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Sayonara Wild Hearts is celebrating its 5-year anniversary today, September 19, 2024. Below, we examine how it feels to revisit the game and its soundtrack time and time again.
The more time passes, the more nostalgic I grow for Sayonara Wild Hearts. The “pop album video game” by developer Simogo–known for the likes of Year Walk and 2024’s moody Lorelei and the Laser Eyes–is an atemporal arcade cabinet. The structure of bite-sized levels, paired with a steep scoring system engulfed me back in 2019 and hasn’t let go since. The presentation is encouraging enough to return to it sporadically. Five years later, however, I’m still surprised by how the experience gains more significance with each revisit.
Sayonara Wild Hearts is one of the few games that have remained installed on my PC since launch. At first, I’d hand-pick one or two levels whenever I had some downtime for a quick play session of something other than a roguelike. Over time, it became my go-to escape to clear my head or wind down after a long week. Sometimes I play it from start to finish, which can be done in about an hour. But even when I’m not, I always finish the session playing the last two stages, resulting in a euphoric gut punch.
Part of the allure, I believe, is that each level has a unique spin that doesn’t require a massive effort to enjoy–something that Simogo painstakingly iterated on during development. You only need to control the main character’s movement and use a single action button to perform attacks, dodges, or snap your fingers. Across the span of 20 minutes, you fight against a three-headed mecha wolf, drive a sports car on a dreamy highway, and play a shoot-’em-up inside somebody’s VR headset.
At the heart of everything, it’s the emotions that these sequences evoke, paired with the soundtrack and overarching story about a woman going through a heartbreak, that stuck with me. I’ve memorized which member of the Dancing Devils I’m facing during each verse of “Begin Again.” I could tell you when the needle drop of “A Place I Don’t Know” will occur with the sound off. I know which songs to resort to if I’m looking to be soothed by melancholy or if I need to be uplifted.
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Very few games are as uncompromising in nature while also being impossible to forget or abandon altogether, even years after launch. The first time I revisited Sayonara Wild Hearts on New Year’s Eve of 2019, now a yearly tradition, I was getting over the breakup of a three-year-long relationship. Doing so last week in preparation for this piece, I kept looking back on my personal growth, ready to reflect on and share the experiences I’ve had with dating since. But that same evening, my replay session gained unexpected significance yet again.
The entire team of Annapurna Interactive, the publisher of not only Sayonara Wild Hearts but dozens of other titles, collectively resigned. As reported by Bloomberg, this was the result of internal disagreements over the future of the division, which included a failed deal that would have spun out the gaming section as a standalone company. Annapurna Interactive’s president Nathan Gary, as well as division co-heads Nathan Vella and Deborah Mars, and the rest of the staff left the company.
In a statement, Annapurna founder Megan Ellison said that supporting “developer and publishing partners during this transition” is a “top priority.” A spokesperson told IGN that the company plans to continue its existing contracts while replacing departed staff. In the following days, a few developers shared updates on their projects, including Wanderstop, Mixtape, and We Kill Monsters, reassuring that partnerships remain in place.
At the time of writing, Simogo is yet to issue a statement about its plans. The team announced a publishing deal with Annapurna in 2020, which entailed “future Simogo projects” for the foreseeable future. Back then, Simogo was working on “Project Fuzzy Optics,” AKA Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. Now, aside from there being no plans of releasing Sayonara Wild Hearts on iOS or macOS separately after it was delisted from Apple Arcade on August 15th, what awaits in the future is uncertain. Even as the publisher attempts to reassure the public that the Interactive team will be rebuilt, so to speak, the people who made this partnership and countless others happen under a joint vision won’t be a part of it.
It’s no overstatement to say that Simogo’s work was one of Annapurna’s recognizable staples. In a way, Sayonara’s collection of different experiences co-existing in tandem mirrors the publisher’s diverse games selection, with the likes of If Found…, Outer Wilds, Kentucky Route Zero, What Remains of Edith Finch, Neon White, and many others under the same umbrella.
As the soundtrack’s lyrics constantly allude to, Sayonara Wild Hearts places importance on the fragments we leave behind. The Fading Memories cassette tape will remain a historic recollection of demos and unused tracks from the composers and musicians behind it. Games like Open Roads, Florence, and Wattam are fragments of a sour side to Annapurna, after a 2022 investigation by People Make Games alleged that the company was aware but didn’t act more decisively on reportedly toxic work environments.
Simogo has always excelled in doing something different with each new project. Any lessons learned along the way aren’t used to inform sequels but inspire sometimes polar-opposite aesthetics and ideas. It’s hard to predict what the studio’s next game will look and play like–as much as it’s hard to know what sort of new significance a revisit of Sayonara Wild Hearts will take.
Next time, I might ignore the collectible in the middle of the road in “Doki Doki Rush” and take a side path instead-just to see what’s in there. Perhaps I won’t even look at my previous score and choose solely to enjoy the music. No matter how many months or years pass, a story about a person going through a heartbreak will always be easy to relate to, and even more so one that encourages us to reflect on the passage of time–to reflect on how, no matter how many years pass, there’s always a chance to begin again.
