Social interaction is the process of reciprocal influence exercised by individuals over one another during social encounters. - Introduction to Sociology, 2nd edition, William Little

When we are interacting with someone, we have a limited set of tools, values, and techniques. When the other person matches yours, everything is smooth. You are able to communicate, to reach an understanding. When not, communication does not work. It's awkward, lonely, you feel like you don't fit. And if you are tired, communication is harder. You have less patience, your brain works at a slower pace.

Every person you interact with influences you, leaves a trace, changes the way you interact with other people. You learn something from them, and that person takes something from you, too. When you do this long enough, with people out of your comfort zone, you can find yourself being a different person. A person that is not able to connect anymore with the people you use to connect with.

As you gain more experience, you start to have more complex tools, to understand different kinds of people, to adapt yourself to the person you are communicating with. You grow up, you learn from experience.

Why am I talking about this? Because this game is able to represent the complexity of social interaction, with all these nuances, in a simple domino-like deck builder game. Yes, the story and characters could be better.

But the core mechanic is just fantastic.

Signs of the Sojourner is a game I've been looking forward to playing since I found it last year, and it really lived up to my own expectations, and then some. What on the surface looked like a cute little deck-builder with quests, really hid a tough choices-matter driven story funded by it's deck-building and exploration. I really think this is one of the more fun "casual" deck-builders I've played in a minute, having simplistic rules with a spice of controlled randomness that really makes you think about your game play decisions. It was shocking how the game would punish me for my decisions with certain characters and make me feel bad, after all, I didn't even like those characters, and now I grieve over their problems... and that's f**king awesome.

I love games that really give you no moral "perfect", the character and story is governed by YOUR CHOICES. Overall, I loved this.

I have only committed to one run as of now, but will ad addendums on future playthroughs.

“The song of the years, the melody of life. Everything else - is not you, all others are strangers. And you yourself, who are you? You don't know. You'll get to know it later, when you string the beads of memory. You'll be what is most endearing, most cruel and most eternal.” - Sasha Sokolov

Diálogo, viagem, trabalho, superação, a inexorável flecha do tempo - tudo requer transformação, voluntária ou não. A soma de todas experiências é o que nos define sem que queiramos, e um conjunto seleto desta soma é o que escolhemos para nos definir. Signs of the Sojourner tenta representar, mecânica e narrativamente, o doloroso e transfigurativo processo de existir em comunidade.

Embora a arte e a ideia do jogo tenham me cativado, senti que a execução rapidamente tropeça e a grande maioria do seu fluxo de jogo segue aos trancos e barrancos (alguns desses dolorosos e intencionais, que respeito), o processo de delicada interface sendo reduzido à um frustrante gargarejo não-determinístico - se levamos a mensagem da interação mecânica ao pé da letra, o jogo quer nos dizer que cansaço é o equivalente de lobotomia. Uma promissora e esburacadíssima estrada que acaba cortando a viagem ao meio.

At first i had no idea what was going on but i was sticking with it because i heard from other's that it's really good. Then the conversation system clicked and i realised that 'failing' a conversation isn't necessarily a bad thing. I was enjoying the story but the fact that your deck is so small compared to what you 'need' made you feel like you were constantly messing up. But perhaps that's the point, you can't be everything to everybody, you have to prioritise certain people in your life. The story seems pretty 'human' in that people react like you think they would in real life and games rarely do that.

I didn't end up completing a run but i do want to, so i'll come back to this once i have and adjust my score accordingly.

A superb game with an enthralling story and an exciting spin on the deck-building genre. I loved my time with it so much that I have been coming back to it over and over again, just to be immersed in the setting and talk to these characters once more.

The game really suffers from a lack of save states, though, and more than once was I forced to restart my run because of a tiny mistake compromising the entire playthrough. Also, I feel like the tutorial should be better implemented - I felt like it didn't do a very good job of explaning the core mechanics of the game, but maybe that was just me.

Those tiny frustrations aside, Signs of the Sojourner is a truly hidden gem of 2020, with a fantastic soundtrack to boot.

I was surprised by how the card game mechanic works really well as an analogy to how people have conversation with each other.

As for the game itself, I liked the atmosphere, somewhat melancholic but at the same time there is hope that makes people move on.
But maybe they should have made a playthrough a bit shorter as it's (imo) imperative to go through several playthroughs to properly see what the game has to offer. (I think even people who are not really trying to 100% the game should do at least 2-3 runs)

(low 7)

Very good card and adventure game about communication and building relationships with a lot of replay value that gives you a lot of routes to take, characters to meet, and ways to build your deck around abilities that fit the context of the game, all in an interesting though not hugely explored world.

You start the game taking over the caravan route of your recently deceased mother with the goal of finding things to stock in your store to keep your town afloat. You can follow the other truck drivers around from town to town or set out on your own in order to reach events that the caravan would have missed or to complete tasks for the people that you meet during your travels.

When you talk to a person a card game starts where you need to match the last played symbol of the current card while setting up a symbol that the person you are talking to can also match, each card having a single or multiple symbols on the left and right side. When a match isn't made or the track of cards is complete you will continue to a new conversation track until you succeed or fail the set number of times required to complete the conversation. If the same symbol is played four times in a row you reach an accord which prevents the next mismatch from counting. Cards can be found or can gain abilities that allow you more varied options, reflect can let you redraw your hand, accommodate is a card with no symbols that copies the last card played, observe lets you see your partner's hand, listen has your partner play two cards in a row while another allows you to play a second card, clarify lets you play the card at a different area of the track, backtrack will remove cards until it is able to make a match, and traveling will eventually add tired cards to your deck that don't match anything.

