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Notes on Lorelei and the Laser Eyes

Nostalgia Figurines $1

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is unlike anything else the developer Simogo has ever made, and at the same time it is explicitly linked to everything they’ve ever made. I would know. This post is intended to work as a standalone piece, but it is also the fourth and final part of a retrospective on Simogo’s complete works. If you’d like to read from the beginning, you’ll find it here. I have spent a good chunk of the nine or so months since Lorelei’s release replaying Simogo’s whole catalogue, tracing common themes from one game to the next, and discovering the general shape of their body of work.

In my view, Lorelei is the second game in an intentionally backwards-looking phase of their career, forming a pair of “secret sequels” with Sayonara Wild Hearts. Here’s my schematic in brief:

They started with a trilogy of casual mobile games…

Kosmo Spin
Bumpy Road
Beat Sneak Bandit

…continued with a second trilogy of metafiction-inclined adventure games…

Year Walk
DEVICE 6
The Sailor’s Dream

…took a beat for an “intermission featurette” containing two small and contrasting works…

The Sensational December Machine
SPL-T

…and most recently, they’ve created two ambitious games that each recall a different past phase of Simogo’s career…

Sayonara Wild Hearts, a secret sequel to their early trilogy of casual games
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, a secret sequel to their second trilogy of metafiction adventures.

If this schematic continues to its logical conclusion, then Simogo’s next game will have to be a meditation on the trilogy that it is itself a part of: a secret sequel to Sayonara Wild Hearts, to Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, and–somehow–to itself. In practice, this would be ridiculous, not because it’s impossible but because Simogo has already made that game. It’s this one.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes shares most of its DNA with Simogo’s second trilogy, particularly DEVICE 6, which is also a midcentury-inspired adventure through a labyrinthine property littered with escape room puzzles and enigmatic men in suits. But its explicit references to Simogo’s back catalogue go back well beyond Year Walk, encompassing their early casual games and even their pre-Simogo work ilomilo. It sequelizes the whole of Simogo’s corpus. And if any game is recursive enough to be considered its own sequel, it’s either The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe or it’s this.

Lorelei’s dialogue with its predecessors begins in literally the first frame, with a car named “Lily Christine,” a reference to a rowboat in The Sailor’s Dream. The car’s license plate number, YW-D6-2013, completes the trilogy, referring to Year Walk, DEVICE 6, and the year of their release. Get in the car and turn on the radio, and you’ll find the jockeys playing old hits like the final boss music from Beat Sneak Bandit. This is not hidden. Before the game reveals anything about itself, it allows you a trip down a memory lane full of memories you might not actually have.

Knowledge of Simogo’s catalogue is by no means plot critical to Lorelei. But for those of us who’ve scrutinized the complete works, there are more than just Easter eggs here: there is a continuity of purpose, an explicit attempt to frame their work as a tidy series of related gestures that, for better or worse, culminate here. Whatever else it is, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a self-curated Simogo retrospective. And why shouldn’t it be? We’ll soon discover that this is a story about artists seeking to give shape and meaning to their own pasts. It may or may not be self-indulgent, but it’s all of a piece.

If you’ve read the first three parts in this series, you may be expecting a fairly holistic analysis of this game, which is what I attempted to bring to each of Simogo’s other games. That won’t be possible here. The most obvious difference between Lorelei and the Laser Eyes and its predecessors is that it is comparatively gigantic. You can have a relatively complete experience with any of Simogo’s other games in one or two sittings. Lorelei has a 17- to 24-hour campaign, with the strong possibility that it will take even longer if you’re a Smell The Roses type player. If I’m going to say anything meaningful about this sprawling work, I’ll have to limit my scope.

(Full spoilers, nevertheless.)

In certain creative works, you can hear the creators asking themselves a question. Having played through everything Simogo has ever made, and having now finished Lorelei twice, the question I hear in this game is: who do we make things for?

This is not a simple question. At any given time, the answer could be: for ourselves, for the publisher, for the critics, for the general public, for a niche community of self-identifying “gamers,” or for people who are specifically invested in Simogo games in particular. I haven’t spoken to anybody involved in the creation of Lorelei, but I feel that the game itself announces its intent to grapple with this question, trying on different responses for size. This game is a treasure hunt for self-awareness, not just on the player’s part, but (I suspect) on the artists’ parts as well. It is an act of stock taking: an explicit attempt to address a question that has implicitly defined Simogo’s output for fifteen years.

So. Who is Lorelei and the Laser Eyes actually for?

Directional input… any button…

The single most prevalent complaint in Lorelei’s broadly positive reviews was about its control scheme. As Griffin McElroy put it: “In this game, you can move around, and then you have button.” Which is to say, there are only two inputs in Lorelei: a single directional input, and an action button. Several action buttons, really. In the Switch version, all of the main gameplay buttons on the controller are interchangeable. The action buttons–all of them–double as the button that pulls up the menu when the player character isn’t standing near an interactable object. Odder still, while you’re in the menu, if you want to retreat to the previous submenu, there’s no dedicated button for that. Instead, you’ve got to navigate to the “x” icon in the corner of the screen.

The fact that this extremely small UI issue came up in so many reviews, positive or not, indicates just how annoying it is. There is a widely agreed-upon, better way to do this: the A button is for selecting things; the B button is for going back. It’s so prevalent, and so ingrained in the muscle memory of anybody who’s ever owned a console or handheld, that it feels odd to even describe it. Lorelei’s lack of a back button makes you feel like you’re writing with your non-dominant hand. It causes an effortless task to become effortful.

But to whom is the task effortless? Again: to anybody who’s ever owned a console or handheld. What about everybody else? Historically, this is one of the main questions that Simogo has sought to answer. They started their career in the primordial days of “casual games” for mobile phones. And since then, they’ve been more committed than almost any other game developer to questioning the assumptions of what a player will come to a game already knowing. Simogo made a name for themselves by creating thoughtful and immersive games that required no more explanation than a web browser. Reducing the barrier to entry has traditionally been part of their core mission.

In theory, Lorelei’s control scheme is simpler than the standard one. The “move around, and button” approach keeps you from having to think about what button to press. But, unlike with Year Walk, DEVICE 6, The Sailor’s Dream or even Sayonara Wild Hearts, I find it hard to imagine that much of this game’s potential audience would see the benefit of this ostensible simplicity. For one thing, it is Simogo’s first game not to be released on mobile devices. For the first time in their history, Simogo is selling a product exclusively through video game shopfronts like Steam and the Nintendo eShop, making it unlikely that players who aren’t predisposed towards games will encounter it at all.

But more puzzlingly, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a video games-ass video game, filled not only with references to Simogo’s own back catalogue, but to the culture and heritage of video games in general. With their previous release, Sayonara Wild Hearts, Simogo’s stated aim was to finally create a video game that was “unashamed of being a video game.” Lorelei goes much further in this direction, incorporating references to the Game Boy, to the cheat codes you could sometimes input via secret controller inputs on vintage consoles, and to the physical ephemera of retrogaming. On three separate occasions, it forces you to use fucking tank controls.

It feels like Simogo is being pulled in two directions. On the one hand, they maintain their impulse to keep the controls simple for the benefit of the broadest possible audience. But on the other hand, they’ve filled Lorelei with old-school gamer shibboleths. Lorelei is neither fish nor fowl. Maybe the only way to make sense of it is to take it for what it aggressively asserts itself to be: a Simogo game. The Simogo game. The game where Simogo lays all of their principles and fascinations on the table for the enthusiasts to puzzle through.

INVESTIGATION REPORT

Before we move on, it’s probably worth discussing what actually transpires in Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, as I understand it. The game takes place in a grand old hotel containing a frankly decadent variety of locked doors. As we unlock those doors, we gradually learn the identities of four key players in the story.

Our player character is Lorelei Weiss, a conceptual artist whose work made trailblazing use of computers in the early 1960s. We’re told that her early drawings prefigured the polygonal wireframes of 3D animation. One of Weiss’s most notable works was a collection of puzzle boxes, inviting the viewer to participate in unlocking them. So essentially, Lorelei Weiss is a game dev: an authorial insert on behalf of any or all of the artists who created this game.

The two most obvious answers to the question “who do we make things for” are “the audience” and “ourselves.” If we’re ever tempted into thinking that those two answers are mutually exclusive, we should remember that the player’s avatar in this game is also an authorial insert. It’s never simple.

Next up, the man we came to see:

Renzo Nero is a filmmaker who’s summoned us to the hotel to assist him with a project he refuses to describe. Renzo talks in half-meaningless aphorisms that he seems to have made up on the spot. We learn more about him as we collect documents scattered around the hotel. He’s a fearsomely divisive figure in the film world: a provocateur with a gambling problem, a penchant for mysticism, and a dictatorial streak. He courts controversy by saying dumb shit, like that the atomic bomb was beautiful. (I’m reminded of Karlheinz Stockhausen calling 9/11 “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.”) He is every inch the Problematic Art Man of a prior generation, but perhaps it’s all bluster.

Notably, for almost the entire game, we only see him from the nose down. The same is true, for hysterically obvious reasons, of our next player:

This guy is in fact not nameless; he is Lorenzo the Great, an old-timey stage magician who is transparently just Renzo in disguise. But that is not all he is. We hear stories about Lorenzo, that place him at a far earlier time in history to the mid-20th century when Renzo supposedly lived. And he communicates with us through uncanny means: letters placed beside safes that contain floppy disks, and then through messages hidden within those disks. There are posters of him scattered throughout the hotel, each adorned with a mysterious red rune.

And finally:

This woman appears in three forms across the hotel grounds. There’s this eyeless ghost, floating outside a broken third-floor window. There’s the conspicuous corpse lying on the ground directly below that broken third-floor window. And there’s a young girl wearing an owl mask. It isn’t obvious from the start that this girl is related to the woman, but the more we see her the more she suggests this. It’s nice of her to be so direct. She is in fact the most helpful person around–unsurprising, since the instructions explicitly told us: “Listen very carefully if a person wearing an owl mask speaks.” She is this game’s Kaepora Gaebora: a quest giver, who imparts information as plainly as Lorelei’s idiom allows.

The woman’s name is Renate Schwarzwald, and she was ostensibly the owner of this estate before it became a hotel. Like our other characters, she is an artist: a portraitist whose eyes failed in later life, leading her to embrace abstraction–not unlike Sargy Mann. Schwarzwald’s late work gives Lorelei its most indelible image: a man in a black suit with a neon red maze for a head. Identity is a puzzle in this game. Faces are obscured by coy camera angles, blurry textures, and sunglasses. Schwarzwald’s maze man–a creative insight born from a lack of literal vision–hits the nail on the head.

Schwarzwald isn’t the only character here who appears in multiple instances. When we find our way into our hotel room, we discover that we’re already there:

This old woman with glowing red eyes is Lorelei Weiss, our player character, decades later, ohne sunglasses. That fact is not immediately obvious: in my view, the narrative purpose of the player character’s sunglasses is to mask whether she has glowing red eyes or no eyes at all, i.e. whether she is actually Lorelei or Renate. Until close to the end, the game is very keen on allowing its characters to crisscross into each other’s identity space.

But by the end, it’s obvious that this elderly woman represents the most empirically “real” thing in this whole godforsaken hotel. It is not actually the middle of the 20th century; it is 2014. We are not actually in the Hotel Letztes Jahr; we are in the Schöner Tag care home, coping with dementia. What we have been experiencing in this game is a difficult journey through Lorelei’s heavily barricaded memory palace. The people we’ve been talking to are two-thirds fictional: Renate Schwarzwald and Lorenzo the Great are characters in an unmade film by Renzo Nero. Renzo himself was an old colleague of Lorelei’s. He invited her to collaborate with him in 1963, but fell into a deep mental illness before the project was complete.

The reason we haven’t seen Renzo’s eyes yet is because he gouged them out. In this state, he threatened Lorelei, who pushed him through a window in self-defense: an inversion of the ending of Renzo’s unmade film, where it’s Renate who’s pushed through a window by Lorenzo the Great.

