Sayonara Wild Hearts iOS, PS4, Switch
That difficult eighth album? Five years in the making, Sayonara Wild Hearts is comfortably the longest we’ve had to wait for a Simogo game. You’ll quickly realise exactly why it took so long, and yet it bears the weight of its developer’s hopes and the expectations of critics and players with remarkable grace. It’s positively sprightly, in fact – its suit of cups overflows with ideas, yet it’s the opposite of bloated. Its 23 stages each cover a bewildering amount of ground in a matter of moments, with new themes, mechanics and even perspective shifts introduced and cast aside, frequently leaving you gasping for more. Even its controls are reduced to the barest essentials: a stick and a single button is all that’s required. It’s often said that the secret to storytelling is in the editing. Sayonara Wild Hearts suggests it might be the secret to videogames, too.
Although light on its feet, at its core this is a tale of heartbreak. In that respect, it has something in common with 2014’s The Sailor’s Dream – though Simogo’s approach here couldn’t be more different. Back then, we got a lonely lament in a sea of sad memories, a wallowy wander around near-photoreal environments set to a sweet, folksy score. This, by contrast, is pure synth-pop bliss. Constructed around a tarot theme, the story is abstract enough to be universal, yet relatable enough to feel deeply personal: it centres on a despairing young woman, curled up sadly on her bed before her world is physically upended. The musical shift, meanwhile, marks the difference between someone unable (or perhaps unwilling) to move on, and someone ready to confront their past and sift through the detritus of the relationships that have left them at such a low ebb. And so lyrics about pain and regret accompany sequences of cathartic exhilaration. You speed along on a motorbike, picking up trails of small hearts – scattered fragments of your avatar’s own, perhaps – as you weave between traffic and trams, whizzing through busy intersections and somersaulting over fiery blasts from the fingertips of a trio of devilish biker girls. This, believe it or not, is one of the earliest and least eventful levels.
Where Simogo once seemed keen to challenge conventional genre definitions, Sayonara Wild Hearts is, proudly and unabashedly, 100 per cent videogame. If you wanted to be reductive, you could say it’s an arthouse Temple Run: you’ve heard of ‘elevated horror’, well, here’s the elevated auto-runner. Yet in practice it’s so much more. The controls are more flexible, whether you’re skating, sailing, soaring or sliding. Yes, your lovelorn Fool will keep moving without any prompting, but there are more than enough nervy high-speed lane changes, not all of which follow an obvious trail of hearts. You’ll squeeze through gaps or dart left and then right, not because you have to, but because it’s fun. Risky manoeuvres, like waiting until the last second to swerve a projectile, net you a small bonus, too. Crash or get hit and the needle will skip, setting you back a few seconds, although your combo meter – each consecutive heart you collect earns you more points – will reset. You can afford the odd spill for a silver rank, but a rush for gold transforms moments of pleasure into sweaty-palmed tightrope walks, sometimes requiring several minutes of near-flawless play.
It’s fitting for this “pop album videogame” to have a few growers; these trickier levels are the equivalent of those B-side tracks that take a few listens to love. And then you have the instant classics you’ll want to spin again as soon as they fade out. A pulsing title screen number wouldn’t seem out of place on Chvrches’ next album, while mid-game banger Mine sounds like a parallel-universe chart-topper. A gorgeous, swooning sigh of a ballad, meanwhile, soundtracks – but of course – a multi-directional scrolling shmup set within a spinning VR headset. It’s here that Simogo makes explicit the idea of a videogames as an escapist salve for a broken heart: after a series of stages where our hero finds herself clinging on by her fingernails, here she’s back in control, via an unlikely love letter to a Sega arcade favourite (not the only one) and a trance-like firstperson plunge that nods towards a classic puzzler. And then comes The World We Knew. Sure, it could lead to a spate of insufferable op-eds: This Bullet-Hell Level Will Make You Cry. But, well, it just might.
Needless to say, it all looks fabulous, even if this hyper-saturated world of hot pinks, deep purples and inky, enveloping blues often goes by too fast to properly take in. However long Simogo spent on visual polish and performance alone, it was worth it. The camera is astonishing: swooping, pirouetting, darting here and there, consistently framing the action so it’s readable yet spectacular all at once. It’s impeccably smooth, too, hitting a consistent 60fps even when you’re being jerked along by the magnetic pull of an extended heart trail, when the horizon is hurtling toward you and you daren’t blink, and even when the whole world is given a hearty wobble by a dub bassline.
Some, no doubt, will argue that there’s not much reason to return once you’ve earned gold ranks on every stage, and you’ll likely have most of those within a few hours of concerted effort. Beyond that you can refine your score a little, but not a great deal. There are no leaderboards, but then maybe that’s for the best. And perhaps it demonstrates where the developer’s focus lies: aim for a high score, by all means, but why not simply play for the heart-melting, spirit-lifting joy of it all? With a little help from some musical friends – including the narrator, whose identity is tantalisingly withheld until it’s time to say sayonara – Simogo has outdone itself; in a catalogue festooned with gems, this wild heart glitters brightest of all.
You can afford the odd spill, but a rush for gold transforms moments of pleasure into sweaty-palmed tightrope walks