It’s a deeply personal tale about love, heartbreak, looking inward, and moving forward, but its transformational imagery and demanding, fast-paced gameplay create a consistent sense of change and unpredictability which reflects in miniature the upheaval we’ve collectively experienced in 2020.īy proceeding through the game’s neon dreamscape, the characters you encounter, the environments, and the mechanics alike undergo endless metamorphoses that require your constant adaptation. Sayonara Wild Hearts isn’t a game about a pandemic, nor is it about police brutality, racism, economic instability, inequality, climate change, or any of the other issues that have spent time in the global spotlight this year.
My city was facing a second lockdown to curb the spread of COVID-19, which ultimately would see the extent of my in-person social interaction restricted to the supermarket checkout for the next three months during this time, the internet was my window to the rest of the world, but with wave after wave of devastating news plastered across my phone every day, the outlook was more than a little sombre. It’s a question I found myself asking earlier this year as the weeks began to bleed together and I started measuring time by the number of months since I’d last hugged another person.
It’s a stunningly beautiful game, but it can often feel hard to keep up. Booting up this effervescent arcade racer for the first time, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed: levels shift and change at breakneck pace new mechanics are introduced and discarded with barely enough time to get used to them much of the detail in the music and environments passes by as you focus on survival. Tumultuous, demanding, unpredictable: you could pin these words on the calendar year of 2020 just as easily as you could use them to describe the genre-bending celebration of pop music and video games that is Sayonara Wild Hearts.
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