Previews

First impressions - The Sailor's Dream is Simogo's most ambitious and intriguing game yet

As spoiler free as possible

First impressions - The Sailor's Dream is Simogo's most ambitious and intriguing game yet
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iOS
| The Sailor's Dream
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The trajectory of Swedish studio Simogo would be hard to plot on any graph. The duo, and their collaborators, have gone from bouncy cartoon arcade games to creepy horror romps to esoteric ebooks.

Its latest - The Sailor's Dream - is perhaps the strangest one yet. It's a hazy oceanic experience where you're asked to simply "satisfy your curiosity", explore intriguing locations, and take in a fractured narrative.

It borrows the unsettling atmosphere, and slick parallax scrolling of Year Walk, and the textual funkiness of DEVICE 6. But it proudly eschews the logic puzzles that showed up in both.

The Sailor's Dream

Instead, the only real puzzle is piecing together the story, which is delivered in fragments and scattered about the game world in objects and rooms. And under every scrap of story is a button which opens up the iOS printer menu.

It seems purposefully insular and personal - an anarchic pushback in a world of sharing everything on social networks. It's a very different feel to the ever present Tweet button in Sword & Sworcery.

As you explore the game's locations - like a lighthouse, some ruins, and a wrecked ship - you'll find more items that help shine light on the ethereal narrative. But teasing a linear story out of them is on you.

The Sailor's Dream

Every room is a weird patchwork quilt of images, music, text, and voices - both spoken and sung. And everything is slightly interactive, from window panes that produce sound effects upon your tap, to adaptive audio that skews and fades and changes tempo as you scroll around the screen.

The whole thing is basically, to use a horrible world, an "experience". Not really a game, but absolutely not a book either. Something somewhere in the murky middle, and I can't wait to uncover further. If you're into unique narrative experiences, you should feel the same.

The Sailor's Dream

The Sailor's Dream is out on iPhone and iPad next week. We'll have a full review then.

Mark Brown
Mark Brown
Mark Brown is editor at large of Pocket Gamer