Sayonara Wild Hearts is a wonderfully beautiful experience of sight, sound, and gameplay. From the moment you boot up the game on Steam, it hits you right in “the feels” and never lets you go. It’s gorgeous, fun, and shows that indie games are the closest thing to the perfect mix of art and fun we are going to get from the medium of video games. Committee designed AAA games wish they could be this incredible on any level.
This might be the most beautiful gaming experience of 2019
The game itself opens with a wonderfully voiced narrator explaining that on this night, somewhere in time, a young woman’s heart broke so violently that is echoed throughout all of space and time. The experience then shifts to the title menu that floors you straight away with the amazing title song that hits like a bass drum to the heart.
Before I even laid a hand on the keyboard I knew I was going to be in for something truly special. I even spent a few minutes just experiencing the music, something I haven’t since I booted up the original Halo for the first time.
Sayonara Wild Hearts can be classified as a rhythm-based runner, but one the pushes the genre to its very limit in terms of style and design. You play as a girl tasked with saving all of reality and you must guide her down wonderfully designed stages moving her left and right. Visually, the game feels a little like REZ, mixed with Amplitude, and crossed with Nights Into Dreams, if that makes any sense at all. And I don’t mention those three much-loved franchises lightly, as I feel Sayonara Wild Hearts makes for some excellent company alongside them.
The basics see you ride down a fairly fixed path moving our heroine side to side, working to collect as many heart gems as you can. You also have to manage a single action button and that’s pretty much your lot The better you do the better score you get at the end of each stage. You can also take alternative paths to help up your score as these are more difficult to navigate. Essentially, what we have is a score attack game, but it’s the world around that basic concept that sticks with you long after you’ve put the controller down or stepped away from the keyboard.
Stages are oftentimes short yet always challenging. You can hit ramps that allow you to briefly fly around the course, hit warps that blast you across the lane you are on and see the lane itself form, fall away, and alter in every direction at any given moment. Sayonara Wild Hearts is an absolute visual delight and there wasn’t a single person that I showed (or let play) the game that didn’t walk away with the biggest smile on their face. This is the kind of sensory experience that makes you feel better about the world around you.
What’s more impressive is that the game works well for any type of player out there. Someone new to gaming could easily pick this one up and be grooving along as they guide our hero through each stage. As long as you can hit the arrow keys to the left and right and can follow a basic beat you can fully experience Sayonara Wild Hearts. Likewise, if you are a score junky and need a challenge, going for perfection on each track is going to still give you quite the test.
The feeling of blasting down a digital highway, your motorcycle dematerializing as you hit a jump and begin to soar like Superwoman is incredible. Riding your long-board through Sonic-like loops and tunnels is a delight. Surfing a playing card through techo-inspired wonders, stimulating nearly all of your senses is a unique experience. And the fact that the soundtrack is absolutely out of this world doesn’t hurt either. I know our “Game Of The Year” awards aren’t until January, but I can’t look to any other game this year with a better soundtrack, or one with better overall sound design.
But Sayonara Wild Hearts wouldn’t be special if it didn’t have a few tricks up its color-splashed sleeve. The story that weaves through the game is delightfully futuristic, yet comfortably familiar. It’s like a neon-inspired Happy Days tinged with sadness in many respects. And while many games of this nature stick to the core runner mechanics, Sayonara Wild Hearts isn’t afraid to mix things up and become a rhythm-based fighting game during a race. The whole experience moves at a break-neck pace, never letting anything get stale and surprising you at every turn.
Buy this game right now
There have been very few games this year that are as charming or as fun as Sayonara Wild Hearts. Add in the fact that you have a well-paced and well laid out story about the power of love in our universe and you have a game that needs to be in everyone’s library. I know this review isn’t quite finished but I’m telling you to just open up a new tab and buy this game right now on Steam. There wasn’t a moment where I was playing where I didn’t just feel good. Not just happy, but good deep down inside.
It’s almost impossible to explain the experience of Sayonara Wild Hearts without playing it yourself. If games can be art, then Sayonara Wild Hearts ticks off all of those boxes. If games are supposed to be fun, it hits those beats as well. It’s not often that a game comes around and manages to shatter my bitter reviewer heart while also being a joy to play and experience. Even as I write this I can hear the games pumping music in my head and just want to jump back into the game for one more go at it.
A friend of mine who played a little of the game with me said it was a “dreamlike” experience, and I couldn’t have said it better myself. Weaving in and out of danger collecting hearts is almost magical in a sense. Timing your inputs for huge set-piece moments never gets old, and the way the camera work as it flys around you in a beautifully cinematic manner is near perfection in terms of design.
Playing Sayonara Wild Hearts is an experience. It threads this really cool line of letting you play the game while at the same time making you feel like you are an observer to it as well. The color employed throughout the game is wonderful as well, punching to the weight of the music, making for a game that you feel just as much as see and play. And all of this for only $8 on Steam. That just blows my mind.
Now, to be fair, this isn’t the hardest game out there, even in the genre it sits in, but it isn’t a walk in the park either. The level design is such that you have more freedom than one would expect along the fairly fixed path. If you stick to following the heart-shaped gems you’ll probably be okay as they help guide the player down the correct path, but it’s the in-between bits where things get really tricky.
You slide back and forth down paths and your speed is fixed, or tied to hitting boosts for extra locomotion. It’s sometimes easy to get distracted and crash into a wall or sometimes miss some of the smaller gaps and paths the first time through. Thankfully, a crash won’t end your run as the game throws you back a little before your accident to try it again in time with the music. Sayonara Wild Hearts sits right in the sweet spot of not being a cakewalk for casuals, but also not being something like Super Meat Boy.
If I had to nitpick (something I love to do so much that I made it my job) one thing about the experience is that the movement can feel a little floaty when things get really busy. I didn’t notice it too much, but if the controls were tightened up just a hair, the whole experience would benefit from it. The timing during the action bits also feels about a millisecond off. Most people won’t even notice this, but since I plied my trade as a drummer during my formative years, I felt it dragged by the most minuscule of degrees. Then again, this could all be down to my keyboard and monitor setup as the better you have the better the overall experience will be.
I know these types of rhythm games aren’t for everyone, but if you are going to give one a chance make sure it’s Sayonara Wild Hearts. This is a gaming experience that isn’t going to be leaving you anytime soon and one that only comes around every few years. Support this team and but this game and then go buy a copy for someone that you love. Yeah, it’s that good.
“Sayonara Wild Hearts might just be the most beautiful gaming experience you’ll have all year. “
Final Score: 4.5/5
Genre: Action, Casual
Developer: Simogo
Publisher: Annapurna Interactive
Platform(s): PC [reviewed], Nintendo Switch, PS4, Apple Arcade
Release Date: Dec 12, 2019
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