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How Simogo built Sayonara Wild Hearts' best stage

We talk with four members of the team about how "Begin Again" came about, why it took them a year to finish it, and the challenges of building something new.

Written by Matt Leone
How Simogo built Sayonara Wild Hearts' best stage
While in development on "Begin Again," the Sayonara Wild Hearts team experimented with a more detailed art style, as seen here. "I remember playing Gravity Rush 2 and feeling a sense of defeat in how good it looked," says Simogo's Simon Flesser. "This is why we decided to make the environments much more stylized, low poly, because I realized that as a small team we would not be able to compete with grander-scale games." | Image: Simogo

Towards the end of an interview with Sayonara Wild Hearts developer Simogo, it becomes clear I'm more enthusiastic than they are about what I consider the game's best stage.

I'm describing how I still play "Begin Again" — one of 23 levels that play out like interactive music videos — about once a month, now six years after the game's release. From my perspective, it's the game's masterpiece, letting you ride a motorcycle, skydive, dodge trollies, and time backflips with button presses as though Dragon's Lair won the fast food wars. As a roller coaster ride set to a pop song about a break-up, it's hard to beat. In fact, that's why I pitched the interview — I wanted to learn more about the four minutes and 31 seconds I haven't been able to stop playing.

Little did I realize what I was stepping into.

For Simogo co-founder Simon Flesser, the stage carries a bit of extra baggage. "Begin Again" was the first stage the team built, he says, so it's filled with visual and design wrinkles that the group learned to iron out while making the rest of the game. "You can sort of feel that we hadn't really figured out the rhythm of the game," Flesser says, calling the stage "rigid" and "wonky" and not as interesting to play nor as readable as other levels.

Behind the scenes, Flesser and Simogo co-founder Magnus Gardebäck say the stage also proved particularly challenging to develop — taking a year to nail down and using elements like hard cuts that ended up being too time-consuming to include elsewhere. While working on the stage, the team even established a toolset that Flesser is highly critical of in retrospect, calling it "a completely insane way to build a video game" — yet Gardebäck says they stuck with it because they didn't want to redesign the level after spending so long on it.

Thankfully, they don't let any of that get in the way of talking about all of this for an hour.

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