It’s a clean and decisive ending–possibly a disappointing one for those of us who appreciate ambiguity. “It was all in her head” is not the sort of ending a creative writing professor would sanction. But there’s more to it than that. At the end of my second playthrough, the facet of the ending that really hit home for me was Lorelei’s reconciliation with Renzo. Clearly, she feels guilty for her part in his death. And obviously her memories of Renzo are coloured by the fact that she knew him at his worst. But the image of Renzo that the game leaves us with is not of him with bloodied eye sockets, or even with his face cut off at the nose. Rather, we see him in full, looking youthful: a comforting presence for the dying Lorelei.

My favourite single moment in Lorelei is a sequence during which Renzo and Lorelei dance the bossa nova. Renzo’s interests are “not amorous”–he’s gay. Rather, he insists on dancing with every collaborator before a project. That way, when things get heated, “we know that once we danced together.” Much of what transpires in Lorelei’s memory palace cannot possibly be literal memory. But I take this scene to be an actual recollection of something that happened before Renzo took a turn for the worse: a fond memory of Renzo at his most charming, wily and beguiling. Keeping this scene in mind, the ending is less about the reveal that “it was all in her head” than about one final character beat. For decades, Renzo has lived in Lorelei’s head as a source of trauma: now she remembers the whole person.

Cinema does not need people to exist

Back to our central question: who is Lorelei and the Laser Eyes for? Another possible answer is: cinephiles.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’d been following what little news there was about Lorelei very intently during its development. To me, the single most exciting announcement was that Simogo was working on something inspired by Alain Resnais’ 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad. I wasn’t excited because I love the film overall (I don’t), but rather because Resnais’ specific triumph is a triumph of atmosphere. Marienbad is a film that gets enormous mileage out of the sheer, undeniable mood of its opulent setting–a hotel, no less. (Other films like this include Casablanca and Spirited Away.) It is a film that makes you want to live inside of it, however eerie and unsettling that experience might be. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes fulfills a dream I didn’t know I had: Last Year at Marienbad, but make it Resident Evil 1. (The dramatic central staircase could be a reference to either.)

Last Year in Marienbad is the most explicit cinematic influence on Lorelei (the neon sign reading “Hotel Letztes Jahr” is visible from the woods you start the game in). But it’s hardly the only one. If you’re obsessed with this period, you’ll probably detect a hint of Persona or Performance in the identity slippage that occurs throughout the game. If you’re obsessed with David Lynch, you’ll find it impossible to imagine Lorelei without him: a pioneer of the boundary between the real and the unreal–and a connoisseur of the colours black, white, and red.

But the cinematic influence that has the most to do with the question of “who is this for?” is Federico Fellini’s 8½. This is another film mentioned in Simogo’s initial announcement. Like Lorelei, the film is concerned with the creative process. It is a film about filmmaking, with a filmmaker at its centre in the same way that Lorelei centres on a prototypical game developer. Renzo bears a slight resemblance to Guido Anselmi, 8½’s protagonist, and they share a profession. But it’s Lorelei Weiss who’s inherited his taciturn cool, his tendency towards autobiographical art, his position as an authorial insert, and his extremely rad shades.

Like Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, 8½ is an act of autocritique. If we continue to take Lorelei as a hunt for self-awareness and an act of stock taking, then it is very much in the tradition of 8½. Fellini’s film is self-referential, almost to the point of smugness. It is named for its position in Fellini’s filmography. Close to the start of the film, we learn that Guido has hired a film critic to help him flesh out the screenplay he’s struggling with. Predictably, he’s of no help whatsoever. He spends the film manifesting Guido’s (and possibly Fellini’s) inner critic, saying things like “you need a much higher degree of culture.” There’s also a producer stomping around, looking after the bottom line, telling Guido: “How could you not care if audiences understand? I’m sorry, but that is arrogant and presumptuous.” It’s hard to know whether Guido, or Fellini, agrees.

If 8½ is going to resonate with you, you’ve got to be onboard for this kind of talk, where the big questions about the relationship of artists, their art, and their audience are debated in plain language. The same goes for Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, which approaches the same themes in precisely the same register of near self-parody. Both the film and the game put themselves at risk of smugness by preemptively ridiculing their critics and suggesting that we, the audience, might not be all that important. And in both cases, the sincerity of these claims is a matter of interpretation.

In Lorelei, it’s the filmmaker who makes the Big Proclamations. Renzo Nero’s personal manifesto is the most direct statement in the game on the question “who do we make things for?” Like the dialogue of the critic and the producer in 8½, it’s not necessarily sincere–but it might be disagreeable all the same, for readers who prefer a subtler approach:

Renzo spends the game inveighing against any external force that threatens his singular vision. To Renzo, there is nothing more important than a singular vision. That’s what attracted him to Lorelei as a collaborator in the first place: she has laser eyes. During their cathartic pre-production bossa nova, Renzo assures Lorelei that their project will “overthrow the industrial entertainment complex,” rendering art and commerce separate at last. Renzo reviles his funders, his critics and his audience. He seeks to be free of them all, free to make a parodically extreme form of “art for art’s sake.” In the end, he deems even his own eyes to be a threat to his work, and removes them so he might inherit the visionary capacity of Renate Schwarzwald, his blind creation.

“How could you not care if audiences understand?” asks the producer in 8½. “I’m sorry, but that is arrogant and presumptuous.” If Renzo could bear to use an expression he didn’t personally coin, he might respond: “hold my beer.”

An old artist who looked into a red mirror

In the same announcement where Simogo namechecked 8½ and Last Year at Marienbad as influences on their upcoming game, they wrote of their concern that “entertainment is dying, perhaps is already dead. Pre-chewed to mean absolutely nothing. Culture as hamburgers to pass time and bring in the dollars.” The message was, after the neon embrace of Sayonara Wild Hearts, the next one would be something difficult. But, they hastened to add: “the interactions and controls should not be the barrier. Everyone should be welcome. An intricate meal should not be hindered by a complicated fork.”

That last line is Simogo in miniature. It is the reason for this game’s stubborn refusal to use more than two inputs, even though that would make it easier for many (probably most) of its players. Simogo’s best work has a Renzo Nero-like singularity of vision, but without his sociopathic disdain for the public. Their games are products of the utopian vision that complex ideas can be made accessible to large audiences. This idea is laughably unpopular today. No politician believes this anymore. It is a lonely hill to die on. One day, in the smoldering aftermath of the culture wars, it’ll stand barren with only a smattering of dead educators, librarians and public broadcasting advocates to indicate that anybody ever cared. It is genuinely cathartic to experience art that takes this notion seriously.

Simogo emerged from a more optimistic time. Barack Obama was president, and the smartphone was poised to democratize access to information. As far as games were concerned, smartphones promised to usher in a new era where games were no longer the province of an insular subculture. Simogo’s early games, drunk on the sheer novelty of the touchscreen, paved the way for a series of adventures that used mobile devices in ever more innovative and always accessible ways.

In 2013, we learned just how useful these miraculous new devices were for spying. Simogo responded with DEVICE 6, a game that weaponizes the player’s anxiety about what black magic their phone is capable of. Optimism turned to wariness. The following year, Simogo released The Sailor’s Dream (still their finest work) to weak sales and critical indifference. Instead of publicly succumbing to spite, or forswearing the audience like Renzo Nero, they released The Sensational December Machine. It’s a vanishingly short game that deals with some of the same themes as Lorelei and the Laser Eyes: what it means to make something, and whether it matters what other people think. It concludes that no, it doesn’t necessarily matter. But it does so in the most graceful possible way. Their next major release, Sayonara Wild Hearts, was the definition of a crowd pleaser.

That brings us up to date. The backdrop for this current phase of Simogo’s career is that the era of smartphone pollyannaism is well and truly over. Sayonara was their first game to be released on a console simultaneously with its mobile release, and Lorelei is not available for mobile devices at all. The technology that was once their raison d’etre is no longer viable and has probably made the world worse, so they’ll have to commit to less ubiquitous platforms that cater to a more specialized audience. They’ve experienced success, failure, and compromise. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a wild creation whose parts don’t always seem to add up, until suddenly they add up too neatly. But as the culmination of everything Simogo has done before, it could not be more perfect. It strikes me as a reflection of fifteen long years spent constantly thinking about how the audience will respond to something–a howl of frustration at the struggle of making art that welcomes everybody without losing its soul. It is the most melancholy victory lap I’ve ever seen.

To end discussions by giving a “correct answer”

In one version of Lorelei’s story, Renzo has called upon Lorelei to create a maze. “As you know,” he explains, “the maze is a weapon of mass destruction. An endless ride for fascists and critics.” This is Renzo’s trick: he’ll trap us all in a puzzle so that his art remains unblemished by unworthy eyes. That, in a sense, is what Lorelei and the Laser Eyes does as well. It is quite possible to play most of the game, solving puzzles, and not engaging too much with any of the themes I’ve been interested in here.

Then, abruptly, that becomes impossible. The game’s final sequence takes place inside a computer, with code running visibly down the side of the screen. Simogo has always tended to emphasize the softwareness of the software, and for this they deserve an award for the best Verfremdungseffekt of the year. The computer is a manifestation of an ancient force, an artifact called the Third Eye. Think of it as a sort of Train Pulling into a Station for all human creativity.

In this computer, we experience something called the Verity Sequence. We are presented with a series of questions pertaining to the characters in the game. All of the questions have right and wrong answers. We’re expected to know that the old woman and the young woman are both Lorelei. We need to have discovered that Renzo and Lorelei were real people, whereas Lorenzo and Renate were fictional characters. And we need to know that Lorelei was responsible, or feels responsible, for Renzo’s death.

Again, this ending might be disappointing to those of us who appreciate ambiguity. Up until this point, the game has been admirably unwilling to “pre-chew” itself. But a line from 8½ continues to echo through the hallways of the Hotel Letztes Jahr: “How could you not care if audiences understand? I’m sorry, but that is arrogant and presumptuous.”

And so, the Verity Sequence frees us from Renzo’s maze. The fact that the game’s big questions ultimately have unambiguous answers becomes an invitation. We are no longer caught up in the minutiae of puzzle solving, we’re obliged to consider the big picture, and at the last minute we become the person it has all been for.

But remember: all this time, we’ve been walking around as a character who doubles as an authorial insert. We cannot be the only person it’s for. That would be far too simple. Even Renzo, a character who stands for all of the complicated forks and labyrinths of gatekeeping that Simogo disdains, is given grace in the end–because maybe self-indulgence is not a completely useless idea.

In the end, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is quite simple, and fairly complicated.

And there’s room for everyone.

TL;DR

Notes on Simogo, Part 3: Secret Sequels

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This is the third part of a retrospective on the complete works of the indie game studio Simogo that begins here. This part will cover The Sensational December Machine, SPL-T, and Sayonara Wild Hearts. Full spoilers, insofar as that applies.

The Sensational December Machine (2014)

Let’s begin by revisiting my broad schematic of the Simogo catalogue. They started with a trilogy of casual games for mobile devices. Next, they made a second trilogy of mobile games focusing on narrative and metafiction. Finally, in my view, their two most recent major releases have served as tacit fourth instalments in each of those trilogies.

The point we’ve now arrived at–late 2014–sits between those latter two phases: after their trilogy of fourth wall-breakers was complete, but before they’d set out on developing their secret sequels. At this point, they’ve shipped six games in the past five years. They deserve a break. Every artist needs a moment now and then to take a breath, to reflect, and to chart a new course. So, between the release of The Sailor’s Dream and the bulk of Sayonara Wild Hearts’ long development period, we get a sort of “intermission featurette”: two small releases that serve as a mirror to the past and a map of the future.

Simogo presented the first of these, The Sensational December Machine, as a Christmas gift to fans. It was a tiny, free, interactive story available through their website–notably not for mobile, but for PC and Mac. It begins with static and bells, and a hand-drawn title card depicting something that looks like a radio. Nothing happens. Then you click, and the title card recedes into the background a little. You click again, and it recedes further. A piano melody joins the bells. You recognize that the key mechanic of this game is simply clicking and holding, while occasionally moving the mouse around to gently change perspective.

You keep holding down the mouse button. Text appears. The text tells a story about an artist in a town where everybody is obsessed with machines. This artist is an expert machinist, but she has a deeper ambition: “she dreamed about touching people’s hearts.” (The text of The Sensational December Machine is fable-like and nakedly sentimental, like a children’s Christmas story.) The artist spends a whole December on her latest gadget, and fills it with “words, sounds and pictures.”

