Heartbreak, subsistence, and resurgence are typical emotive beats to plot with for many a narrative, and Sayonara Wild Hearts uses an interactive visual album in the style of endless runners and vertical scrollers to develop a queer protagonist's turn from heartbreak to resurgence into the world she once knew. Brevity befits the experience (replayability enhances it, albeit the riddles and Arcade modes do not interest me) as wonderful pop tracks from Simogo mainstays Daniel Olsén and Jonathan Eng back dreamlike, neon sequences of travel through cities and forests and seas in search of what is lost. This reminds me now of Pop. Love. Panic! (a.k.a. We Are OFK) in a significant improvement of flow and use of these music video-esque levels, but the necessary attachment to the story requires both a love of the music and the ability to attach meaning to the chaotic events happening onscreen as the player dodges obstacles, projectiles, and checkpoint-restarting QTEs. If all that sounds good, this is another example of why Simogo (and Annapurna Interactive) are among the best in the business.

Wong Kar Wai meets Quentin Tarantino meets Jean-Pierre Melville and whoever else you wish to add make up a cinematic reverence unto the form of Thirty Flights of Loving, yet this influence never entraps the experience with the lustful deceptions of a Quantic Dreams game nor similar works which cannot persuasively define themselves as "cinematic," whatever the hell that really means for videogames. Smash cuts, montage sequences, and abstract storytelling form this unique amalgam; environmental details which developers like those at Fullbright recognize as innovations in narrative forms in the medium are a consistent treat of humor and insight to this familiar organized crime thriller. Chung's rectangular art style also finds an angle of understanding where "realism" would betray the colorful spirit within the work, an absolute masterpiece.

Despite some iffy gameplay prior to the climax, Gravity Bone is a captivating venture into filmic possibilities for ludic experiences, where the cut can be a means of editing perspectives yet unseen (and now rarely seen) in the medium. The various film references here for the two contracts are cute while the game itself propels past pastiche toward a significant short fiction whose abstraction details lives and stories worth subjective introspection. Brendon Chung's advancements from this in Thirty Flights of Loving and Quadrilateral Cowboy do not undermine the still existing value of Gravity Bone.