Acclaimed pixel-art adventure Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP Twitter 'spam' criticised

iPad pixel-art adventure Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP made its App Store debut this week to widespread acclaim, with Pocket Gamer's own Tracy Erickson giving it a Silver Award.

But it's not all roses. Several players have criticised the game's Twitter integration.

The game's App Store description promises the ability to co-operate with friends via Twitter, but in practice this amounts to the game retweeting vague pieces of text about your progress, along with the hashtag #sworcery, to your followers.

A quick search of ‘#sworcery’ will unearth such nuggets of information as, "Keep calm & follow my directions to summon the sylvan sprite that softly slumbers in the cool waters of the deepwater pond #sworcery."

This has led to accusations of guerrilla marketing. MTV Multiplayer writes, "the folks behind "Sword & Sworcery EP" shouldn't be claiming that they're providing a way to play co-op with friends over Twitter. Unless playing co-op means providing the game with free marketing while annoying your followers at the very same time." But developer Superbrothers has pointed out that the tweets are entirely optional. Posting on - where else? - Twitter, it said: “The Twitter component of S:S&S EP is entirely optional & ignorable. Every tweet you see was chosen by a player to broadcast.”