When the artist finishes her machine, she takes it to the town square, where she’s met with utter incomprehension from a public that expects something other than what the artist set out to deliver. When the artist attempts an explanation, that the machine is simply for inspiring emotions, the public responds that “this was not something machines could do.” Hold the mouse button a little longer, and the words “or even should” are shunted into the sentence.

The artist sours on her own creation. Frustrated by its reception, she leaves it to rust in an alley. “Why make something no one wants?” The machine is forgotten within days. But every now and then, the artist reaches into her pocket to feel a screw that came loose from the machine as she left it in the alley. She recalls her creation and she feels a sense of fulfilment, regardless of everything else that’s happened in the story so far.

A hand-drawn Simogo logo appears, and you hit Esc to quit.

The Sensational December Machine is a five-minute experience that says more about its creators, and more directly, than anything else they’ve ever released save possibly for Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. The story dramatizes the creation and reception of The Sailor’s Dream, Simogo’s most ambitious but least gamelike game, which was their first release that didn’t match the critical and commercial success of its predecessors. Its mixed reviews from both critics and players tended to reiterate the same tedious points: the game is too short, provides too little agency, and isn’t a game. Reviewers consistently fell back on the old consumer journalism tendency to compartmentalize and rate the game’s elements separately (story: good; art: great; gameplay: ???), and to ask whether a game with such limited interactivity could possibly be worth the money. (I’ll defer to Noah Caldwell-Gervais on Kentucky Route Zero to refute this.)

As clapbacks to the haters go, The Sensational December Machine is remarkably graceful. Instead of obsessing over the community’s reaction to their creation, Simogo’s story echoes Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to grade school students on creativity: “Practice any art… not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.” One could argue that you don’t make a game like The Sensational December Machine unless you’ve felt a certain amount of creatorly spite and resentment. Certainly, the game portrays the townspeople who wilfully misunderstand the machine as parodically myopic and shallow. And the fact that this story is defiantly un-interactive (a descriptor that frankly does not apply to The Sailor’s Dream) also suggests a certain amount of “I’ll show you.” But ultimately, the story emphasizes an important and altogether more empowering perspective: that art is not fundamentally a commodity, and that the relationship between an artist and the art itself is more crucial than the relationship between the artist and their audience. Some would call this attitude self-indulgent. Kurt Vonnegut would say: “you have made your soul grow.”

I’m tempted to leave it at that, but I can’t help feeling that the critical discourse being relitigated here is not over, even a decade later. Simogo’s early career was informed by the promise of smartphones: specifically, the promise that they would enable people who were otherwise uninterested in games to become interested in them. The success of Year Walk and DEVICE 6 suggested that there was an audience out there for well-made games that didn’t hew to the tedious genre trappings of AAA products (spacemen with guns and jumping children’s cartoons) and that renounced the gatekeeping of unintuitive controls. The failure of The Sailor’s Dream does not, in my view, contradict this. It simply speaks to the challenges of creating art in a milieu where art is generally received as a commercial product to be compared against other similar products for feature richness and value for money.

The historical moment when the smartphone seemed poised to transform games into a democratic, aesthetically heterogenous Big Tent without gatekeepers was over by late 2014–we explored this in the last part of this series. A decade later, the indie games space has evolved into almost this exact environment, albeit still one inhabited by dedicated enthusiasts and not the general public (and one in which smartphones remain a tertiary part). Still, even in this era of abundance and openness, you occasionally encounter the same critical attitude directed at The Sailor’s Dream ten years ago–the attitude reenacted by the townspeople in The Sensational December Machine.

When the (non-indie) studio Obsidian released their small-scale medieval RPG Pentiment in 2022, the reception was broadly positive. Nevertheless, some reviews emphasized that it is “not for everyone.” The game’s director Josh Sawyer offered the simplest response: what is? But even beyond that, asserting that Pentiment is specifically “not for everyone” is bizarre. It’s on Game Pass, and it’s short enough that you can finish it within your trial month. It runs on the laptop you use to answer your emails. Its RPG systems don’t involve any numbers at all, nor do they require any pre-existing familiarity with RPG mechanics. And its story fits the popular mould of historical fiction, which ought not to be any more alienating than science fiction or fantasy. I’m inclined to suspect it is less alienating. Each of these considerations would seem to make Pentiment more approachable than your average AAA game, not less. Yet they’re seemingly the very reasons why it was received as an outlier–a niche product. All of this in spite of the game’s deep interactivity and its very video gamey focus on moving a little guy around on a screen.

During Simogo’s first five years, one of the main ideas floating around in the games discourse was that devs needed to branch out from the most entrenched stories and mechanics if the entire medium was to become less niche. The reception of Pentiment demonstrates that even today, games that are demonstrably more accessible and approachable than standard AAA tentpoles are still sometimes regarded as less “universal” than those games.

This is the notion that Simogo gracefully declines to refute here. Good for them. And alas.

SPL-T (2015)

Simogo is maybe the only developer that could make a game that feels like something by Tale of Tales, and immediately follow it up with a game that feels like something by Zach Gage. If The Sensational December Machine was an epilogue to their trilogy of increasingly narrative-focused adventure games, then SPL-T serves as a prologue to a new era with a renewed interest in the elegant score chasing of Simogo’s early work.

Development on Sayonara Wild Hearts was well underway by the time of SPL-T’s release, so it may be a stretch to characterize it as a second response to the poor reception of The Sailor’s Dream. But it feels like it is. It feels like a deliberate shoving of the pendulum as far in the other direction as it’ll go–an exercise, perhaps, to see if the old arcade muscles are still in fighting trim. It took five weeks to make and it’s the most austere, narrative-free experience Simogo has ever produced. Narrative will reassert itself in their work almost immediately, but it’s still hard not to view SPL-T retrospectively as a statement of purpose for their next creative phase, during which nobody will ever accuse them of making something that is “not a game.”

SPL-T’s basic mechanics are elementally simple: you tap the screen, and a horizontal line divides it in two. Then you tap one or the other of those two halves, and a vertical line divides that half once again. The entire game is a succession of alternating horizontal and vertical lines, always splitting a section of the playfield in two equal parts, until a part becomes indivisibly small. There’s a Cute Little Guy at the top of the screen doing semaphore at you to tell you whether it’s a horizontal or a vertical line coming up.

When a split creates a group of four or more equally-sized blocks, those blocks are frozen in an unsplittable state, regardless of their size. A number appears on the blocks: the current number of splits that you’ve made so far. With each new split you make, the numbers on your point blocks reduce by one, and when they reach zero the block disappears. Every point block above it on the screen drops down to fill the space and, in the game’s most immediately hooky mechanic, all of those dropping point blocks have their numbers cut in half. Stack your point blocks strategically, and you’ll have cascades of them dropping with each new split.

The first time you see a point block drop downwards, you might be surprised to learn that there’s a gravitational pull towards the bottom of the screen. Nothing before this has suggested that we’re looking at the playfield from the side. We could just have easily been seeing it from a bird’s eye view, drawing lines on a map. But the moment that rectangular blocks begin to fall vertically, SPL-T enters into a dialogue with Tetris: the most successful “casual” game of all time. It’ll be instructive to bounce these games off of each other.

The most fundamental difference between SPL-T and Tetris is the pace. There’s no time pressure in SPL-T, and progress occurs on your time–not the game’s. The meditative power of Tetris is that it locks you into the present moment, commanding your attention and focussing it on a single time-sensitive task. SPL-T doesn’t do this. Instead, it offers all the time you need to make your next decision, like a sudoku or a crossword puzzle. This is the key difference between SPL-T and its distant ancestor: Tetris is meditative; SPL-T is not meditative. SPL-T is chill. It declines to short-circuit your rationality the way that Tetris does, engaging your conscious mind rather than your instincts. Entering a flow state while playing SPL-T is not out of the question, but the flow state giveth and the flow state taketh away. If you become single-mindedly focussed on how things are working in your favourite little corner of your rectangle machine, you inevitably miss the big picture. You fail to think holistically. And you accidentally create a massive point block that ruins your whole goddamn game.

So, Tetris and SPL-T are only superficially similar. But they feel more similar than they are, because they’re both among the rare games that exist in a space of complete abstraction. Part of the reason Tetris is more universal than, say Dr. Mario is that the latter modestly incorporates narrative: you’re a doctor, and you’re fighting viruses–whereas, in Tetris, you’re you, and you’re playing a video game. Even in Candy Crush, while it’s unclear what you’re actually accomplishing by eliminating candies, they’re candies–whereas, SPL-T depicts only space on a screen, organized into increasingly chaotic divisions. The only representational images that appear in SPL-T are the semaphore guy and a little frog who appears on the help screen, both of whom take up minimal space on a screen that remains mostly dedicated to rectangles. This purposeful lack of iconography–of branding–lends an air of elegance to both SPL-T and Tetris. Like instrumental music or abstract expressionism, these games are about nothing but themselves.

There’s no randomness in SPL-T: every game starts the same way, and any given playthrough is perfectly replicable. Once you’ve spent a good bit of time with it, you may find yourself drifting towards familiar approaches, as if by a footpath of your own making. My default, unthinking approach is to arrange half the screen into point blocks yielding constant points, while the other half of the screen is a scrapheap of random shapes I only touch when I can’t find a good split on my main half. Playing this way, it only takes a few minutes for a blank screen to transform into a landscape of tiny, interconnected economies: resource extraction in the southwest leads to profit in the northeast. Given the lack of randomness in the game, there’s nothing preventing me from playing this way every single time–except for the lurking sense that there must be a better way.

Simogo marketed SPL-T with IKEA-like Swedish plainspokenness. “We know,” the game’s single, 34-second trailer states, “It doesn’t look like much. And this video is probably not going to sell you on it. But we promise that it’s really good. Like, really good.” The trailer explains nothing, and shows barely more than a few seconds of gameplay. But SPL-T, like DOOM, speaks for itself. Even without knowing the mechanics, or how deep the game becomes once you gain familiarity, you can see what SPL-T is from a couple seconds of gameplay footage: a return to basic principles, invoking the purity-by-necessity of not just Tetris but even earlier games like Pong and Asteroids, whose aesthetics it more closely resembles.

It might be enough that the trailer lets you hear the sound. The sound of SPL-T is its connection to Simogo’s legacy of tactile delights. Each time you place your finger on the screen and release, it’s like popping a little electronic kernel of popcorn. Horizontal splits and vertical splits are tuned a major second apart, giving the game a constant feel of unresolved tension, until a point block vanishes and a little melodic figure brings relief. The music itself, repurposed in uncompromisingly retro fashion from Kosmo Spin and Bumpy Road, taps against your eardrums like a blacksmith striking the world’s tiniest anvil. The sound and feel of the game are as thoroughly considered as any of the interactables on the islands of The Sailor’s Dream.

When Simogo released the game, it seemed a little slight to some of Simogo’s devoted players, accustomed as they were to the overflowing fictions of Year Walk and DEVICE 6. Surely, the makers of such impish games as these wouldn’t produce something… straightforward. The momentary presence of a frog on the final help screen even drew speculation that the game might be connected to Frog Fractions, another game whose fiction famously escapes its boundaries.

Unless something earth shattering remains undiscovered about SPL-T nearly a decade later, this turned out not to be true. The game does contain some entertaining secrets, such as a hidden ball-balancing game that reveals itself when you press and hold the game’s title, and the ability to change the colour scheme by shaking the phone or turning it upside down (good luck actually playing that way, though). Most notably, if you wait long enough on each of the help screens, you’re shown a series of messages from an unknown sender: an almost-story told as a one-sided conversation between a mysterious consciousness and an unseen second party. It’s suggestive, but it doesn’t motion towards any further secrets or any compelling interpretations.

It’s entirely possible that twenty years from now, somebody will unearth a massive secret from within SPL-T that places it alongside DEVICE 6 and Lorelei in Simogo’s pantheon of uncanny metafictions. I doubt this: the fact that SPL-T’s simplicity was so hard for some players to accept is simply a reflection of how completely Simogo had come to be identified with the complex narratives of their last three major releases, and how little they were known as the creators of Bumpy Road. In 2019, the idea that they’d want to create something as uncomplicatedly gamey as this would suddenly become much easier to accept.

