The soundtrack stretches the boundaries of synthpop from Debussy to Bach. There are high scores and different ranks, but I had a lovely time fumbling through like a clumsy tourist, listening as choruses and verses turned into actual songs, as one theme gave way to another, a progression of dreams, almost, with the same go-anywhere nature and the same steely sense of a shared theme running beneath it. It would be too much, but Sayonara Wild Hearts can change suits so often because the rules of the game remain constant: aim for this, not for that, and watch for the glowing prompts. A Rez reference gives way to a bit of good old F-Zero. (Keeping track is such a crucial part of heartbreak.) Buttons appear allowing you to land rapier blows in one section and fire rockets in another. And you note each one, I guess, thinking of the deep wrongs that your pirouetting, motorbike-racing eternally-spurned dandy has suffered. You follow them to uncover racing lines that lead through the shifting visuals, with their bruised 80s cocktail colour schemes and their brittle pop soundscapes. Another is space invaders (again: sort of), playing out on the gently curved surface of a VR headset. One section is a sort of urban chase, sudden intersections appearing out of nowhere. How? Sayonara wants you to work that out as you go, as it shifts between two dimensions and three, sending you into the screen, across the screen, out of the screen. Skateboards? Bikes? Magical thermals? No problem. You pick through a shuffled deck of scenarios, dropping down tunnels, racing over streets, bounding across rooftops and lancing through the void. More practically, Sayonara Wild Hearts is rhythm-action, I guess. The whole thing is delivered with the vividness and force of a good revenge fantasy. The theme, if you ask me, is heartbreak and bitter romance and the journey through it all, but experienced as it can only be experienced in the teens and early twenties, when the drama is lurid and the setbacks are brutal and echoing and unprecedented. A ship rolls over humpbacked low-poly waves. A deer bounds across a fractal winter forest. A highway grows ambitious and launches itself at the sky. You move, you avoid, you collect, you match the rhythm, and around you one thing becomes another, becomes another, becomes another. What sticks this together is interaction. In another it is a dizzying headlong rush of ideas, pranks, nightmares, middle-eights and other glittering fragments. In one way, Sayonara Wild Hearts is absolute simplicity. It's a game I want to shake and then hold to my ear, listening for a rattle, for a hint of the shape of the internal mechanism. Availability: Out September 19th on PS4, Switch and iOS (as part of Apple Arcade)Īnd here is Sayonara Wild Hearts.It's not just film: Ralph Ellison, when asked why his second novel was taking so many decades to finish, generally replied by saying that he was working on "the transitions." (Also, his house burned down at one point, which can't have helped.) Sayonara Wild Hearts review So how do you stick things together? Some of the best film-makers find their movies in the edit, in that frightening, abstract landscape where time is fractured and can spin backwards, forwards, sideways if you want, while, simultaneously, the cutting suite is littered with old Hula-Hoop packets, its tables haloed with coffee stains. It's so strange, really, that at the heart of such a mysterious process should be something so deeply, infuriatingly practical. Simogo shuffles through a stacked deck of rhythm-action delights, mastering yet another genre.Ī huge part of any creative endeavour, I suspect, is learning how to stick things together.
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