Signs Of The Sojourner
PC, Switch
Cards on the table: we’re in danger of growing weary of such a sight. Slay The Spire may have consumed our evenings – and caused a few late nights besides – but the deck-building genre has recently become an increasingly crowded niche. To stand out from the growing crop, any new entry must surely have some kind of ace up its sleeve.
Enter Echodog Games’ narrative-led card game, in which you stack your deck not for combat but for conversation. This makes a crucial difference: for the most part, encounters feel collaborative rather than competitive. You’re not working against an enemy, but with an NPC, trying to make chains rather than break them: forging a connection through words rather than landing a blow with a fist or a sword. Even if you see a casual chinwag as a game to be won, your reward here is much more meaningful than a glittering treasure.
It’s framed by a story that is less important than it initially seems. Your unnamed protagonist is bequeathed a small store in their home village when their mother passes away. You travel with a local caravan to a variety of colourful settlements within the vicinity, but soon you need to make your own way. Each trip out represents an opportunity to accrue a variety of foodstuffs, other essentials and exotic knick-knacks before you head back to restock the shelves and keep your faltering business alive. And to get your hands on any of those – and, later, to unlock routes to new places and shortcuts to towns you’ve already visited – you need to talk to people.
You’re given a smattering of narrative context for each exchange, but the most important part of the conversation is effectively wordless. The cards you and your opposite number own bear symbols on the left and right: from your deck of ten, you’ll draw a hand of five, taking turns to match the right-hand symbol on the card previously played as you both aim to complete a sequence of up to six cards. Succeed, and you’ll have a more fruitful dialogue. But with the wrong card things can quickly turn sour. Each of these emblems represents a different approach: a triangle means logical and diplomatic, a circle empathetic and observant. Then you’ll travel somewhere new and meet someone with a diamond or a square by their portrait. Can you control a conversation when you don’t currently have the vocabulary to break through to someone? Completing a sequence of up to six cards might be easy with a childhood friend, but during a tense early run-in with a possible thief, a single misstep will leave them tightlipped and a mystery potentially unsolved.
Still, there are ways to charm even the most unaccommodating townsfolk. Matching four of the same symbol lets you come to an accord, protecting your progress in a sequence, and potentially allowing you to play a non-matching symbol – albeit at the cost of disrupting a convivial chat. Another mismatch at this point and you’re back to square one, with a black mark to boot. It usually takes three of these before you reach an impasse and the dialogue comes to a premature end. You might offend someone early on, but there’s usually room to turn things around.
Usually. Over time, you accumulate cards with different properties that should make things easier. Each of these is used in a way that is instantly understandable, because it fits with the way real-world discourse works. So if you’re in a chatty mood, you can play two cards in one turn, while inviting your partner to elaborate sees a card inherit a symbol of the previous one, leaving your opponent with more options. And though we rarely find the opportunity to actually play it, we grin and nod in appreciation at the ingenious way a ‘clarify’ card slots into conversation. But picking up a new card after each exchange forces you to discard an old one. At first, the trade-offs are no-brainers; then, as you return home to your best friend Elias, you suddenly realise you don’t have quite so much to say to him. Not least since your travels have left your deck studded with fatigue cards which – but of course – don’t match with anything.
By this point, what at first seemed abstract has come to reveal so much, and not just about its colourful and charismatic cast. Signs Of The Sojourner touches upon profound truths about the way we communicate with one another. At worst, it gamifies dialogue, tempting you to view each encounter as a puzzle to be solved rather than a person you’re hoping to get to know better. At best, it asks provocative questions about the world, and your own role in it; it reveals how the places you go and people you talk to can shape your own perspective, and not necessarily always for the better.
Even its built-in frustrations invite moments of contemplation. When an unfortunate draw leaves you shy of good options, the exasperation hits close to home. However close we are to someone, however relaxed we may feel in their company, all of us have the capacity to rub people up the wrong way. Even – especially – those we love most. Yes, that one fatigue card is effectively a double punishment feels harsh, though there’s an excuse even for that: we’re living proof that overtiredness can make a person snippy from time to time.
The questions keep coming. Should you – do we – learn something from every conversation? Are some people just fundamentally unknowable? When grief comes into the mix and we’re given cause to regret one particular stalemate, the answers to these can seem uncomfortable. Yet don’t think this is hard work by any means: this is a game of rare thematic consistency and mechanical brilliance, yes, but it’s also one that invites us to look at the world with arms and eyes wide open. We may not be playing with a traditional deck, but when the credits roll our hand is full of hearts.
You stack your deck not for combat but for conversation. Encounters feel collaborative rather than competitive