A final note: although SPL-T is the Simogo game that least needs a sequel, it is their only game that has one. Nestled within the folds of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, you can discover SPL-T 2, a feature bloated, perhaps intentionally worse version of SPL-T that serves Lorelei’s commentary on art and commerce, similarly to the bonus content in The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. Simogo claims it may inspire “the strange sensation of lessening your opinion on the predecessor.” Inferior as it is, I have not found this to be the case.

Sayonara Wild Hearts (2019)

There are only a handful of moments in music history when a cult artist made a record so pure and undeniable that they broke through to a mainstream audience without significantly changing their approach. The archetypal example is The Dark Side of the Moon, an album whose self-seriousness makes it an odd fit to even mention in the context of Sayonara Wild Hearts. Better analogues come from the pop songwriter world: Heartthrob by Tegan and Sara; So by Peter Gabriel; Hounds of Love by Kate Bush.

Sayonara Wild Hearts is a work like this: a warm embrace, human and relatable, that still maintains the particular mannerisms and idiosyncrasies that made its creators interesting in the first place. It is Poptimism: The Video Game, and not just because of its musical reference points. Its fundamental attitude is a belief in people, and a sense that there are universal experiences worth expressing through the closest thing possible to universal means. Simogo has always worked in a big tent, but Sayonara skips wildly and joyfully along the surface of mass culture to create something more inviting and enveloping than anything in their catalogue so far.

This change of attitude is a subtle thing. Simogo’s previous games were all obsessively honed towards accessibility, with an eye towards attracting players who didn’t normally play games. But perhaps this gave the impression of a certain aloofness towards the medium in which they were working–a deliberate distance from the type of games made for people who do normally play games. Envisioning new audiences often means alienating the existing one to some degree. The paradox of Year Walk, DEVICE 6 and The Sailor’s Dream is that they are simultaneously more accessible to inexperienced players than most hit games–and they are highly ambitious, far-reaching and artful works that ultimately seem to be courting a cult audience. Simogo is hard to pin down. Calling them pretentious would be outright rude, given their commitment to accessibility and their philosophy that games should be for everyone. But trying to paint them as video game populists is somewhat challenging because of the esoteric and literary tenor of their best-known works.

Sayonara Wild Hearts kicks dirt in the face of this entire, tortured train of thought. It does so by being, as Simogo themselves put it: “unashamed of being a video game.” No more languid exploration. No more long chunks of text. No more interactive music boxes. Motorcycles. Lasers. Fail states. Accordingly, on its release day, Sayonara Wild Hearts was released not only for mobile devices, but also for Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4. Knowing all too well that there’s a gendered component to making a game that’s “unashamed of being a video game,” Simogo gave their laser motorcycle game a queer female protagonist, built it around an effervescent pop music score, and made it, just unbelievably purple.

On Sayonara Wild Hearts, Simogo had their cake and ate it too. They once again refused to cater solely to the narrow sliver of the public that so many developers rely on–and they also made a fucking Video Game.

Sayonara’s universality begins with the story: a hero’s journey narrative, where a reluctant protagonist completes a quest through what ultimately turns out to be an interior landscape, and emerges transformed. The idea of the “monomyth” has become a tedious self-fulfilling prophecy ever since Hollywood screenwriters started reading Joseph Campbell. But if you’re aiming for universality, market research suggests you could do worse. Though its protagonist is a young adult, Sayonara fits the mould of classic coming-of-age fantasies like The Wizard of Oz, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Labyrinth, where the main character’s journey through a new reality changes their outlook on the mundane world they eventually return to:

“And you think of all of the things you’ve seen
And you wish that you could live in between
And you’re back again, only different than before
After the sky.”

Sayonara Wild Hearts takes place on either side of a beanstalk: a threshold between the mundane and the fantastical. The very first cutscene, which plays as soon as you boot up the game, keeps us on the mundane side of the beanstalk: a heartbroken young woman skates forlornly away from a falafel shop. Shortly after, another cutscene at the start of the first level situates us within a fantastical tarot-inspired cosmology involving the fracturing of a once-harmonious universe. In two cutscenes, we understand the twin facets of this story: the personal and the cosmic.

So where is the beanstalk itself? What sits between these two scenes that introduce us to our two realities? The title screen. In a sense, every game’s title screen serves as a threshold between the mundane and the fantastical: it is the passageway that leads from the material world you were living in before you switched on the console into whatever constructed reality waits therein. But Simogo’s title screens tend to make this even more explicit. Sayonara‘s is effectively a synthpop rewrite of the opening of The Sailor’s Dream, which depicts its protagonist crossing the threshold between waking and sleep. Like Sailor, Sayonara begins with a snippet of narration (by Queen Latifah, no less) that makes the boundary explicit: “So our saga begins tonight, yet aeons ago, just here, yet lightyears away.” A couple of logos later, we’re tumbled into a violet universe of strobe lights and sidechaining. The title itself beats at us like a heart, in rhythm with the first of Sayonara’s eight Jonathan Eng songs, all performed by Swedish pop singer Linnea Olsson. “Everything is strange,” Olsson sings, “the end of love doesn’t happen this way.” This is the denial that must exist at the start of any Campbell-approved hero’s journey. It’s up to you whether you sit in that denial for the song’s full 90-second duration, or leave the First Threshold in the dust the second your eyes alight on the “Start Game” option.

It’s remarkable how quickly after this ascension into the sublime that we find ourselves pretty much just playing Subway Surfers. In 2019, Subway Surfers hadn’t yet become a primary component of “sludge content,” a multi-screen experience in which no single element is worth anything. But even then, it felt shocking to see Subway Surfers embedded as such a clear reference point in a game by such an ambitious developer. Some of the same habitual Simogo players who vainly sought a grandiose metanarrative in SPL-T might also have been flummoxed by Sayonara Wild Hearts, which contains precious little text, not the faintest hint of metafiction, and a couple of levels that are almost literally just Subway Surfers.

But if the brief “intermission” encompassing The Sensational December Machine and SPL-T indicates anything at all, it’s that The Sailor’s Dream marked a turning point. It’s quite possible that Sailor was always intended as the final instalment of a narrative-focussed trilogy (Simogo claims as much in retrospect). But the game’s relative failure must have also helped to push them in another direction–you cannot go on making Sensational December Machines forever. With The Sailor’s Dream safely relegated away in “make your soul grow” territory, it makes much more sense that their next project would uncannily resemble the casual mobile games of several years prior–the environment in which Simogo started their career. Thus, Sayonara materialized as a belated companion to Kosmo Spin, Bumpy Road, and Beat Sneak Bandit.

Of the three, it resembles Bumpy Road the most. Superficially, they share a genre: they’re both autorunners–as is Subway Surfers. But the last time Simogo played in this sandbox, Subway Surfers wasn’t even available as a format to riff on. Bumpy Road predates it by nearly a year–and even predates Subway’s predecessor Temple Run by a couple of months. The 3D autorunner hadn’t been codified yet, leaving Simogo to subvert the genre in two dimensions. Sayonara adds the third, but it doesn’t subvert its predecessors as fundamentally as Bumpy Road did. Aesthetics aside, it is mostly just a sequence of well-timed dodges. Its main difference comes in the fact that it is not an endless runner: it is divided into discrete, finite levels that each offer something new.

The framing of these levels takes after Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: our protagonist, having Crossed The First Threshold, must now defeat mystical representations of all her exes. Every character is inspired by one of the Major Arcana: the player character is the Fool, a figure analogous with Joseph Campbell’s archetypal hero. Each ex and their posse is identified with a particular tarot card: the Devil (a troupe of dancers), the Moon (a bunch of howling wolf people), the Lovers (a person that’s actually two people), the Hermit (a gamer, hilariously), and Death (the protagonist’s canonical Big Ex, “Little Death”: a French euphemism).

Each ex is the focus of a series of levels that offer a constant stream of stimulation. The fixed perspective of Subway Surfers is replaced by a dynamic, constantly shifting camera whose unpredictability adds a little extra challenge, and also makes you genuinely feel like you’re in a music video. The levels rip through the history of pop culture, pillaging images and sounds from disparate quarters and smashing them together so confidently that nothing ever feels out of place. Simogo’s games have often played like interactive “mood boards,” but never more than here: we’ve got Carly Rae Jepson, the occult, cosplay, Mario Kart, bisexual lighting, Final Fantasy VII, and the 75% of Tumblr not already accounted for by the rest of this list. Sayonara’s flood of references, images and themes only coheres because its central mechanic is so simple and consistent. Just keep dodging and watch the pretty colours zip by, and in the end you’ll be surprised by how much of the game’s content got through to you somehow.

Once the Fool has chased down every one of her exes on motorbike, hoverboard, and vintage car, KO’ed them to the rousing approval of Queen Latifah, and released the monster lurking within Little Death, we learn an additional layer of mystical truth: each of these past lovers has been, in a sense, the Fool herself. The last level finds the Fool giving a loving, platonic smooch to each of the game’s characters in sequence–all of them having taken on elements of the Fool’s own character model. Sayonara predates the dominant cultural phenomenon of the moment during which I’m writing this: the Eras Tour. And for all its poptimism, Sayonara’s sensibility is a shade more indie than Taylor Swift. But somehow, it presages the key message that Taffy Brodesser-Akner took from Swift’s gargantuan global spectacle: that a key element of maturity is extending grace to your various past selves–however troubled, however embarrassing.

In that sense, Sayonara Wild Hearts plays like an autobiography. There’s nothing particularly embarrassing in Simogo’s corpus, but it is a body of work characterized by a couple of clean breaks with the past. Sayonara brings all of Simogo’s past selves together in blissful coexistence. Even as it refers back to the sensibility of their earliest work, Sayonara continues to be in dialogue with The Sailor’s Dream, just like the two smaller games that preceded it. It synthesizes the arcade gameplay of Simogo’s first three games with the expressive presentation they honed on Sailor. Sayonara is fast where Sailor is slow, and Sayonara offers ecstasy where Sailor offers reflection. But the priority Sayonara places on sheer audiovisual splendor is characteristic of a post-Sailor Simogo. This game simply doesn’t exist in a world where Simogo didn’t previously create their narrative works.

It also doesn’t exist in a universe where Simogo hadn’t built a relationship with Jonathan Eng–a relationship that fully flowered on Sailor, and which arguably reaches its apex here. Eng’s Sayonara songs take after the grand Swedish tradition of ABBA and Robyn: heartbreak anthems aiming for maximum catharsis. His original sketches for these songs are in a different sonic universe from where the game ended up. It’s easier to imagine some of them as Bon Iver-adjacent anthems of lo-fi anguish in the woods than as the synthpop bangers they actually became. But while Eng was on his own making music for Sailor, here he’s collaborating with Simogo’s longtime composer Daniel Olsen.

Olsen hasn’t come up yet in this retrospective, mainly because Eng is a more novel figure: it’s common enough for a game studio to have a go-to composer, but not a go-to songwriter. But Olsen’s work on Sayonara is more integral than ever. He transforms Eng’s introspective demos into CHVRCHES songs, then does the same with piano music by Debussy. Elsewhere, the instrumental score drifts through Daft Punk and Kaminsky before ultimately settling back into the sweet spot of Carly Rae Jepson’s Emotion. Released during the first year of Sayonara‘s development, Emotion is manifestly an inspiration. It’s a record of loud, glossy exteriors hiding a broken, Sinatra-like inwardness. Emotion’s best cut, “Your Type,” feels like a clear model for Sayonara’s title track, and Sayonara’s pop tunes share a sense of purpose with Emotion: they both reach for catharsis by fusing misery with ecstasy.

This aesthetic evaporates just as the credits start to roll. Sayonara’s final song, “A Place I Don’t Know,” was a country song Eng hadn’t originally intended for the game. Its final form is semi-acoustic dream pop, with an almost whispered vocal performance by Linnea Olsson that suggests a new maturity that’s absent from the callow narrator of previous songs like “Mine” and “Inside.” The lyric is, on its face, an odd fit for the end of a story about self-love. It is clearly a love song directed at a partner. But the relationship it describes seems different from the previous ones hinted at throughout the game:

“I was used to my safety and peace
I mistook all this tedium for being at ease
But then you came along and said it’s time to let go
And you took me to a place I don’t know.”

