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. From top-note to drydown, vividly here and then vividly gone.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. Maybe this is perfume, following the shape of the breeze. But then I think back to its atomiser bursts of transitions, one idea gusting into another, and I wonder if it's all more ephemeral that that. It can reference Panzer Dragoon, Jet Set Radio, Dyad and Thumper while remaining entirely coherent, entirely itself.Īnd as for the shape, I would say it's more of a playlist than the standard video game movie pastiche. And so dense! Its exuberance is precision, its chaos is sheer choreography. Sayonara Wild Hearts is such a simple thing but also such a complex thing, such a heartfelt thing. All of this is the work of Simogo, a studio whose games I love, and whose forthcoming projects I always worry about slightly, worrying because the team seems to have such confidence and such taste that I am forever waiting for things to be over-worked, over-considered, to become too stylish, sharp-edged and chilly.

Sayonara wild hearts begin again gold