I find January a perfect time of year to catch up on the backlog. While being a patient boy for Living the Dream,Big Walk,and Marathon, I’ve started up a handful of games I’ve been meaning to get around to proper.
Death Stranding and Dark Souls have proven to be the ones sticking around for the longer plays and I also found myself, once again, returning to Slay the Spire. Maybe my brain is preparing itself to fall deep into its sequel for later this year as well. Then I was getting the appetite for something artsy and quick. I decided to jump into Sayonara Wild Hearts and it immediately scratched that itch and then some.
Developed by Swedish team Simogo, Sayonara Wild Hearts is a music game. I hesitate to immediately label it as holy a rhythm game because the game focuses less on precise timing to the beat (although this will pop up throughout the play time) but it is really an endless runner that takes its inspiration from many sources and throws out mechanics and game genre as fast as it introduces it.
I love when describing the game Simogo said:
“It’s the teddygirls sub-culture, cafe racers, OutRun, Carly Rae Jepsen, Rez, WarioWare, Blümchen, the 1950s, modern dance, Akira, F-Zero, Space Harrier, Sia, the 1980s, Sailor Moon, Ouendan, Tron, Rhythm Tengoku, Punch Out, and a good portion of mysticism stuffed into a blender.”
This. Game. Is. A trip, man. It’s structured like playing through one of the best pop albums of the 2010s. It’s pacing is immaculate. It is dripping with style. Sayonara Wild Hearts grabs onto you, and does not let go until credits roll. My total play time was a little over an hour after a single play-through, and this game has immediately cemented itself as an all-timer for yours truly.
This game is light on any kind of direct narrative, focusing mostly on emotions and vibes. The basic set up is you are reflecting on your past relationships in a dream, specifically the heartbreak of them. Everything in this world is themed after the Major Arcana. From you being represented as The Fool, to your various ex-partners being The Hermit, The Lovers, etc.
Every section of this game is set to a beautiful soundtrack made collaboratively by Daniel Olsén, Jonathan Eng, and Linnea Olsson. The style of the music ranges from synthpop bangers, dub funk, to one of the best remixes of Clair de Lune I’ve ever heard.
The speed of this game is unreal. It feels like how you wish every Sonic the Hedgehog game played. Just breakneck speed and pulsing rhythms with some absolutely breath-taking set pieces through the whole run time. Failure is even snappy in this. When you mess up the game only really takes you back to the closest measure that makes sense immediately, with positively no downtime, which feels sooooo good.
I was truly moved from within the first minutes of having my hands on this. I found myself in tears while going through just the introductory parts of the game and was really trying to pin down why. This is a very cathartic story about acceptance through the cycles of heartbreak but before that was even apparent to me I was an emotional wreck.
I guess I was just so aware I was in good hands from the second I started this thing up. Everything about this game is just, well, perfect. It’s hard to really say anything else about it, it’s just one of those things that I finished and had to go to the nearest mountain top to let people know how good this thing is.
I suppose here is the next best place.
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