In its final moments, Sayonara Wild Hearts suggests that the self-love it celebrates in its final level isn’t only an end in itself, although it certainly could be. It also provides the courage that’s a prerequisite for real commitment–real love. For the second time, Jonathan Eng delivers the emotional kicker at the end of the story.

Is it really possible that one of the five or six most beautiful love songs ever written is hidden in the end credits of a racing game?

Yes.

I hadn’t originally intended for this section to end here. My plan was to cover the two small post-Sailor games quickly, and then dedicate the bulk of this third part to the third major phase of Simogo’s career, constituting Sayonara Wild Hearts and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. But this is quite long enough for one post, even without trying to shoehorn in the densest text in Simogo’s whole output. The next and final instalment will be entirely dedicated to Lorelei. It will be a standalone post, but it will also serve as “part 3.5” of this series, the second of Simogo’s two secret sequels.

I’m satisfied that it turned out this way in the end, because it strikes me now that the three games we’ve covered here are part of a single continuous motion. Together, they constitute a reaction to the end of Simogo’s prior phase: the critical dismissal of The Sailor’s Dream, the exhaustion of a particular creative direction, and the end of the smartphone as a new and promising expressive technology. Lorelei doesn’t strike me as part of this same continuous motion. It’s of a piece with Sayonara in a way, looking backwards for inspiration in previous successes. But after Sayonara, it feels like Simogo has tied up their various preoccupying loose ends. Lorelei, for all its open nostalgia, is something new.

The final part is here.

Notes on Simogo, Part 2: Fourth Wall Foregone

Year Walk (2013)

The three games that predate Year Walk in the Simogo catalogue are all love songs to the smartphone. You might expect that the novelty of the touchscreen, the quality that made Bumpy Road a success, would have worn off by 2013. Nevertheless, Simogo spent the second phase of their career continuing to mine for novelty in the physicality of the smartphone. This still-new technology had already become mundane, so the new challenge was to create experiences for them that cut through the mundanity and made them feel surprising again.

If that’s the key theme of Simogo’s second era, then the mobile version of Year Walk remains the definitive one. Year Walk has escaped its origins as a mobile game more successfully than any other pre-Sayonara Simogo title: it exists in two dedicated ports for PC and Wii U. But we’ll be glossing over those ports in favour of the iOS original, because that’s the one that shares a continuity of purpose with the two narrative-focussed mobile games that came immediately after.

This version of the game is split in two unequal parts: the game itself, and a chalk-dry secondary app called the Year Walk Companion, featuring short encyclopaedia articles on the folkloric characters that appear in the story. These two apps are so dramatically asymmetrical, one so lavishly designed and the other so plain, that it’s easy to miss the fact that their user interfaces are exactly the same. In Year Walk, you scroll the game’s first-person perspective from left to right, exploring horizontal corridors that give the option of shifting to a new corridor by swiping vertically at specific moments. The Companion offers a menu of articles that you scroll between horizontally and select by swiping upwards. This mechanical similarity is the first suggestion that the Companion may be more than it seems: an integral part of the game, and not just a dutiful infotainment product like the ones you might download to Enhance Your Experience of a public museum or art gallery.

But the game itself is your first point of contact. It opens with the sound of a film projector, and white-on-black intertitles like in an old silent movie. The whole game has the flicker of cinema, though it commits to this premise only about as much as Super Mario Bros. 3 commits to its evocation of the theatre. It also resembles a children’s pop-up book at times, and it never really pretends to be anything other than a straightforward point-and-click adventure game with fairly standard puzzles. You play as an initially unnamed protagonist, undertaking a ritual called the year walk. To complete the ritual you must wander the haunted woods at night, meeting creatures of varying malevolence. At the ritual’s conclusion, you will presumably be confronted by a truth that you’ve been searching for, or avoiding.

The story is threadbare by design. It was based on an unproduced screenplay by Simogo’s collaborator Jonas Terestad, with the details pared away by Simon Flesser until all that remained was the protagonist’s motivation: he’s in love with the miller’s daughter, but she’s engaged to another man. You meet the miller’s daughter once at the start of Year Walk, and once more at the end. The hard truth we encounter at the end of the ritual is that she will fall out of love with the protagonist in the new year. The game’s final revelation is that the miller’s daughter dies for this transgression against male desire, murdered by the protagonist in the morning.

Edgar Allan Poe wrote that “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” But it’s possible that you need to be alive in the 19th century and you need to be the greatest gothic writer of all time for this to be true.

It isn’t the story that sticks with you after a playthrough of Year Walk. Nor is it the puzzles, really, which are quite simple. This game doesn’t have the self-guided difficulty scaling of Beat Sneak Bandit and Sayonara Wild Hearts baked into it. I suspect it’s too brief and linear to support that kind of approach anyway. The puzzles are easy enough to provide a few moments of friction along the way to the story’s conclusion, which every player should be able to see.

What sticks is the visionary quality of your encounters in the mythical forest. Many familiar stories position the forest as a threshold between the mundane world and the fantastical, but these Swedish woods are darker and chillier than the lotusland of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or even the enchanted forests of the Grimm fairy tales. Simogo brings it to life with a cut paper art style reminiscent of the German shadow-play filmmaker Lotte Reineger and the Soviet animator Yuri Norstein. Simogo’s love of paper and other physical materials has been visible since the arts and crafts-inspired Kosmo Spin, but never more so than in Year Walk. The art is deeply expressive: every frame is suffused with wintry melancholy, underpinned by a soundtrack of whistling wind and snow crunching underfoot.

Throughout the ritual you meet the Huldra, a figure of threatening sexuality; the Brook Horse, a guardian of the drowned; the Mylings, spirits of murdered children; the Night Raven, an omen of death; and the Church Grim, a gatekeeper at the edge of revelation. Of these, the encounter with the Brook Horse and his wayward Mylings is the most memorable, for its puzzle mechanics and its character design alike. The besuited Brook Horse stands waist-deep in the stream that runs through the forest, asking you wordlessly to find the four Mylings hiding in the woods. Each of them requires a different way of physically interacting with the phone, like turning it upside down or scrolling the environment past its ostensible edge. They’re simple puzzles, but the way that they break verisimilitude by making you think about the physical object you’re holding adds to the uncanny atmosphere. What exactly is the player character doing when you turn your phone upside down? The player and the protagonist are visibly distinct from each other in these moments, purposely breaking immersion. It’ll happen again.

The sought-after revelation occurs in the final encounter with the Church Grim, during which the scissors-and-paper physicality of the world dissolves into 3D abstraction. Everything that has defined the game previously is gone. The puzzles cease to be puzzles in any meaningful sense, replaced by frictionless tactile moments of the sort that will be taken up with different degrees of success in Genesis Noir, A Memoir Blue and the flashback sequences in What Remains of Edith Finch. This presentation–a clean break with the game’s previous aesthetic and logic–helps to obscure the straightforward gothic romance of the narrative, which reaches its turning point here. When Year Walk doesn’t rely on words, it is fascinatingly obtuse and elliptical. When it does, it displays the five words “I don’t love you anymore” each on its own emphatic screen. A pool of blood spreads out around the body of a girl, and Jonathan Eng sings over the credits. (Incidentally, the first great Simogo musical number is a Year Walk song, but it isn’t this one. It’s “Myling Lullaby,” the promotional single that isn’t included in the game.)

So what is this ritual we’ve been undertaking? This ending leaves open the possibility of a somewhat tired psychological interpretation, that all the odd things we’ve seen are the product of a deranged mind. But something strange happens after the credits: an unknown voice speaks to us through onscreen text, entreating us to consult the Companion, where a secret passcode will enlighten us further.

The Companion’s blandness is a deeply committed feint. It is so incredibly halfhearted on its face that it almost feels like it was made to fulfil the requirements of a grant: like the Swedish government gave Simogo a few thousand euros to edutain the world with Sweden’s bizarre, forgotten myths. But this mundane supplement contains the secret that makes Year Walk into something more than a gothic point-and-click with a clichéd psychological twist. For reasons not supported by verisimilitude, there’s a login screen in the Companion that leads to the notes of its fictional author, Theodor Almsten. Almsten is a scholar of Swedish folklore whose investigations into the little known ritual of year walking led him to discover the story of Daniel Svensson, a young man who was executed for the murder of the miller’s daughter after undertaking the year walk. This is the name of our previously nameless protagonist.

Almsten’s notes contain the best puzzle in Year Walk. After his discovery, strange things start happening to Almsten. He feels like he’s being watched, and a sequence of strange shapes begins showing up in his life: in drawings he makes in his sleep, on paintings that appear unexpectedly on his wall, tattooed on his skin. He realizes–without saying it explicitly and ruining the puzzle for us–that these shapes are the combination to open the mysterious wooden box he found in the woods near Daniel’s hometown.

We’ve seen this box before. It’s one of the first things you encounter in a playthrough of the main game, sitting there perfectly solvable from the moment you take control of the character, like the final puzzles in Myst and Outer Wilds. You might not think about it at the time, but the box looks odd. It doesn’t fit into the environment. It’s not hovering, exactly, but it’s the one thing in the game that looks like it hasn’t been blended in with the rest of the world: just an asset superimposed on a background. It’s uncanny. It only becomes more uncanny when you open the box–because who is opening the box, exactly? Daniel? How would Daniel know the combination? Does he, in the 19th century, have a smartphone with a copy of the Year Walk Companion? And by the way, who did Theodor Almsten actually get in touch with in that vision after the end credits? Presumably the Companion’s login passcode would be useless to Daniel.

A somewhat underdeveloped thread in Year Walk concerns the idea that the year walk ritual causes a sort of “system error” in the universe: that it causes verisimilitude itself to crash. The game’s final resolution–its “true” ending–involves a connection between two characters: Daniel Svensson and Theodor Almsten. From more than a century in the future, Almsten entreats Svensson to appease the (evidently quite real) forest creatures’ bloodlust with his own life rather than an innocent girl’s, changing history. But this connection requires the intervention of a third figure: us. In order for Daniel to know the combination to the uncanny wooden box floating at a fixed point in space, Almsten must reveal his notes to us, through the medium of an iOS app. You may recall in this moment the immersion-breaking Myling puzzles, or that notion of a “system error” in the universe. Year Walk’s true ending emphasizes the softwareness of the software: a move that Simogo is still finding new ways to pull as of 2024.

Year Walk marks the first time that Simogo let the fiction overflow its banks. It overflows in the form of the Companion, and various Blair Witch-style guerilla marketing. One final notable piece of Year Walk ephemera emerged in conjunction with the release of the Wii U port: the short story collection Bedtime Stories for Awful Children. These stories are fairly self-contained and don’t pull any of the Companion’s metafictional tricks–except in the sense that all scary folktales are frightening because they live on the border between fiction and reality. Year Walk is unsettling for the same reason that ghost stories are to children: because the storyteller swears it’s true.

DEVICE 6 (2013)

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

— Lewis Carroll

About midway through the development of Simogo’s fifth game, Edward Snowden leaked a massive trove of documents. It’s not like people weren’t already wondering whether their phones were spying on them. But suddenly, the efficacy of the smartphone as a surveillance device was a matter of public record. Simogo’s catalogue of mobile games up to Year Walk is an extended proof of concept for the smartphone as a Fun Little Gizmo: “Hey, look what this thing can do!” exclaimed over and over again to curiously undiminishing returns. By late 2013, the atmosphere had changed. DEVICE 6 asserts even more strongly than its predecessors that the smartphone is capable of just about anything. But this time, “just about anything” includes wanton surveillance, mind control, and the total collapse of reality into narratives that serve capitalism.

The smartphone has been the main character of this story since the start. We’ve arrived at its heel turn.

DEVICE 6 begins with a simple request: to hold the phone six inches from your face and press a button. When you do, the phone begins making scanning noises, and red lines flash across the screen like a sinister photocopier. The game then identifies you as “Player249,” leaving you to wonder what actually transpired here. Of course, the answer is nothing. The app doesn’t have access to your phone’s camera, and the red photocopier beams that appear on the screen couldn’t possibly have a function.

Or could they? DEVICE 6 constantly brings to mind Arthur C. Clarke’s famous assertion that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Nobody really knows how their smartphone works, so it may as well be magic. And in the post-Snowden era it may as well be black magic. This is DEVICE 6’s most fundamental trick: it leverages your distrust of technology to make you believe the game is doing things it can’t. It’s barely suspension of disbelief. Your phone really is spying on you. You know it is. You read it in the newspaper. The phone game knows your face.

