Sayonara Wild Hearts: Simogo makes an action game that plays like a pop album

Simogo is a small Swedish studio best known for Year Walk, DEVICE 6 and The Sailor's Dream — dense, story-led games that asked for patience. In December 2018 it announced Sayonara Wild Hearts with a statement that opened 'Our new game! Our new pop album! Our new everything!' and described a pop album video game about riding motorcycles, dance battling, shooting lasers and breaking hearts at 200 mph.

The studio explained the turn: after three slow and thinky games it wanted something with a swift soul, more gut than brain, that thrilled and filled the player with euphoria like a good pop song. Flesser argued that games had become scary and uninviting, with action titles operated by twelve buttons and two sticks at once, and wanted a spectacular 3D game as simple as the arcade games that needed one button and four directions.

The musical idea came from an accident in the studio. While the team played a prototype of masked biker gangs based on tarot cards, an energetic electric pop playlist happened to marry perfectly with the action on screen. Within about a day, Simogo asked composer Jonathan Eng to write pop songs about heartbreak and Daniel Olsén to arrange them with vibrant electronic production; singer Linnea Olsson joined and the project became a real pop band whose first album was the soundtrack.

Publishing followed a single demo: after more than a year of emails, Simogo showed Annapurna Interactive one level in 2016 and the partnership gave the studio two extra programmers, a 2D/UI artist and an animator. The design goal was constant surprises without tutorials or new systems to learn. Sayonara Wild Hearts shipped in 2019, and Annapurna's page still leads with the tagline 'a pop album video game.'