Like a dream

Sayonara Wild Hearts Annapurna Interactive Available on IOS, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4

Sayonara Wild Hearts is a beautifully designed game about travelling fast along nighttime roads while listening to good tunes. It seems to be born out of memories of old music videos that used animation and featured people with teased hair.

By extension, anyone who remembers the video for Michael Jackson’s Beat It will find a cultural echo in the game’s danceoffs between jacket-clad gangs and their rivals.

Mixing elements of racing, rhythm and shooting games, Sayonara Wild Hearts spins a disposable story (voiced by Queen Latifah) around a heartbroken young woman whose world is upended after a butterfly-like creature from another universe wakes her up one night and flips her room upside down. The emissary hails from a place that was once ruled by three benevolent arcana until “a cursed arcana” crossed the trio on the “astral highways.” Backed by its “star-crossed” conspirators, the dastardly arcana plundered the harmony from that universe and cached it in their corrupt hearts.

The woman alights on a skateboard. The nocturnal road that uncoils in front of her spirals, twists, loops and breaks off into sections that twirl through the air as discs before joining other segments.

As a modernized version of Debussy’s Clair de lune plays, the woman zooms down the road and over jumps acquiring whatever hearts she rolls over, contributing to the player’s final score.

The next stage introduces the first of five “heartbreak” stages. Unlike later stages that introduce different adversaries, these stages are devoid of other people. The goal here, as elsewhere, is simply to acquire as many hearts as possible.

The first adversaries you meet are the Dancing Devils, a motorcycle gang that engages you in a dance battle before speeding away. Easily timed button presses will get you through the dance-off.

None of the stages in Sayonara Wild Hearts take longer than a few minutes to complete. Indeed, the game can easily be finished in under two hours on one’s first attempt. That said, I’ve played through it a few times now and I’m nowhere near tired of it.

Sayonara Wild Hearts is a concentrated blast of audiovisual delight. It is game that excels in instilling an ephemeral sense of elation.