(Like Bumpy Road, elements of DEVICE 6 don’t work as well on modern smartphones–but not for any mechanical reason. In this case, the sinister novelty of DEVICE 6’s opening is blunted by the fact that our phones actually are constantly looking at our faces now, in lieu of passcodes. We’re used to it. The fact that this moment is less upsetting than it once was is upsetting in itself.)

Moments like the opening face scanning sequence serve as interstitials throughout DEVICE 6. Between chapters, you’re given surveys by a suspiciously friendly corporate entity, each of which suggests in a slightly different way that your device is doing impossible things.

Meanwhile, you read the most esoteric ebook ever devised. DEVICE 6’s story is a mishmash of adventure game clichés concerning an amnesiac called Anna, who has to solve a bunch of escape room puzzles to discover why she’s been brought to this unfamiliar island. But as with Year Walk, it’s all in the telling–which finally brings us to the game’s main selling point: the text of DEVICE 6 doubles as both story and map. As Anna moves through the space, sentences stretch out into long, one-line hallways and stack into paragraph-rooms. At times, the text becomes a staircase or an elevator. Sometimes it turns corners, or branches into forking paths. Time and space collapse into an approximate representation of both at once. And yet, as schematically ambitious as it is, DEVICE 6 is simpler in certain respects than any of its predecessors. As much as it makes you twist and turn your phone around, it doesn’t actually use the motion sensors at all. And it is, after all, mainly just text.

At the time, DEVICE 6 was part of a discourse about the re-emergence of “interactive fiction.” Games composed mainly of text have never ceased to exist, but in 2013 there was reason to believe a renaissance was underway: Twine; Inkle; Fallen London; A Dark Room. DEVICE 6, which unexpectedly became Simogo’s biggest hit to date, was part of an unlikely trend. But DEVICE 6 also stands apart from the trend. It has different priorities from most of the other totems of the IF Renaissance. As the revered IF writer Emily Short noted, DEVICE 6 is first and foremost a “beautiful piece of typographical design.” It doesn’t offer branching story threads, except in a rare few instances that always require both branches to be explored. It leaves effectively no space for role playing, purposely separating the player and the player character for thematic reasons, similar to Year Walk. It is, figuratively if not literally, a linear story interspersed with light puzzles. It feels less like 80 Days than like the New York Times’ “Snow Fall” (the Train Pulling into a Station of high-budget online journalism).

DEVICE 6’s interactivity is subtle. It’s not so much about the tasks you are required to undertake or the choices you are allowed to make. It’s about the relationship it forges with the player: the intense awareness it fosters that you are engaging with technology. Specifically, you are engaging with a kind of technology that Steve Jobs wants you to be completely unaware of. Simogo is once again emphasising the softwareness of the software.

(This is another trend that DEVICE 6 was unexpectedly part of: a vogue for metafiction. 2013 also saw the full release of The Stanley Parable and the first two episodes of Kentucky Route Zero. The following five years would bring a flood of acclaimed metafictional games including Undertale, which follows in DEVICE 6’s footsteps by daring the player to disbelieve its reality.)

Scattered throughout the game’s text are schematics for, count them, six different devices that factor into the narrative, one per chapter. Learning what each device does in sequence gradually changes the way that you read the story. It becomes clear that the text we’re reading isn’t a mere pre-rendered story: it is the live feed of Anna’s actual experiences as she makes her way through the island’s trials on the other side of the world. A shadowy group called HAT has installed a number of clever devices in her brain that convert her inner monologue into text and broadcast what she sees and hears to our screen. More troubling still: one of these devices allows us a limited amount of control over Anna, which is how we can participate in solving the puzzles.

Learning about this succession of devices is the real story of DEVICE 6. Until close to the end, nothing much happens to Anna, really. But we grow more invested–more complicit–as we understand the nature of our interaction with the game. Of course, this is only as true as the facial scan at the beginning. But the fiction has overflowed its banks again, just like at the end of Year Walk, and this time the overflowing has been aided by real-life revelations that your phone is up to more than you know. Believing the impossible isn’t so hard.

This specific type of metafiction, where the story seems to spill uncannily into the real world, is the main thing that DEVICE 6 shares with Year Walk. But where Year Walk revelled in the moments where verisimilitude gave way, DEVICE 6 takes great pains to fill in the gaps that its predecessor left open. In Year Walk, Simogo handwaved away the game’s thorniest questions (“How does this character know how to open this box?”) with talk about a “system error” in the universe. Then, they hung a lampshade on their own handwaving by naming their game after its biggest handwave.

There is no such handwaving in DEVICE 6. The numbered devices we encounter in sequence throughout the chapters exist to precisely map Anna’s experiences onto the way we experience them on the screen: to narrow the distance between the map and the territory; the story and the telling of the story; the signifier and the signified. Year Walk leaves open questions for the player to puzzle out in the shower. DEVICE 6 goes so far in the opposite direction that it provides an in-universe answer to the most basic question in semiotics: what is the relationship between the furry animal that lives in my house, and the symbols “D,” “O” and “G?” (They’re related because DEVICE 1 relates them to each other, naturally.)

Anna’s story culminates in an encounter with DEVICE 6 itself. It serves as the central unit of HAT’s surveillance operation, master control for all of their other devices, a storage tank for the human sensory experiences they’ve collectively sucked up, and an object of worship for the members of HAT. By refusing to worship it as well, Anna seals her fate. The epilogue shows us a contradiction: one of the little devices in Anna’s brain continues to broadcast normally, showing us the reality of what she sees, but another device has been overridden by HAT. So, while the text gives Anna a happy ending where a sea captain answers her distress call, the sound and images show her true fate as a man in a bowler hat raises a pistol and shoots.

In the 2016 documentary HyperNormalisation, Adam Curtis argues that governments and corporate interests have successfully mediated our perception of reality by providing us with simplified narratives that deny the complexity and unpredictability of the real world. Many of his examples come from the Soviet Union and the internet, two places where it gradually became commonplace to deny the reality in front of your eyes. The epilogue of DEVICE 6 illustrates a rather Soviet cognitive dissonance. The story is allowed to end in a way that we know is untrue–but having no alternative, we proceed regardless. In 2013, three years before HyperNormalisation, it was less obvious that tech companies were playing a profound role in this flattening of the world. Nevertheless, DEVICE 6 managed to depict exactly this: a cultish organization developing technologies to filter and depict reality in a way that suits their own interests.

As a gift for playing through to the end, our corporate friends offer to send us a creepy doll in the mail. We know what this doll does. Once we receive it, it will knock us unconscious so that HAT can kidnap and forcibly “enhance” us with their horrible machines. We will be flown to the island, and the cycle will begin anew. Should you decide to play again, the Saul Bass-inspired opening cinematic now takes on a new meaning. What had initially seemed like a random parade of images now clearly depicts Anna’s kidnapping, as well as the player’s own eventual fate when that doll arrives in a few business days. At this point, the barrier between the fictional world and the real one has become precariously thin. Depending on how successful the game has been at suspending your disbelief, you may fear to open your own mailbox.

In 2013, DEVICE 6 seemed so deeply of its moment that it risked dating itself immediately. But we are still living in DEVICE 6’s moment: our realities have become even more strictly mediated by filtered streams of information emerging from consumer electronics, and we have collectively become much better at believing impossible things.

The Sailor’s Dream (2014)

Having thoroughly vilified the very technology that enabled their success, what was Simogo to do? Just keep working. Nothing in Simogo’s copious online documentation of their creative process indicates that they seriously considered moving away from mobile games after DEVICE 6: no hint that the dystopian possibilities they entertained in their fiction felt pressing enough in real life to prompt a clean break with smartphones.

Still, looking backwards from 2024, The Sailor’s Dream feels like the end of something. Simogo’s major releases since then have moved gradually away from smartphones: Sayonara Wild Hearts was their first game to initially launch on consoles, and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is seemingly not coming to mobile at all. Aside from the spontaneous experiment that became SPL-T, they would never make a mobile-first game again. That knowledge lends an elegiac quality to The Sailor’s Dream: a sense that we are witnessing a fond memory from well after the fact.

But that elegiac quality was there from the start. This game’s atmosphere isn’t haunted in the same way that Year Walk was: there are no threatening or inexplicable creatures here. Instead, The Sailor’s Dream is populated with sad ghosts and wistful recollections of happier times. Our sole objective is to explore a handful of creaky-floored environments, all deserted. The point-and-click mechanics and escape room puzzles of the last two games are gone, but both games’ navigation mechanics are back. To travel the ocean overworld we scroll horizontally and swipe vertically to travel to a new area, like in Year Walk. And the game’s interiors navigate like a more pictorial DEVICE 6: networks of illustrated rooms, connected by scrollable pathways and graphical crossroads.

The rooms inside these mysterious island dream spaces are filled with symbols and memories. If you take the locations in the order they’re given, the first interactable item you’re likely to encounter is an empty picture frame. Its descriptive text details the photograph it used to hold, of a woman and a girl on a cliff: “The woman sings an old sea shanty and the girl wishes she was an explorer of the seas… just as the girl starts to feel cold, the woman wraps her arms around her.” That’s a lot of information to glean from considering a photograph that isn’t even there. This happens again and again in The Sailor’s Dream: even in the vividness of this dream world, memories present themselves as absences and diminishments. We don’t see a photograph of the woman and child, just the empty frame. We don’t see the kitchen table around which the family gathered, just the driftwood it eventually became. Even in dreams, the life has drained out of these places. But by the same logic, every object contained within The Sailor’s Dream, no matter how abstract or phantasmal, is freighted with potential meaning. Everything is more than it is: a piece of driftwood an elegy for a family dinner; an empty picture frame an elegy for an embrace on a cliff.

These brief snippets of descriptive text begin to suggest a story involving three people: a girl, a woman and a man. They also contain hints about other potential ways we might learn about these people. Firstly, there’s a print button at the bottom of each text snippet. This is the only time Simogo engaged with Apple’s AirPrint system: this print button allows you to view and, for some reason, print the girl’s drawings of the people and places in this story. We learn as we progress through the game that the story’s other two main characters have their own preferred media for personal expression. An old seaman is rumoured to broadcast on the radio every hour, on the hour. And somebody swears that the woman who lives on the cliff has been singing into a bottle and flinging it into the ocean, once per day.

In the broadest possible sense, The Sailor’s Dream elaborates on the formula established by Gone Home the previous year. That game had invited the player to explore an environment full of telling details, and to gradually learn the story of a family. Each family member’s story was told in a slightly different narrative register: YA coming of age story; trashy romance; multi-generational novel. The Sailor’s Dream extends this approach outwards so each character’s story is told in a different medium altogether: drawings, spoken language, and songs.

The woman’s bottles are easily discovered: after a certain point they start appearing in the game at the rate of exactly one per real-world day, and they do in fact contain songs. This is how we learn the story of the woman who lives on the cliff. Learning the story of the old seaman is the closest thing The Sailor’s Dream has to a puzzle. There’s an odd clock inside a shack on one of the smaller islands. At the top of the hour, again according to the real-world time, the clock’s radio flips on and a wistful man with a deep, rustic voice talks to nobody in particular about his lost love.

The fact that these two elements of the game correspond to the real-world date and time is the only way that The Sailor’s Dream allows the fiction to overflow its banks. The story here is essentially self-contained, but it invites you to check in with it periodically as you would a recurring dream. Every morning when you wake up, you’ll eventually remember that a new bottle has plunged into the waters of the dream world. And throughout the day, you’ll occasionally notice that it’s close to the start of a new hour, and you’ll know that in another reality, a man on a ship is about to broadcast his feelings over the shortwave. Discovering all of these bottles and broadcasts is part of the game’s critical path: the credits won’t roll until you do. Of course, it’s possible to brute force your way to completion in a single sitting if you mess with your phone’s date and time settings. But doing that would mean treating The Sailor’s Dream like a video game, and not the pocket universe it means to be.

