Simogo: The Sailor's Dream is less of a game and more of an interactive novel. It tells the story of a girl, a man, and a woman on an island. It reimagines the novella for the smartphone era

Simogo, The Sailor's Dream








The Sailor’s Dream is in typical Simogo style of interactive story telling. The game is already receiving rave reviews from people so let’s see how it is.
The Sailor’s Dream is less of a game and more of an interactive novel. It tells the story of a girl, a man, and a woman on an island. The game world is split into a handful of places in the ocean and you visit each place by swiping down on the screen.

Once inside, you can move around by swiping up, down, left or right as the game tells you to. You can swipe around and explore the place. The story is told through short pages scattered here and there in the game world.

The game is 2D and the exploration is done by swiping sideways. As you swipe you see images with some interactive elements but there is not much you can do. It’s like exploring a pop-up book. There is nothing to do here as such. There is no gameplay or puzzles of any kind like we saw in DEVICE 6. All you do is read and explore.

Call me a simpleton if you will but I thought that’s incredibly boring. I didn’t find the story all that interesting and the whole exploration thing got boring quickly. Even worse, there is not much to explore, and you can go through everything in about twenty minutes. The lack of anything to actually do in the game is also mildly annoying. Although at no point does the game claim to be some sort of a puzzle game or anything, the lack of literally anything to do other than scrolling and a bit of reading makes it nowhere as interesting as DEVICE 6, which had plenty to read, a much better story and actual gameplay elements.
Graphics and Sound
Even though it may be boring, I have to admit the game is pretty. The artwork is fantastic and the way it is all animated and smoothly flows when you scroll is beautiful. The game also includes some beautiful music, along with some very eerie background sounds and voices that you hear as you move around that add to the slight creepy factor of the game.
Verdict
I’ll be honest, The Sailor’s Dream has a very modern art kinda feel to it. The one where people pretend to understand and appreciate it when it actually makes no sense. The ‘game’ looks and sounds beautiful but other than that offers very little to actually do. It’s not even greatly interesting. You could say not every game has to be the same but when you’re calling it a game the least you could do is give people something to play with. - Prasad


I've spent much of the past week in a quaint little cottage by the sea, listening to the same seven songs over and over — and I've enjoyed every minute. The house is empty aside from seven mysterious turntables, each playing a different, beautiful song. It's also one of several locations you can explore in The Sailor's Dream, the serene new release from Swedish developer Simogo. It's hard to say exactly what The Sailor's Dream is; it may come from one of mobile gaming's most talented studios, but it's not really a game in any traditional sense. But whatever you want to call it, it's an undeniably wonderful experience that feels perfectly at home on your iPad.
Simogo calls The Sailor's Dream "a peaceful narrative experience," but it might be better described as a mixed media concept album. You're presented with a series of different locations, each floating on a calm, quiet sea, and you can drop anchor and explore any of them, ranging from a seemingly normal lighthouse to mystical ruins that look ripped from a fantasy novel. You can enter these buildings in any order, and once inside you're free to explore at your own pace. Some rooms contain strange musical toys to play around with, while others are home to important objects that you can read about through a series of short stories.
When I first started playing, The Sailor's Dream felt like a series of unconnected places, stories, and objects, all tied together with a nautical theme. But as I explored and read further, important moments and characters kept recurring — a young girl who dreams of being a sailor, a terrible fire at a peaceful cottage — and slowly things started to make sense. It's almost as if someone took a story, ripped it apart, and scattered the pages in the water. It was my job to put them back together and make sense.


It's almost as if someone took a story, ripped it apart, and scattered the pages in the water

