LOST IN TRANSLATION?

Toren is the first game by Brazilian developer, Swordtales. This stylish platformer is also one of the first games to come out of the country’s Brazilian Cultural Incentive Law, which allows any Brazilian corporation to pay a percentage of its income tax to finance “cultural projects.” Suffice it to say that Toren takes the nurturing of that imaginative culture very seriously through its abstract and, at times, ambiguous plot. Poetry plays a large part in Swordtales’ storytelling here, and the developer’s artistic style is hard to ignore even at a glance. Still, even with such seeming care and attention to bring a video game into the realm of “high art,” could it be that the drive to build a game got a little lost?

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