The story we discover is a patchwork nautical melodrama: Breaking the Waves via dream logic. A beautiful woman meets the man of her dreams, and they live together in a cliff-top house overlooking the sea. They informally adopt a young girl during the summers, they get a dog named Archibald, and they live together in domestic bliss for one quarter of the year. The rest of the year, the girl is elsewhere and the man frequently has to be away at sea. The woman is mostly alone in that house. She comes to hate the sea, and the solitude. One night, the man is getting tossed around by a particularly vicious storm. He’s in the cargo hold when the ship tilts violently and a crate carries off his arm–the arm where he’s tattooed his loved one’s face. At this moment he knows, as we come to learn, that his beloved has thrown herself off the cliff.

We experience this story mainly through the eyes of the girl the couple adopts. It is her dream we’re in, her faded memories we discover, and her drawings we find. We learn that when she’s not with the couple in the cliff-top house, she spends most of the year in an institution. Evidently she has a history of pyromania. She hates the institution, and the doctor who asks her endless questions about her dreams. But there is one friendly guard, who regales her with stories about his beloved rowboat, which he’s named Lily Christine. The guard affectionately calls the girl “Sailor,” and brings her paper to draw on. When her mother figure dies, she watches as the pallbearers carry an empty coffin down the street, and she burns the cliff-top house to the ground.

The old seaman’s radio broadcasts come to us from a ship on the open sea, sometime long after the rest of the story has come and gone. He speaks with a voice of tired experience. He has little interest in his crewmates, who try in vain to coax him into a game of cards. The Jack Russell Terrier onboard his latest ship can’t compare with the memory of Archibald. Nothing interests him much except for reflecting on his great love. Like another ancient mariner, he’s compelled to relate his own tragedy to anybody who’ll listen. But unlike Coleridge’s mariner, this one isn’t guaranteed an audience. He speaks his tragedy into the static and is audible only in dreams.

It’s the woman’s story that’s the most memorable, not only because it’s the most tragic, but because it is delivered in the most memorable way. The songwriter Jonathan Eng has been in Simogo’s orbit since the promotional cycle for Kosmo Spin, and he’s been involved in every subsequent game in one way or another. (He even appears as himself in DEVICE 6–a rare honour for video game composers who didn’t work on Chrono Trigger.) But The Sailor’s Dream is the point where he becomes indispensable: as valuable a collaborator for Simogo as Ben Babbitt is for Cardboard Computer. It is rare for a video game to have songs–i.e. true songs, with lyrics, that maintain focus and aren’t just window dressing or a glib joke over the end credits. And it is vanishingly rare for these songs to be excellent.

The Sailor’s Dream’s songs in bottles tell their story with Sondheim-like efficiency. On the OST, they are simply named for the days of the week on which they appear in the game. On Monday and Tuesday, the woman sings of her early life: yearning for the sea against her family’s wishes, and finding a comfortable home in a friendly seaside town. She assembles her makeshift family on Wednesday and Thursday, meeting a handsome sailor at a dance and taking a needful child under her wing. On Friday, we hear one of Eng’s most satisfying songwriterly flourishes: he extends the length of the final chorus to accommodate the woman’s sincerest single utterance:

As the sun slowly sinks, I can’t help but to think
That we’re truly each other’s most valuable things
They say time can’t be stopped, but I’ll give it a try
As the last summer’s night passes by

Saturday brings rage. The woman rails against the sea and the promises her loved one should have known he couldn’t keep. Finally, Sunday marks the end of the woman’s life. Without this song, it’s possible the whole game wouldn’t work. We hear very little of what the woman’s life is like after her husband goes to sea. The rest of the game largely declines to give voice to her struggle. It takes Jonathan Eng exactly four lines to make up for this:

This house was once full of wishes and desire
But all life died out, only ghosts come through the door
Now it’s a shell that’s just waiting for the fire
Nobody lives in this house anymore

You could argue it’s troublesome that The Sailor’s Dream is the third Simogo game in a row that revolves around the violent death of a woman, and this one in particular may be a problematically romantic depiction of suicide. But the teenage Decemberists fan deep inside me is powerless against this. Eng’s song is a beautiful illustration of grief, longing, and the difference between how you hoped it would be and how it turned out. It completes the woman’s emotional arc, and finds the humanity in a very melodramatic ending.

In spite of its melodrama, The Sailor’s Dream is Simogo’s subtlest creation, replete with easily ignored detail: the symbols in the UI; the sound and feel of the swiping motion; the subtle fade between photorealistic ocean and painterly sky on the overworld screen. It is their least gamelike creation but their most expressive, like the Church Grim encounter in Year Walk expanded into a whole game. Its rooms are filled not with puzzles, but with bespoke software instruments that allow you to improvise melodies overtop of Eng’s score, wheels to spin, windows to tap on. The narrative doesn’t depend on this interactivity to come through, but the experience of finding a room full of glowing musical cubes is equally beguiling and evocative as any of Simogo’s now-absent puzzles.

Since The Sailor’s Dream is driven so heavily by atmosphere and music, it isn’t surprising that Simogo spun it off into a podcast. The Lighthouse Painting is part of the post-Serial podcasting boom of 2015, when everybody remembered the storytelling power of audio all at once, in spite of the fact that podcasts had already been around for well over a decade and radio hadn’t gone anywhere. It focuses on a minor character in the game: the sympathetic guard at the facility where the girl is being held. Over four miniature episodes, the now-former guard tells us a maritime tall tale about a girl who paints with watercolours made from the ocean. The ocean, vengeful over its stolen water, repossesses whatever she paints, including her mother and the lighthouse where she lives.

The Lighthouse Painting is only tangentially connected to The Sailor’s Dream through its narrator and his rowboat, and a couple of repeating themes from Eng. But it expands on the game’s obsession with dreams and stories–it is only through these that the ocean takes on supernatural powers. Simogo only ventured into podcasting this one time, at the precise apex of the excitement about that medium.

Meanwhile, the apex of excitement about the smartphone had come and gone. The Sailor’s Dream is a bittersweet recollection of a time when it seemed novel to have a telephone that also worked as a day planner, played music and told the time. This miraculous device, which responded to the touch in precisely the way you expected, once seemed like it had limitless potential for designers and storytellers to bring their craft to new audiences. Those days are over. Nobody lives in this house anymore. Time for a new horizon.

Part three is here.

Notes on Simogo, Part 1: Business Casual

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Every body of work belongs somewhere on a spectrum between order and ungainliness: between Nine Inch Nails and Aphex Twin, perhaps. There is an appeal in the Aphex Twin kind of catalogue, scattered among different monikers and doled out in irregular quantities. The treasure hunter in me appreciates the challenge. But my heart belongs to the artists who keep their garden well weeded, who impose their own sense of order onto their work. It isn’t mere vanity that might compel an artist to act in this way. To actively corral and demarcate a list of works is an invitation from artist to audience, to look at all of this material as a cohesive whole: to see each individual part in conversation with all the others.

Over the last 15 years, the indie developer Simogo has built up one of the most internally coherent back catalogues in games. This coherency lends depth and meaning to each game in itself, especially their latest: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. Lorelei contains explicit references to Simogo’s entire corpus, from their earliest mobile trifles to their most ambitious adventure games. It expands on themes and approaches that have defined Simogo’s work since the start of their career.

The release of Lorelei strikes me as an opportunity to look back at Simogo’s complete works, to attempt to trace the consistent voice that runs through their catalogue. As in the past, I don’t have a specific thesis or grand unified theory of Simogo I’m working towards here. I’m just going to play all of their games, and go through some of the ephemera associated with each. I’ll comment on what strikes me most, and how each part seems to inform the whole.

Here’s the “shape” of Simogo’s catalogue as I see it, laid out in parts and subparts:

A trilogy of casual mobile games:

Kosmo Spin
Bumpy Road
Beat Sneak Bandit
- A playable demo called Rollovski, for an unreleased Nintendo 3DS game in the same universe as Beat Sneak Bandit

A second trilogy of metafiction-inclined adventure games for mobile:

Year Walk
- The Year Walk Companion, a separate app expanding on the folklore that inspired the game and containing important secrets (the Companion was folded into subsequent ports of Year Walk)
- Year Walk Bedtime Stories for Awful Children, a set of short stories written for the release of the Wii U port
DEVICE 6
The Sailor’s Dream
- A fiction podcast called The Lighthouse Painting

An “intermission featurette” containing two small and contrasting works:

The Sensational December Machine
SPL-T

Two comparatively large games that appear to follow up on approaches from their first and second trilogies, respectively:

Sayonara Wild Hearts
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes

That’s a lot of games, so I’m splitting this into a three-part series. This first part will deal with the early casual games. The second will cover Year Walk, DEVICE 6 and The Sailor’s Dream, with all their associated ephemera. And the final part will touch on the two small titles in the “intermission featurette,” then dive into Simogo’s two most recent games. (Edit: As it turns out, Lorelei required a post all to itself. So, this is in fact a four-part series. The schematic still applies.)

Me and Simogo, we go back a long way. Playing DEVICE 6 in 2013 was one of a handful of experiences that encouraged me to get back into games after a long absence. The point of this retrospective isn’t really to assess the quality of what Simogo has made, but the fact that I’m doing this at all should demonstrate my personal attachment to their work. I’ve played everything from Year Walk through Sayonara Wild Hearts at least three times each, and I’m the particular kind of sicko who considers The Sailor’s Dream to be their secret masterpiece. I’ve thought about these games a lot.

On the other hand, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is as new to me as everybody else, and I hadn’t played Kosmo Spin, Bumpy Road or Beat Sneak Bandit before I started working on this series. So there will be an element of discovery here. The more I play these unfamiliar games, the stronger the sense I get that Simogo’s current creative phase is explicitly in conversation with their own past. Sayonara Wild Hearts strikes me as a spiritual sequel to their initial trilogy of casual mobile games. In the same way, Lorelei seems to follow up the metafiction trilogy that began with Year Walk. Simogo redesigned their website for the release of Lorelei, including reams of documentation and present-day reflection on their previous games. Their catalogue has never been tidier, and its coherence has never been more relevant to their current work.

A final note before we begin: I wrote earlier that I have no particular thesis I’m working towards. I do however see a correlation between Simogo’s work at any given time and the prevailing attitude towards smartphones. As we proceed, we’ll witness the rise of the smartphone as a casual entertainment device, its embrace by indie developers as an accessible platform for interactive storytelling, and the gradually declining optimism about its possibilities over the last ten years. Another fact that marks Lorelei and the Laser Eyes as a turning point in Simogo’s work is that it’s their first game not to be released on mobile, which has been their natural habitat for most of their career.

We’ll get there, but first: back to a more innocent time.

(This series will ultimately contain full spoilers for every Simogo game, but that isn’t particularly relevant to the early games covered in this part.)

Kosmo Spin (2010)

Kosmo Spin was the first game that Simon Flesser and Magnus “Gordon” Gardebäck made as Simogo, but not the first game that they worked on together. Their most relevant pre-Simogo work, ilomilo, falls outside the scope of this retrospective–though it lives on through a minigame in Lorelei and a Billie Eilish song.

It’s easier to appreciate Kosmo Spin when you consider it as a snapshot from 2010: that’s three years after the release of the first iPhone, two years after the launch of the App Store (which had about 150,000 apps in total at the time, compared with today’s two million), and one year after the medium-defining success of Angry Birds. Kosmo Spin was released anywhere from one to two years after you first saw that app that made it look like you were drinking a beer–the Train Pulling into a Station of our time. The iPhone was a blank canvas, a new technology so void of preconceptions about what it could do that even the dumbest applications of its motion sensors and touchscreen seemed novel.

The touchscreen in particular felt like it would initiate a new era, where you would no longer need to learn a piece of software, it would simply behave how you expected it to. The intuitive physicality of the touchscreen, and the fact that everybody suddenly had one in their pocket, enabled a generation of indie game studios. Simogo is a child of this moment, and Kosmo Spin is a modest relic of its time.

The fundamental feature of Kosmo Spin is that it uses only one input from the player: moving your thumb in a circle on the touchscreen. Doing so spins the planet at the centre of the screen while your character, Nod, remains on top of it. The main threat is a flying saucer floating around above the planet that can use a tractor beam to abduct Nod, ending the game immediately, or fire various balls with different movement patterns at the planet, briefly stunning Nod and preventing you from spinning the planet for a second or two.