The area you start out in has people who often speak with two types of symbols being the empathy and observant symbol and the logical and diplomatic symbol. Traveling to new areas has you meeting people that use direct and forceful and creative and industrious, while a late game event mixes in some distressed and grieving cards to many character's decks. When you finish a conversation you have to take one of your partner's cards and discard one of the cards you used to have. As characters you encounter travel or move from town to town you may discover that they have picked up different styles of communication as well depending on where they have been.

Succeeding in conversations is usually what you want to do in order to gain items, further stores, and learn new routes but certain conversations will just play out differently if you fail (or fail on purpose) as you can push people to taking different paths or decide if you want to help certain people or not, one successful conversation only lead to me being distracted while the person I was talking with had their friends steal from me. The game should only last a couple hours but with all the different paths to take, events to see, and ways that your story and the stories of some others can end there is a lot of replay value.

It's a really great system, if a bit limited by never actually showing what you are saying and mismatches never actually mattering unless you fail the required number of times to continue on, that system can also make it a bit difficult to tell how you are going to answer questions or handle things that will effects character's lives and your ending. A way to speed things along a bit when you play multiple games would also have been nice.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1281411333997473794

The power fantasy that video games provide with NPCs enthusiastically telling the player character whatever they want to know is something I've always taken comfort in as a dude who has a horrible habit of fixating on awkward, awful conversations I've had throughout my entire existence. Even games, especially RPGs, where there are dialogue mechanics, typically put all the tension in picking the "right" option that those games themselves provide to the player. It's never really in the dynamics of a conversation.

Dialogue itself is also mostly seen as a skill with linear progression that ultimately leads to mastery, where you can max it out by investing enough skill points to the point that you can talk your way out of literally every possible situation regardless of context. Disco Elysium might be the only other game I've played where your character's experiences and how you've chosen to develop them can drastically affect how dialogue unfolds, but even that game doesn't quite capture the ebb and flow of an actual conversation.

Signs of the Sojourner is the first game I've played that realizes those dynamics in video game mechanics, and it does so without even having the player character's own voice written out in lines of text during these conversations. It's all abstracted in the card-matching system. It truly captures the essence of speaking with a close friend you've grown up with and having it go so smoothly, and then having the opposite experience trying to talk to a complete stranger from a distant land with a different culture. There's a shared vocabulary and understanding of each other's temperament in the former, and there's just not having the words nor the conversational style that suits the setting in the latter, and it's distilled in the deck of cards that changes thoughout the game.

Also, the music is chill and melancholic and evocative of frontier life with its understated but head-nodding percussions, sleepy synth keys, and crisp, twangy acoustic guitars, and each area has a distinct track that adds so much character to the world.

Wouldn't really call myself a deck-building game fan, but from what I've learned through osmosis about the genre, Signs of the Sojourner breaks the mold. I certainly haven't played anything like it.

I might come back to this, because I did enjoy what I played. Some interested (and kind of touching) dialogue, and a sweet story from what I can tell.

The card mechanics are very interesting, and it's fun to see how the different conversational "powers" (clarifying, chatter, etc.) fit into the gameplay and narrative. It does a cool job of reflecting actual conversation through an abstract way.

Where it lost me a little bit was when I realized that "failing" a conversation changes the story path, but there's no real consequence (that I know of, at least). This, combined with having to swap cards after ever encounter and a frustrating fatigue system, made it feel like the choices I was making weren't as tied to actual progression or strategy as I thought.

That could be wrong! It could really come together as the game progresses. But I didn't feel that from what I played. I might come back to it, so I won't score it now.

This game is an incredibly good idea, and I encourage everyone to try it on the merits of that idea alone: the entire game is you talking to people, however your conversations are abstracted as a card game. Cards have symbols that represent the tone of your speech, and you have to match the tone the other character is going for. If someone plays cards with a circle (meaning emphatic and observant), and you try to play a triangle (diplomatic, logical), the conversation doesn't develop in any useful way. And since you're a traveling salesman of sorts, getting on the good side of people is how you progress.

So that's awesome.

And I wouldn't even say the game is not awesome. It is. It's very charming, the soundtrack is incredibly soothing, and it does interesting things with its mechanics. For example, some cards have unique conversational properties such as allowing you to redraw your hand ("reconsider"), matching whatever symbols were in the card your conversation partner has just played ("accommodate"), or even to play the card retroactively in a previous point of the conversation ("clarify"). This is just the tip of the mechanical iceberg here, and I am not kidding when I say the game is remarkably industrious with how it unfolds.

However, some of the things it does, regardless of how mechanically creative, just rub me the wrong way.

For example: after every conversation, the game forces you to change one of the cards in your incredibly small 10-card deck for one that was used in the conversation you just had. At the start, these feel like upgrades to how much you can express yourself. And it makes sense: the more you talk to people, the better you get at talking to people — especially if they're the kind of people you just talked to.

However, as you go along, the size of your deck doesn't increase, but the number of different symbols you need to effectively juggle in order to being able to talk to people in new places increases a lot. At the start everyone just used the same 2 or 3 symbols, I could be sure to almost always have the right cards to ensure effective communication with all of them. But later on, there's twice as many symbols, but my deck still only has 10 cards, which means talking to everyone is harder — including those people at the start that used the first 2 symbols in the game. It doesn't make sense that the more I talk to people, the worse I got at talking to people, especially to the people I was already good at talking to!

This only happens because the game mandates that I substitute one of my cards for one used by the person I just had a failed conversation with.

Anyhoo. This relatively small thing was enough for me to drop the game. I'm not sure this means this "flaw" is that heavy (and I'm sure some people wouldn't even consider it a flaw) or that I'm just eager to drop games since I've been juggling so many at the same time, but the truth is it happened.

Creative, nice, and soothing as it is, Signs of the Sojourner failed at communicating with me.