Sayonara Wild Hearts
Simogo returns with its boldest, poppiest game so far
Switch
For Simogo, it always starts with a song. If the studio’s last major release, The
Sailor’s Dream (with apologies to minimalist puzzler SPL-T) was a folk album masquerading as a videogame, then the Swedes’ long-awaited comeback is a threeminute pop banger, a foot-tapping, hightempo number with soaring vocals backed by dazzling dance routines.
It wasn’t always thus. The original vision for Sayonara Wild Hearts was much darker; more nightmarish, even. Working alongside long-time collaborators Daniel Olsén and Jonathan Eng, Simogo’s initial soundtrack experiments blended surf rock with world music. “Like taiko drums and Ethiopian influences,” co-founder Simon Flesser explains. The game itself, meanwhile, was based on an idea he’d had of a universe built around tarot cards – a constant throughout his life, thanks to his family’s interest in divination and astrology.
But something wasn’t quite working, even as the first prototype began to take shape. Then one day, Flesser put on a playlist of upbeat pop music and had an epiphany. “I just said, ‘No, this is it’, while we were playing the demo,” he says. “And we’ve been through a lot of iterations of the game since then.”
A lot of iterations, and a lot of influences. There’s a bit of everything in Sayonara Wild
Hearts, Flesser says: from Tron to Carly Rae Jepsen, Out Run to Ouendan, Sailor Moon to Sia. Something about its speed, fluidity (it runs at a steady 60fps on Switch whether docked and undocked) and sheer energy reminds us of Kid Icarus: Uprising, and there’s perhaps even a hint of Killer7 – not only in its sharp sense of style and cinematic eye, but also its streamlined control scheme.
“I was playing a lot of really simple arcade games,” Flesser says, “And I was starting to think that it’s such a shame how complicated games have become. They’re like spaceships to control. You look at something like Uncharted or God Of War, and they have a million buttons.” He acknowledges that Simogo might not have the budget or staff to make a Bayonetta, but is hoping to capture a similar sense of spectacle and pace with just cardinal directions and a single button.
And heavens, it’s quick. You play as a young biker, speeding through a dreamscape as her alter ego, The Fool. It’s a pseudo-onrails action game where you have full directional control, but while the level design flows in time with the soundtrack, like Rez this isn’t strictly a rhythm game. At first, Flesser was dead set on excluding any traditional elements (“no lose state, no pickups”) but without them, the game lost some of its edge. “Basically, we said, ‘Let’s just try and make this the most videogame-y we can make a videogame,’ and rebooted it, and everything fell into place.”
It’s a twitch game, then, a replayable score-chaser, but one that seamlessly segues into short cutscenes mid-flow – usually to present new mechanical twists without letting the pace drop. “It’s mostly for enemies, actually,” Flesser says. “It’s like a cool cutscene that introduces the fact that a rival will now start to shoot fireballs or what have you.”
Though Simogo is a little vague on some of the details – suffice to say, alongside the bike pursuits you’ll find dance-combat setpieces and even flying sections – that’s partly because Flesser is keen to surprise players, and also because no two levels of Sayonara
Wild Hearts are alike. “Our motto throughout the entire project has been, ‘Every stage is a bonus stage’. You know that feeling how bonus stages are always more exciting to get to than regular stages, because they switch everything up? We wanted to capture that feeling so players are excited every time they start a new level.”
That title, then, an allusion to Flesser’s own concern that this could be the last game Simogo makes, seems awfully premature. Even so, he says, “There’s definitely a sense of ‘Let’s make this one count’.” There may be a lot riding on The Fool, but even as part of a catalogue that includes three Edge 9s, the studio’s “most videogame-y videogame” to date could well be a new high note.
“Let’s just try and make this the most videogame-y we can make a videogame”