The Sailor's Dream

released on Nov 06, 2014
by Simogo

A peaceful narrative experience, in which the only objective is to satisfy your curiosity. Explore an ocean dream world, in which time passes even when you are not there, visit forgotten islands and piece together memories – some even existing beyond the screen of your device.


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You know that moment at the start of Sayonara Wild Hearts where the opening cutscene transitions into the menu screen and the title song kicks in? That moment rules. This is a game made entirely of that moment.

Simogo are the absolute masters of what some people call "presentation," but I like to call it "staging": the combination of elements that makes a moment dramatically successful. Simogo pays more attention than anybody to details like the way text moves across the screen, the way a colour scheme can set the mood, the way a touchscreen can give the illusion of physical tension. During their run of games from Year Walk to DEVICE 6 to The Sailor's Dream, their work became more and more stylish as it became less and less concerned with puzzles and traditional gameplay objectives. It's no wonder that they ran in the opposite direction with Sayonara: with The Sailor's Dream they'd reached the apex of something. They put all their efforts into making a game that looks, sounds and feels beautiful at every moment and indeed it does. Every design element from the explorable environments themselves down to the loading screens and individual UI elements are beautiful, tactile and intuitive. Assessing it demands an entirely different frame of reference from most games, and indeed even from Simogo's other work.

The story is simple enough but elaborately told. The same events are heard Rashomon-style from the perspective of three different characters through three different media: text, speech and music. (Incidentally, although this game doesn't have the best music of all time, it certainly has the best songs.) The gut punch arrives once you've completed all three parts of the puzzle.

The Sailor's Dream is Simogo's masterpiece and one of the best mobile games ever made. I joined this website because it needed a friend.


After Year Walk and Device 6, I was very excited for Simogo's next release. Unfortunately, although very pretty to look at, with some interesting writing, there wasn't much to it, and I constantly felt like I was missing something. I'm not sure exactly what they were going for, but it wasn't working for me. I did everything I could figure out how to do, and lost interest pretty quickly.

The puzzles that crippled Device 6 are missing, thank god. But what’s left behind is so slight, so precious and twee, that it leaves almost no impression at all.

Unnamed characters and places aren’t mythic or universal. They’re forgettable. Names are anchors, but everything here is adrift. I remember only Archibald (a dog) and Lily Christine (a boat). The rest is dishwater.

The Sailor’s Dream wants to feel full of secrets, but it’s all intimation. The only thing it really suggests is a kind of respectability politics for gaming. Artisanal and generic. A handcrafted ship in a bottle, going nowhere.