You're basically getting to play an active role in a well-made pop album, with your actions paced incredibly well to the music, which in turn matches up with the emotional beats of the story. Players move left and right, as well as other actions like jumping over projectiles, all in time with the beat, attempting to collect gems in the non-stop scrolling levels for points, and trying to avoid head-on collisions which will break the flow of your run. Taking between 60-90 minutes per playthrough, the game is comprised of approximately three-minute-long music rhythm action levels, from bubblegum aspirational romance ballads to more dramatic and slow percussion-based tracks. Sayonara Wild Hearts is a recently released video game, which was pitched as a playable, female-focused, pop album. That's a big part of what made playing through the superb Sayonara Wild Hearts feel so special. I'm a lesbian, and as much as I love the sound of some Gaga or Adele, it's rare for any of those pop artists to set my hopeless romantic side alight with their tracks. Much of that comes down to the fact that romance so often plays a core role in pop music lyricism, and so often those romantic lyrics are explicitly written to be from a straight perspective. As much as I love the sound of pop music, a lot of pop artists never really connected with me in a meaningful way when I was growing up.

Sayonara wild hearts