Kosmo Spin’s single input allows you to accomplish a small handful of tasks. Most importantly, you can collect the “breakfast thingys” that spawn along the edge of the planet. This is the thrust of the game: an alien has come to this planet to steal their breakfast, and Nod is breakfast’s saviour. He can also head the balls the flying saucer shoots, which may in turn collide with other balls or with the flying saucer. That’s a more or less complete summary of the mechanics of Kosmo Spin. It is elementally simple: Pong, but circular. It’s an idea so obvious that it seems bizarre that it didn’t happen until 2010. All it took was the widespread availability of touchscreens and a wave of enthusiasm for new tactile experiences.

In its day, Kosmo Spin was promoted for its originality–“a one of a kind circular arcade game.” That originality is less obvious from today’s vantage point, when the Lumiere-like novelty of the touchscreen is a distant memory. The main reason to play Kosmo Spin today is to do what I’m doing: to add context for Simogo’s later work.

There are a couple threads that begin here and run throughout Simogo’s catalogue. The simplicity of the controls is one. Simogo’s games have become enormously more complex, but their belief in simplifying game controls persists to this day. In fact, it persists to such an extent that some critics are finding Lorelei’s two-input system too simplistic for the game’s purpose.

The other thread worth noting is everything that falls under the heading of “presentation.” Kosmo Spin is visibly a game made by two people in a few months, but it embraces those limitations and spins them into an aesthetic. Everything about Kosmo Spin is low-stakes and homespun: the cut paper collage look of the menus, the ukulele-led score, and so on. Even the release trailer features fabric puppets on a cardboard set. As minor as it is, Kosmo Spin is as holistically designed an object as DEVICE 6 or Sayonara Wild Hearts.

There is a sort of story mode in Kosmo Spin, where you take quests from a handful of deliberately one-dimensional NPCs whose personalities boil down to encouraging, crotchety, stoned, manic, murderous, arithmomaniacal, hesitant and French. (There’s also a little Einstein lookalike who offers a “Space & Breakfast Fact” if you scroll past the last screen of levels: whimsical little remarks that fall short of actually being jokes.) I have not finished this campaign. I’ve attempted all 60 of its quests and completed 39. For all I know, beating the game could reveal that Nod has been the player character in Year Walk all along. I’ll never see it for myself, because even I have limits. Kosmo Spin is mainly compelling in the same way as the first David Bowie album: a suggestion of interesting things ahead.

It’s also a nostalgic portal back to a time when browsing the App Store was kind of fun. I can’t remember exactly when that ceased to be the case, but it was probably sometime after 2011.

Bumpy Road (2011)

It didn’t take long for the smartphone’s infinite possibility space to present a few obvious paths of least resistance. The success of Canabalt in 2009 opened one of them: the auto-runner, and its subcategory the endless runner. Simogo released Bumpy Road three months before the definitive side-scrolling endless runner, Jetpack Joyride, and only two months before the wellspring of 3D endless runners: Temple Run.

In retrospect, the ubiquity of this genre might make you yawn or gag, or despair at the swiftness with which predictable patterns exerted themselves in the open frontier of smartphone entertainment. But that’s what a genre is: a path through the possibility space that’s recognizable enough to be travelled again and again, but broad enough to suggest different ways of travelling down the recognizable path.

Bumpy Road itself is an enactment of this metaphor: its infinite scroll recalls the predictable elements of its genre, but the freedom of movement the player enjoys within that scroll (including backwards movement, a rarity) indicates just how much space for variation there is along the reliable genre path.

The elderly couple that acts as Bumpy Road’s protagonists, Auntie Cat and Uncle Hat, are not “player characters” as such. You choose which one of them is behind the wheel of their vintage car by selecting from the two available game modes. But once selected, they go on their own, leaving you to guide their motion by changing the shape of the road on which they travel. You do so by sliding your finger along the road itself, stretching it upwards and creating slopes for the car to accelerate down or bumps to stop it from careening into a game-ending hole.

The game’s frisson comes from the counterintuitive feeling of controlling something other than the moving object on the screen. The controls are simple to understand in concept, but perhaps intentionally awkward–a little like Katamari Damacy, or the future mobile sensation Flappy Bird. The game’s true endless mode, “Evergreen Ride,” puts the cautious Uncle Hat in the driver’s seat and challenges you to collect as many car-powering “gizmos” as you can while not falling into any holes. The more reckless Auntie Cat’s game mode, “Sunday Trip,” has a finish line and no holes to fall into, and challenges you to complete an obstacle course as quickly as possible.

A run in either game mode consists of a shuffling of discrete level segments in random order. As you gain familiarity with the game, you start recognizing these level segments as they begin. You remember to some degree what you’ll soon have to avoid and how you’ll need to position yourself to collect the more inconveniently placed gizmos. Bumpy Road sits somewhere between the memory-reliant classic Mario platformers and procedural roguelikes, which rely instead on an overall familiarity with the game’s whole realm of possibilities.

Once again, the game’s aesthetic is half the reason to play it. The homespun feel of Kosmo Spin is gone, replaced by a Triplets of Belleville-inspired French animation look. The ukulele is still here, but a top layer of melodica gives the music an extra touch of pâtisserie sophistication. There’s more of a story here than in Kosmo Spin as well: a love story presented in photographs you can collect in the “Evergreen Ride” mode. I will probably never see the end of this story, or even the bulk of it, in my own save file. The game is so parsimonious with its one meaningful collectible that you have to be either really good or extremely perseverent to see all 40 photographs. I am neither.

I simply cannot get a handle on Bumpy Road. In spite of its basic controls and detailed tutorial, the feel of it eludes me. Part of this may be because I’m playing it on the 6.1-inch screen of my iPhone 14 instead of the 3.5-inch iPhone 4 screen it was designed for. I always feel like I have to reach a little too far. It’s a step forward from Kosmo Spin in many ways, but it still strikes me as mainly a thing of interest for Simogo archeologists. If Kosmo Spin reflects the earliest days of freeform innovation with touchscreens, Bumpy Road represents Simogo’s response to the emergence of a predominant genre in mobile games.

Notably, it is the first of two auto-runners by Simogo. The other, 2019’s Sayonara Wild Hearts, is clearly the more ambitious game. But I don’t think it’s ridiculous to suggest that Bumpy Road is the more experimental game on a basic, mechanical level. In 2012, Subway Surfers picked up where Temple Run left off, and established a template that Sayonara Wild Hearts doesn’t stray too far from. Bumpy Road, on the other hand, doesn’t play anything like the other auto-runners of its era. It subverts the still-emerging expectations of its genre. Very soon, this will become one of Simogo’s favourite hobbies.

Beat Sneak Bandit (2012)

Simogo’s career started with riffs on Pong and Canabalt. The fact that Beat Sneak Bandit doesn’t immediately recall another specific game makes it a turning point. Similarly to Bumpy Road, it does make reference to well-known video game tropes. But this time, it subverts the tendencies of two genres, simply by smashing them together: stealth games, and rhythm games.

I suspect it’s also the only game where it would be possible to write a walkthrough entirely in musical notation:

This is a valid solution for chapter one, level four of Beat Sneak Bandit. It isn’t the most optimal solution, but if you tap on the quarter notes and wait during the rests, you’ll reach the goal and clear the level. You don’t even have to look at the screen.

The title character of Beat Sneak Bandit has been tasked with recovering the world’s stolen clock faces from the detestable Duke Clockface. Again, the game’s control scheme consists of a single input, the simplest one yet: tapping the screen to the beat of the game’s music. On each beat of a level there are only two things you can do: tap or wait. Tapping will move the title character forward if there’s nothing in his way, turn him around on the spot if he’s facing a wall, and move him up a staircase if he’s standing in front of one. Waiting will do none of these, though several passive effects may happen regardless, like falling through an open trapdoor, travelling through a teleporter, or getting busted by a guard and failing the level.

The entirety of Beat Sneak Bandit takes place on a temporal grid, like Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero. But in those games, the grid is explicitly shown on screen with clear instructions about what to do on every grid line that passes by. The trick is simply to keep up. In Beat Sneak Bandit, the grid is hidden. The trick is deciding what to do on each beat: to tap, or not to tap? Nothing is random in Beat Sneak Bandit. Every level runs on a predictable loop, and the Bandit starts at the same place each time. So, while there are a number of possible solutions to each level, any given solution is guaranteed to work every time. That is what causes the extraordinary phenomenon that Beat Sneak Bandit gameplay can be transcribed like a bass drum part, into quarter notes and rests.

(Having investigated, I see that people have attempted to notate gameplay in this way before, for instance with Braid. But in that case, it took some significant alterations to the standard way of writing music. Braid’s gameplay isn’t tied to the audible grid lines of a steady beat. So, Beat Sneak Bandit remains the only game I’m aware of that’s transcribable in this way.)

On its face, it seems like a perverse decision to make a casual game you can’t play with the sound off. But Beat Sneak Bandit is more comfortable asking for your attention than its predecessors. Aside from Kosmo Spin’s quest mode, Beat Sneak Bandit is the first Simogo game with a proper campaign. It consists of distinct levels leading to a final boss and end credits. It’s the first time Simogo has invited the player to “beat the game.” But as with Sayonara Wild Hearts years later, you set the terms of your own engagement. Its levels are usually easy to beat if your objective is just to reach the goal and move on to the next level. But they can be quite challenging if you want to get all of the collectables. It’s genuinely more fun if you try to completely solve a puzzle, but if you see a shortcut and want to take it, the game neither stops nor judges you for it. Also like Sayonara, Bandit has a very generous level skip option that kicks in if you fail a few times in a row. It occasionally starts to feel condescending, but it’s a solution for a possible problem that arises here for the first time in Simogo’s career.

In Kosmo Spin, all 60 quests are available from the start. You don’t have to progress from one to the next to unlock further ones. Bumpy Road doesn’t have “levels” at all, instead offering two different kinds of score chasing. Beat Sneak Bandit is the first Simogo game that forces the player through a linear course of levels. So, it’s the first time it might be possible to get stuck. The level skip option ensures that the linear structure of the game maintains its integrity while also ensuring that the whole game is available to all players, just like it was in Kosmo Spin.

The one occasion when the game offers no grace is the extremely difficult final boss fight which comes in eight phases and sends you right back to the start if you make a mistake. But at that point the game is nearly over, and the only thing that’s locked behind the boss is a bonus stage of 12 variations on previous levels. Arguably, the bigger loss for being unable to finish the boss fight is not getting to hear the music over the end credits, which features songwriter Jonathan Eng on guitar. Eng previously worked with Simogo on cloying promo songs for Kosmo Spin and Bumpy Road but this is his first appearance in a proper game, and the start of the relationship that will make The Sailor’s Dream and Sayonara Wild Hearts possible.

More than either of the first two games, Beat Sneak Bandit feels like the origin point for a lot of elements that are present in Simogo’s most successful phase. The simple fact that it’s a bespoke set of challenges with a hard out rather than an arcade-like score chase accounts for some of this. But also, the first three games all have their own distinct visual aesthetic: arts and crafts in Kosmo Spin, French animation in Bumpy Road, and now Saul Bass posters and mid-century cartoons in Beat Sneak Bandit. Of those three aesthetics, this is the only one Simogo will revisit, in the even more Bass-inspired DEVICE 6.

Shortly after the release of Beat Sneak Bandit came a fork in the road. To one side, a prototype for a lore-rich game unlike anything Simogo had made so far. To the other, an invitation from no less than Nintendo. In 2012, their 3DS handheld didn’t have anything close to the reach of the iPhone, but it offered a unique set of possibilities. Simogo’s response to Nintendo’s invitation was a prototype called Rollovski, with the same art style as Beat Sneak Bandit and in the same fictional universe. But the gameplay feels much more like Bumpy Road, built around moving the environment rather than the character.

In the wake of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes being available on Switch but not on mobile, the Rollovski prototype feels like a harbinger of things to come. There’s an alternate universe where Rollovski made it past the prototype stage and became a massive hit. Maybe in that universe, Simogo continued making work in the same vein as their first three games. I’m sure it’s delightful there. But we live in a more haunted world than that.

Part two is here.

Omnireviewer (week of Nov. 15)

The great and shameful archive

of Matthew J.R. Parsons, retired blogger