Severed

Severed is a game that couldn't have been designed for a gamepad. The Canadian studio DrinkBox Studios has players lead the one-armed warrior Sasha through a strange, dreamlike world as she searches for the remnants of her family, and all combat plays out by swiping a finger across the screen. Enemies surround the player and attack from every side, and each hit means swiping precisely where and in the direction the opponent is vulnerable. The game punishes imprecision but rewards anyone who learns to slash cleanly and rhythmically.

Exploration takes the form of a classic first-person dungeon crawler, in which the player moves across a grid between intersections and solves logic puzzles, hidden passages, and shortcuts. Combat has its own rhythm: block attacks, swing to the correct side in time, and activate a time-slowing ability at the right moment to hit several enemies in succession. The key mechanic is severing the limbs of defeated opponents — after a hit, the player cuts off a specific body part, and these pieces are then assembled into new abilities and upgrades, so combat is also a collecting discipline. Progress opens not only new areas but also shortcuts back through older sections, so the map makes sense as a whole and invites revisiting.

Visually it's typical DrinkBox style — richly colored, flat stylization with sharp outlines, but here turned toward a feverish, sickly tone; the world is beautiful and unsettling at once. Sound and music play with silence, heartbeat, and piercing enemy noises, keeping the tension alive even in empty corridors. Reviews at the time praised the game as one of the best late Vita titles and one of the few cases where touch controls aren't a bolt-on but the entire foundation. The game came out in the console's late life, when major publishers had already lost interest in the platform, and stood out all the more for it. A runtime of around six hours is just right. Today Severed is the strongest argument for why Vita can't be fully replaced by anything else.