Sayonara Wild Hearts

Simogo returns with its boldest, poppiest game so far.

- 

For Simogo, it always starts with a song. If the studio’s last major release, The Sailor’s Dream (with apologies to minimalist puzzler SPL-T) was a folk album masquerading as a videogame, then the Swedes’ long-awaited comeback is a threeminute pop banger, a foot-tapping, hightempo number with soaring vocals backed by dazzling dance routines.

It wasn’t always thus. The original vision for Sayonara Wild Hearts was much darker; more nightmarish, even. Working alongside long-time collaborators Daniel Olsén and Jonathan Eng, Simogo’s initial soundtrack experiments blended surf rock with world music. “Like taiko drums and Ethiopian influences,” co-founder Simon Flesser explains. The game itself, meanwhile, was based on an idea he’d had of a universe built around tarot cards – a constant throughout his life, thanks to his family’s interest in divination and astrology.

But something wasn’t quite working, even as the first prototype began to take shape. Then one day, Flesser put on a playlist of upbeat pop music and had an epiphany. “I just said, ‘No, this is it’, while we were playing the demo,” he says. “And we’ve been through a lot of iterations of the game since then.”

A lot of iterations, and a lot of influences. There’s a bit of everything in