ARTISAN AWARD SIGNS OF THE SOJOURNER

Echodog Games’ captivating debut feels just like one of the hand-carved ornaments you’ll find at the local market stalls on your travels within the game. It’s a small and delicate thing, made with love and care, lying there somehow ignored or undiscovered by most people. And then you open it up to reveal that it’s so much more than just an attractive tchotchke, it’s really a contraption of rare and beautiful intricacy.

To talk to other characters, you need to place cards with geometric symbols attached, focusing on ensuring they match up with the previous card so you can continue the conversation. A circular symbol means your responses are empathetic or observant, while a triangle stands for diplomatic and logical conversation. At first, it seems all too simple and abstract. But as your deck develops over the course of the game – each exchange forcing you to replace a card in your deck with a new one – Sojourner imbues those simple shapes with much deeper meaning, showing how we’re changed by the places we visit and people we meet.

Naturally friendly folks make your job easy, always placing cards with which you can make a comfortable match. By contrast, closed-minded or introverted characters will take time and effort on your part to open up, encouraging you to choose your cards carefully and switch up your deck between visits until you become familiar with their patterns of speech. In choosing to remember the sadder side of conversations to be a more empathetic listener to others in mourning, you risk being too much of a downer to an ebullient shop owner back home. But then a pet dog, wonderfully, will match with whatever card you play. Such close intertwining of story and systems produces occasional frustrations, but even these feel like nothing more than the discovery of a thumbprint or a stray fingernail indentation in a clay pot – signs of a game built by true craftspeople.