Of all of my favorite games, Sayonara Wild Hearts might be the hardest to describe. It’s a rhythm game, but also you ride on a motorcycle and a dragon, wield giant swords while dodging fireballs, and teleport to a retrofuturistic VR world. It’s structured like a pop album, telling a story of love and loss, and is narrated by Queen Latifah. It’s Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater meets R-Type crossed with Rhythm Heaven as directed by Carly Rae Jepsen. It makes sense once you play it, trust me.
This was all true when the game first launched in 2019 on the Switch and PS4 (it was also on Apple Arcade, but has since been removed). But now is a good time to check it out if you haven’t. The game just launched on the PS5 — it’s a free upgrade if you have it on PS4 — which adds some performance improvements and a new endless mode called remix arcade that you can read more about here. Really, though, the new platform is just an excellent excuse to dive back into this world.
Sayonara Wild Hearts follows the story of a young heartbroken woman who is transported to an alternate realm where she must restore harmony by collecting lots of hearts. To do this, you play through a series of 23 short levels, doing everything from racing through city streets to fighting biker gangs to flying amid the ruins of a destroyed city. It’s an arcade-style game, where you’re racing through levels in search of a high score (which you get by collecting hearts and other items), and most of what you’re doing is in time to the beat of the dreamy pop music that plays throughout.
The game only lasts around two hours, but it packs so much into that space. What you’re doing is constantly changing. Vehicles shift from skateboards to motorcycles to cars to human flight to dragons, and there are about a half dozen different styles of games, from old-school arcade shooters to early 3D platformers to racing games. Almost all of those genres are then filtered through the lens of rhythm action, for a twitchy experience that feels very cohesive. It’s also pretty approachable. If you keep failing a section — like me during any of the first-person driving sequences — you have the option to simply skip it and move on.
Just as important, Sayonara Wild Hearts is incredibly stylish. The dream world is slick and beautiful, rendered in pinks, blues, and purples, with characters that dance as they fight and, uh, mechs made out of robotic wolves. It’s as weird as it is cool, and it’s carried by an incredible pop soundtrack from composers Daniel Olsén and Jonathan Eng, alongside vocalist Linnea Olsson. It’s all bangers, and I’m listening to it right now as I write this story.
Just like a great album, Sayonara is something I find myself coming back to again and again. I’ve replayed it several times over the last six years, and each time, I’ve been struck by just how bold it is. Those feelings haven’t been diminished over time. It helps that it’s just the right length so you can easily soak it all in.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
