progress runs through the village as much as the field. You improve your hero there, between runs, before the next hero takes up the sword.
The genres stacked here are role-playing, hack and slash, adventure, indie and arcade. The themes are action and fantasy. Modes cover single player, multiplayer and co-operative play.
That is a lot of labels for one island. Most of them fit.
- Defeat Mormo before the time limit expires
- Explore the overworld and its dungeons
- Improve your hero in the village
- Bring a second player for co-op
- Start again with a new hero when the clock runs out
Mormo Is the Constant
Every run has the same enemy. Mormo does not change. The island does, the hero does, the clock resets, but the evil plaguing the island stays put.
That is the trade the game makes. It gives you variety in the hero and the world, and it gives you a fixed target. The cyclical structure only works if the thing you are chasing is stable enough to chase again.
Mormo is stable. Mormo is also, after several runs, just a name at the end of a timer.
The co-op support is the other constant worth naming. A second player changes the arithmetic of a short run. It does not change the structure.
The Case for the Cycle
The Swords of Ditto is at its best when the cycle is doing the work. A randomly generated hero means you cannot coast on muscle memory. A time limit means you cannot clear every corner of the map. An altered world means the second attempt is not the first attempt.
That is a real design argument, and the game makes it well. Compact is the right word. This is not a game that asks for a hundred hours. It asks for a run, then another.
The village is the piece that holds it together. Improving your hero between attempts gives the repetition a direction. Without it, the cycle would be a treadmill. With it, the cycle is a ladder.
Where the Clock Starts to Grind
The problem with a cyclical structure is that the cycle is the content. Once you have seen the shape of a run, the shape does not surprise you again.
The time limit that creates tension on the first attempt creates pressure on the fifth. You are not exploring a delightful but dangerous overworld anymore. You are managing a schedule.
The randomly generated hero cuts both ways. A new character is a fresh start. A new character is also a stranger you have to build from nothing, again, while Mormo waits.
And Mormo never becomes more than the thing at the end. The game gives you a fixed enemy and a shifting world, then asks you to care about the enemy. It is the weaker half of the bargain.
The village softens this. It does not fix it.
Onebitbeyond’s Compact Bet
The Swords of Ditto is a small game with a clear thesis. It wants the roguelike repetition to feel like legend, not like a grind. It gets closer than most.
The studio’s later trajectory is worth noting. Biddle left to found All Possible Futures and make The Plucky Squire, a game with a very different relationship to structure. The Swords of Ditto reads now as an early, disciplined attempt at the same question: how much repetition can a charming frame carry?
The answer here is: a fair amount, and then a little less.
Co-op is the mode that holds up best. Two players against a clock is a better game than one player against a clock, because the clock stops being the only pressure. The island gets a second set of eyes.
The Verdict on The Swords of Ditto
The Swords of Ditto is a compact action RPG that knows exactly what it is. It is not a sprawling adventure. It is a loop, dressed in a delightful but dangerous overworld, with a village to improve and a dungeon to brave and a sword to unleash.
The cyclical structure is the point and the limit. It creates a unique adventure for each new hero of legend, and then it asks you to be a new hero of legend again. That is a bargain some players will take happily and others will abandon after two runs.
The randomly generated hero is the best idea in the game. The time limit is the most honest one. Mormo is the weakest.
It is a game worth playing once through the cycle, and worth playing with a friend. It is not a game that rewards the tenth run the way it rewards the first.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
