There are a lot of iPhone games. Most of them are crap. A significant fraction are good. Few are great. Even fewer are great and original. Like this one might be!

The video you're seeing above is the opening stage of Sword & Sworcery EP, an iPhone aventure game due out H2 this year. It's got fantastically atmospheric music, a novel aesthetic, a rare control scheme, and most importantly, some kind of vision. A couple minutes of relatively eventless meandering are enough to hook me, which is rare for iPhone games that, in conceptual terms, tend to aim low.

Like this one! Gameloft's Zombie Infection looks fine, until you realize that it's a direct rip-off of Resident Evil 5. The control scheme is the same we've seen used in a lot of the company's other games—some of which are fantastic, by the way—and beyond the promise of a RE5-like gaming experience, and zombies, obviously, I'm seeing the same thing here as I saw with NOVA, or with Gangstar—a commodity game of questionable provenance. It may turn out to be fun, but that's the most it can really hope for.

Almost invariably, the iPhone games I love are the true originals, like Zen Bound or Noby Noby Boy or Spider. It's impossible to say if Sword & Sworcery will be one of those games, but it's clear that the developers' hearts are in the right place, which counts for a lot. [Touch Arcade]