Echodog Games
The LA-based studio behind last year’s Edge Artisan Award winner can reflect on a more successful 2020 than most. A card game about communication – “not exactly a deck-building game but a deckdeveloping game,” creative director Dyala Kattan-Wright says – Signs Of The Sojourner was a triumphant debut for Echodog Games, albeit one that didn’t quite reach the number of players it deserved on PC. That should change in 2021: a Switch version was mooted last year, and Kattan-Wright confirms it’s being brought to more formats besides. “Yeah, it’s coming to current and next-gen – or is it current and previous gen? – platforms, so PS4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X. We don’t have an exact date yet, but it’s going to be early this year.”
Having self-published Sojourner on Steam, Echodog is now working with Digerati Publishing, which is handling PR duties. And we’re delighted to report that this will be an enhanced version of the original game, including new story threads and several additional characters. (PC owners will get a free update.) Yet not all of the newcomers are, in fact, new. “Some of these characters we’d actually had in an earlier version, and then cut due to resources and just deciding [we’d] rather have more fleshed-out but fewer characters,” Kattan-Wright tells us. But with Holly Rothrock having already supplied the art for these NPCs and with plotlines the studio was keen to develop further, it made perfect sense to add them back in now Echodog had the time and resources to do them justice.
“Part of it is about wanting to incentivise people to come back and replay it,” Kattan-Wright says of a game that’s already very replayable. “Maybe we’ll get people to pick it up who have been on the fence so far. There are also quite a few quality-of-life updates that we’d still like to be able to do, and a lot of that is kind of dependent on how the ports [perform].”
The studio’s certainly
hopeful that there might well be more Signs – and sojourners – to come as it considers its next step. “We’re in the early stages of thinking about what the next game might be – I’d say too early to really want to talk about it,” KattanWright says, suggesting that if the console versions of Signs are wellreceived then it might not be quite ready to move on just yet. “Whether we spend time on additional features or even larger content DLCs for Signs, possibly localisation and those kinds of things… a lot of it is really up in the air at this point whether we focus more on Signs or dive into a new project.” Wherever its cards may fall, we can’t wait to see what the team does next.