Everyone could do with a little self care. Gaming can be an exercise in sporting excellence or a terrifying journey into the brutal and macabre, but there’s nothing like an evening diving into a story that’s just as much about you as it is the protagonist. The perfect game can become a soothing embrace that eases you into an evening, and few remedy a rainy day – or even an aching heart – like Sayonara Wild Hearts.

At the game’s core, I’d say, is an exercise in becoming at one with your badass self following loss. As our famed narrator (Queen Latifah) tells us, we meet our hero picking up the pieces from a broken heart, shattered “so violently that her sorrow echoed through space and time”. Yet the pain is never enduring to the plot. The moment our esteemed narrator quietens, our hero is tipped from their slumber – longboard and all – into a succinct one-and-a-half hour journey of closure and self care.

ENGLISH (Digital Download: 09-2017)Related FileForums Posts.Related Games.Get it Here!.Backup & Installation Notes. Some No-CD/Fixed EXE files work fine in Single Player mode but are detected to be modified when trying to play online. Always make a backup of the files that are overwritten by the File Archive, as the original files are usually required to update the game to a newer version or to play Online!.

You fall into an aesthetically stunning world inhabited by stylish gangs, mechs, and pastel overtones, all doused in a familiar and mechanical arcade points system. Within seconds the game’s mechanics are clear: collect hearts and chase ever-increasing high scores. But it’s much more than a race to the finish line and a handful of medals proclaiming the dexterity of your digits. It’s about the journey. Take a second to listen to the music, sink into the laser-etched visuals, and dance-battle to your heart’s content.

By the end of the first level – an epic downhill traversal set to Clair de Lune that longboarders could only dream of – you’re ready to take on anything Sayonara Wild Hearts can throw at you; no longer the girl falling through her dreams, but now her stylish, masked alter ego.

From bedroom to highway through space-time in an instant, you’ll soon ditch your board for a menagerie of vehicles. A motorcycle, a wild stag, a car cruising through the desert, and eventually a favicon version of yourself stuck in the VR-sphere.

Take a second to listen to the music, sink into the laser-etched visuals, and dance-battle to your heart’s content

Sayonara Wild Hearts Achievements. Aries A; Sayonara Wild Hearts. 1,643 1,000 24. 4.61 318 62 (19%) 6-8h. Get no rank in Clair de Lune. Don’t score above the Bronze rank threshold of 5000.

The controls are easy, which helps Sayonara Wild Hearts suit PC as much as Apple Arcade. You move side to side, perhaps a jump here or there, and all with the style and finesse of a skater gliding effortlessly across the ice. In very little time you will have grasped the tempo of every level – each complete with a carefully crafted score, attuned to every animation and action, created by the superb Daniel Olsén and Jonathan Eng, and with vocals from the talented Linnea Olsson.

The soundtrack is nothing less than exceptional, each track custom-made for Sayonara Wild Heart’s 23 levels. It’s comprised of a couple viciously catchy pop romps that will keep energy high and your head bobbing along, but also contrasting tones, such as imposing bass-heavy hits that score the later levels as your opponents gain devilish facades. Level design is built to match, obscured by trippy visuals. A beat transports you between realities – reverberating across psychedelic scores or relaxed ambient electronica.

Sayonara Wild Hearts’ difficulty is what you make of it. It’s not forced, nor is it tacked on. If you want to go for gold every level, get after it. If all you want to do is stare at the cutting art style and take in the sights and sounds, you can do so without condition. Quick-time events will stick around for some time whether you’re in for a penny or a pound.

Chasing high scores can be saved for the tenth or twentieth playthrough, and believe me, you’ll find yourself coming back for more – replayability is through the roof. Once you’re in the second, fourth, or tenth playthrough, you’ll really nail down that gold medal.

Sayonara Wild Hearts is a fleeting techno-pop ballet that’s unlike anything else, one which fills you with overwhelming determination and a sense of self worth. It’s the love letter you should’ve sent to yourself a long time ago – tantamount to 20 Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathons or three long candle-lit baths.

Sayonara Wild Hearts PC review

Sayonara Wild Hearts is a shot of pure positivity to the heart, delivered with excellence, fun, and finesse through a staggeringly bold and bop-worthy soundtrack.

A game of two halves, Sayonara Wild Hearts tells a timely story of heartbreak while also providing one of the most stylish games ever made.

Developer:Simogo
Publisher:Annapurna Interactive
Platforms:PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, iOS/Apple Arcade (Played)
Directors:Simon Flesser, Magnus Gardebäck

A while back, I told someone I had feelings for them through a Discord message. The problem was that I had sent this message literally five minutes before I was due to go into significant dental surgery, the need to send said message stemming from a paranoid fear I was gonna be killed from some sort of reaction to the anaesthetic (even though it was my third time going under). I asked them when I’d recovered, we can have a talk about it. They were incredibly gracious and wonderful about what I had told them, so they agreed.

