Apple Arcade: Cross-platform edition
Sayonara Wild Hearts
I haven’t experienced a rhythm game that was this much of an experience since Rez. And the vibration accessory wouldn’t be out of place with it, either.
Sayonara Wild Hearts is incredibly stylish, reasonably trippy, and has a beautiful flow to it. It’s also blast-processing fast, as you can see from the video above. It is clear that any attempt by me to livestream this will end in absolute disaster. The fact that the action syncronises with the music; the positioning required to get a high enough score to pass to the next level gets very precise, very quickly.
It’s been a rough go for me. I rather like this game. It all comes together so well, But it requires all the skills I don’t have and precious few of the ones I do to get to the end.
World’s End Club
This is where you go if you want to see cutesy cartoon characters… get disintegrated by an energy beam, or get sent flying by the shockwave of a 2016-style giant meteor smashing into their home city in the distance. Or be imprisoned in an abandoned theme park deep beneath the sea where they are compelled to play a death game.
And that’s just the first 10 minutes. This is, after all, a crossover between Zero Escape’s Kotaro Uchikoshi and Danganrompa’s Kazutaka Kodaka. What should we have expected?
While there’s plenty of story to be had, the bulk of the action unfolds as a puzzle platformer. The platform controls are rudimentary at best, but they’re good enough for navigating and completing the Zelda-like puzzles (move objects, activate switches, etc.). Each character in the club will eventually get a special ability that comes into play during puzzle-solving and the occasional fight against some apocalyptic monster or another.
The game threatens to offer meaningful choices for branching paths as the 11 middle-schoolers trudge their way 1,200 kilometers back to Tokyo to see what’s become of the world, but it’s easy to overthink it. Sometimes what appears to clearly be a choice turns into a “but thou must.” In the end, it appears the only choices you need to fret about are made in cutscenes on the “world” map that determine your next destination. It’s difficult to discern the full impact of the choices, though, as Apple Arcade only has a preview version with just the first half of the game. The full shebang will be going down on Switch in a few weeks.
Cat Quest 2
About The Author
Drew
Features Editor | Drew started behind the 8(bit)-ball in the video game world. He first became interested in anime by chance exposure on the Sci-Fi channel. Drew's the creative force behind blog-wide features, works the movie and food beats, and pioneered Damage Control’s entry into video, podcasts and streaming.
