SAYONARA WILD HEARTS
Format iOS, PS4, Switch
Developer Simogo
Publisher Annapurna Interactive
Origin Sweden
Release 2019
Parallel Universes is the 13th, and one of the most conceptually ingenious, of Sayonara Wild Hearts’ 23 tracks. Here, the player character rides a motorbike down a course flanked by a pair of masked twins: the Stereo Lovers. With each snap of their fingers – on Switch, this is accompanied by a small but perceptible buzz of HD Rumble you can feel in your palms – the course shifts between two realities. Click. You steer left to gather a trail of score-boosting hearts. Click. You swerve right to avoid a wall that suddenly appears in front of you. Though from start to finish it lasts no more than 90 seconds, it’s so beautifully executed and thematically fitting you’d never believe it was an 11th-hour inclusion – so when Simogo’s Simon Flesser admits it was put together in a little more than a week, and squeezed in just before the game was sent to QA, we’re quite taken aback. Really? “Yeah,” he says. “We were working on a WarioWare-style megamix mode, which was functional and up-and-running, but opted for giving the Lovers one more stage instead.” Appealing as that mode might sound, it’s hard not to think Simogo made the right choice.
Yet if there were mere days between conception and completion had already undergone a major shift in direction. Inspired by The World Ender, a song by indie-folk band Lord Huron, Flesser first imagined a game about “an avenger that comes back from the dead”. Then, taking cues from the teddy girl and café racer subcultures, he drew a picture of a masked woman as the lead, which became the focal point of early development. At first, the game was much darker in tone, with the music blending surf rock and Ethiopian influences. Until one day – as discussed in the Post Script to the review in 338 – Flesser was hit by an epiphany while listening to Chvrches, and decided that pop music was the way forward.