Three weeks to the day later, where I had finally recovered enough from the surgery to talk to them and following on from some significant personal stuff in my life, we finally talked it out on Discord for an hour. It was one of the most emotionally raw and vulnerable conversations we ever had, if not the most emotionally raw and vulnerable. Despite that, they admitted they were seeing someone. It stung. It stung quite a lot, in fact. I went into it with the hope, despite some big logistics in the way, that something could happen between us. But we always promised each other regardless of what happened that we’d still be friends and we still are. In fact, at the very least, our conversation brought us together a lot closer as friends.

But I would be lying if I said my heart wasn’t shattered, if not broken, after our chat. It was a person I had feelings for for a long time.

So Sayonara Wild Hearts could not have come at a more appropriate time for me amid the game’s backdrop of a young woman whose heart was broken after a massive breakup. You play through two albums worth of levels as you try to repiece your heart together among taking on several gangs in the game. Who knew that a game about heartbreak would also be the most stylish game I’d ever played.

Within booting the game up on my iPad Pro, I find myself in awe at what’s about to go down. The main menu music is such a bop that I find myself wanting to stay on the main menu for a long time. And this was roughly less than five minutes after booting it up. You know you’re in for something special when you don’t even want to leave the main menu screen for how great the music is (I’m listening to the track in question as I’m writing this). And it is great, brilliant even. I mention the two albums worth of levels line because that’s what this is by Swedish developer Simogo’s admission, a game pop album.

The soundtrack goes through many many layers, such as electro, dub, dance, straight up pop and more, all fitting within the motif of the four gangs you come across over several levels each, all lasting an average of two-to-three minutes with transition ‘Heartbreak’ levels in between, as you try to piece together your heart again. To say it is such a brilliant soundtrack feels like such an understatement. It is not only an incredible soundtrack, but it is such a core part of the game’s identity.

Sayonara Wild Hearts is one of 100 launch games for Apple Arcade’s launch. And it tells you about how serious Apple is with it considering the incredible amount of quality of its lineup is, from not just Sayonara Wild Hearts to games like Jenny LeClue, Neo Cab and Assemble with Care from Monument Valley developer ustwo Games. I wrote about some of the games to look forward to as part of the service here.

But also as part of Apple’s renewed push is its messaging that you can play how you like, when you like. If you want to play on your phone or on a big screen via Apple TV through touch or gamepads, including PlayStation 4 and Xbox One controllers as part of iOS 13, you can.

I played Sayonara, Wild Hearts on the most recent iteration of the iPad Pro, a 12.9’ model, with a DualShock 4 and it works really well. The experience more than likely won’t differ a whole lot if you’re playing the game on PS4 as it’s just the same control scheme, but if you’re playing it on an iOS device, we can’t recommend enough pairing it to an iPad or Apple TV.

That’s not to say it isn’t inspired by others. Levels within Sayonara Wild Hearts clearly wears influences all over its sleeve, not just in visual design or music, but in a gameplay sense too. It takes inspirations from first-person on-rails shooters or efforts like Geometry Wars, Space Invaders and even Rez, the latter making me smile like a goofy idiot when I realised what it was doing and not too dissimilar to the reaction I had playing the last level of that game when realising it was sampling Marlena Shaw’s California Soul in brilliant and genius ways.

Sayonara Wild Hearts has other moments too which provided big grins on my face and made me audibly laugh out loud in sheer happiness, including how it uses Clair De Lune at the start of the game as well as later on in it. If not the game’s main menu, that was definitely when I knew Sayonara, Wild Hearts would provide something special. And every level, it produced something that made me at worst tap along to the music and how brilliant it was and at best, legit smile at the combination of everything coming together in that particular moment: gameplay, music, art design, which also confirms the game is for bisexuals. Sorry, we don’t make the rules. They just are.

That’s not to say there isn’t faults with the game. A few levels end just as they begin to find their groove (no pun intended) and there was one particular level that I got stuck out quite a bit (but more of my ability for that level than anything else, so that’s a nitpick than anything).

I don’t know if I will have the kind of closure that Sayonara Wild Hearts provides to its main character in regards to my situation for a list of reasons. Even writing this now, approaching two weeks after our discussion, I’m still thinking of it and other things tied to it. Parasite eve. The ‘what ifs’, the ‘what could have gone differently’, ‘what if I told them sooner’, etc. But playing Sayonara Wild Hearts has helped at the bare minimum to comfort me, as well as helped me come to grips with what happened. To say the least of having an incredible soundtrack mixed with fantastic levels that make me so goofy at the face with happiness, it also provides an important message too: love is beautiful and meaningful in both the best and worst possible ways, and that it applies in so many ways, whether that’s finding that inner bit of self-love and validation you’ve been seeking.

The ultimate heartbreak album? For sure. Let’s pop.

Sayonara Wild Hearts was a mostly cathartic experience for me, but putting that aside, it is also the most stylish game I’ve ever played in every possible way. Mechanically, musically, artistically – it really does feel like not only a statement of intent for the future of Apple Arcade, but for publisher Annapurna Interactive and the games it continues to help publish. Let’s pop.