The Sailor's Dream doesn't feature any traditional game-like challenges; there are no puzzles to block your progress, or mini-games to challenge your reflexes. It's an experience that's entirely about the narrative, but one uniquely built for smartphones and tablets. The peaceful visuals, the wonderful music, the sharp writing, and the simple interactive toys all go towards creating an atmosphere and telling a story. I found myself re-reading sections to glean new insights, and sometimes I'd just sit and listen to the music I'd unlocked.
It's an experience wholly unlike anything else on iOS (or any platform, really), and it's one that Simogo has been slowly building towards. While the studio started out making charming mobile games like Bumpy Road and Beat Sneak Bandit, last year the two-person team branched out with the eerie game Year Walk, a creepy adventure based on Swedish folklore that even included a separate compendium app where you could read up on strange myths and mysteries. The success of Year Walk — the game sold more than 200,000 copies and was later released on Steam — was followed by Device 6, an even bigger departure that was essentially an interactive mystery novel.
In that context, a quaint little app that combines short stories, music, and musical toys doesn't seem like too much of a stretch. "We had a loose idea of having three games that had the same DNA, or spirit if you will, so in that way it was kind of intentional," says Simogo's Simon Flesser. The basic idea for The Sailor's Dream started last year, when Flesser found himself becoming increasingly interested in sea shanties, but the concept evolved quite a bit since then. At one point the game even had you taking the wheel of a ship and exploring the seas, but it slowly turned into something less game-like. Working with musician Jonathan Eng and writer Jonas Tarestad, both of whom collaborated on previous Simogo games, the studio refined the concept into what is now The Sailor's Dream.
Many game studios gain a following because their work is recognizably unique. I play Level-5 games like Professor Layton because they're so whimsical, and will always check out a new Rockstar release because of the amazing world-building. Simogo has a following, and a few Apple Design awards to go with it, but it's hard to think of a unifying theme for the company's work. The studio has jumped from charming mobile games to creepy mysteries to musical books, all with very different themes and styles. So what makes a Simogo game a Simogo game? Even the creators can't really say. "I think that feeling of something being recognizable because it’s made by certain people, is kind of an intangible magic," says Flesser. And the next project to feature the Simogo game will likely be just as different. It all depends on the inspiration.
"When you're drawn to an idea, you just know it," says Flesser. "You can almost physically feel the excitement in the chest, and that's always a good sign." - Andrew Webster 

There’s a well-embraced fallacy that publishing is a dying enterprise. The truth is that publishing is more alive than ever, but it has spread out to a greater variety of outlets using new media. There are still plenty of books, magazines, newspapers, and journals, but now creative people are coming up with novel and exciting ways to share the stories they want to tell. The Internet changed the pace of news reporting, and print-on-demand has transformed fan-fiction zinesters into boutique book publishers. Now, with its latest app, The Sailor’s Dream, Simogo looks to reimagine the shape and structure of the novella for the smartphone generation.
The Sailor’s Dream tells the tale of a girl, a woman, and a man brought together by chance and torn apart by time. Players explore islands, cottages, and ruins, gathering remnants of the life these people shared and slowly assembling the larger picture of their relationships and motivations. The operative word is “slowly,” as The Sailor’s Dream practically demands players take their time and investigate at their leisure. New information unfurls itself over hours, days even, and the game isn’t shy about encouraging players to linger.

This new work abandons the intermittent puzzles of Device 6, Simogo’s previous game. The developer is confident that delving into this dream world and collecting scraps of its backstory will be compelling enough without the need for conventional “game mechanics.” Sliding between rooms, the dreamer comes across star charts, lanterns, runes, and other ephemeral artifacts of the people that used to live here. Some objects are little more than musical doodads to poke and prod, while others hold memories of the past, short scenes of prose that often raise more questions than they answer.
Remnants of the past haunt The Sailor’s Dream’s uninhabited locations and bring them to life. Sailors’ voices echo through the darkness as players search the memories of a wrecked ship. Stairs creak, and raindrops tap gently against the windows. The pop-up book locations explored here may not be technically spectacular, but they are anything but flat. With every new vignette, audio log, and ballad, the personalities of the characters grow clearer. Their voices are intimate and sincere. Their actions may be vague and left to interpretation, but our line to their hearts and minds is open and direct. Whether Dream draws you in may depend on your fondness for that degree of emotional honesty.

It’s all familiar territory: unlikely companionship, the desire to make time stand still, romantic expressions of youthful rebellion. If this sounds like any middle-grade coming-of-age tragedy, there’s a reason for that. The Sailor’s Dream recalls all of those tropes with uncanny precision, and they feel all the more immediate and personal with the added ambience of rich, Morphean art and sound. Everything resembles reality, but it’s a selective, idealized reality—much the way both dreams and the young readers of middle-grade novels present their own worlds.
As with Simogo’s other recent efforts Year Walk and Device 6, the art is luscious, and the writing is sharp. The breakout star of The Sailor’s Dream, though, is the original folk songs performed with devastating finesse by Jonathan Eng and Stephanie Hladowski. Eng’s work was a highlight of those previous games, too, but here, his acoustic ballads do more, actively tying together disparate plot threads with their lyrics and telling a whole third of the story on their own. Hladowski’s confident voice is warm and comforting, and when it begins to waver, my heart shatters along with her character’s.

The Sailor’s Dream is a novella, a folk EP, and an art installation wrapped into one app. Were they to stand on their own, those three components would still be worthy of attention, but as a single collected piece, Dream is a self-assured work of emotional deference. It’s an inspired example of what storytelling can be in the 21st century and the way modern technology can shine new light on well-worn conventions. - Derrick Sanskrit