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Video Game or Bedtime Story? 'The Sailor's Dream' Is Weird and Rad

It's a game more about reading prose than point and shoot.
Image: YouTube

​I genuinely wonder if video games have made me an impatient person. Digital cultures often bait the jittery, the casual backlogs of tabs, the over reliance on real-time Twitter feeds, or the unforgiving expectations that every email will be responded to within the hour. But I never hate myself more than when I get distracted from a video game by either another video game or, worse yet, something on TV I encountered on my way to the video game.

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The Sailor's Dream, Simogo's highly anticipated entry for 2014, is the antithesis of rushing, even if it's incredibly easy to do with all the modern distractions at your fingertips. It's not a game for everyone, or really a fantastic one, or even Simogo's best, but it is a great lesson. Better yet, instead of trouncing through demons with a submachine gun, this game slows you down, and actually makes you read rather than kill.

The studio used to deliver cute action-y-er gems, like Bumpy Road and Beat Sneak Bandit, but ever since 2013's suspense story Year Walk, the company has dedicated itself to uncanny, often deconstructing narrative experiments.

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Like their last and most lauded game, Device 6, The Sailor's Dream is played nearly exclusively through storytelling and prose reading. And while the two titles may also share, perhaps, philosophical genes, that is also where their similarities end. Device was a wry, sci-fi mystery adventure, while Sailor's Dream, very true to its title, feels like you're constantly floating towards the surface of consciousness, but never arriving.

Starting in the middle of the ocean, the player is free to intrude on a selection of strange isles. Swiping along you can hear a whistling ditty, and the tides of calm water and flotsam. A lighthouse, a cottage, a shipwreck, recent ruins and a 'celestial sanctuary.' Other places to visit will present themselves when they feel the time is right. To enter, all you need to do is swipe upward.

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The initial screen is usually calm, looking downward on the almost entirely unlit vantage. From here you can keep moving, usually to a fork in the path, allowed to sweep towards more ominous sounding spaces. It's easy to get lost since your journey is only marked by sounds of different creaking floors and spotlights of the area around you. It's like being clueless in a dark wood, and instead of a path of breadcrumbs you only leave behind torn View-Master frames. Wispy sounds and music intensifies the deeper you go.

Getting out is a lot easier than keeping tabs. Games train you to speedrun to the finish line, and the screens will rush by as fast as your thumb can paw them. The game could ostensibly be annihilated in mere minutes by bulleting through each environment. But you'd know you're missing the point. At least a fake-out conclusion will remind you of this if somehow you didn't clue in. The end of every level has the instructions to "Let Go." It's hard not to derive both instructions and abstract meaning from the words.

Tucked in to many of the transitions, the staircases and hallways between rooms, is where most of The Sailor's Dream takes place. Objects hidden in plain sight can have the magnifying glass laid on them, unlocking snippets of text, scenes from an incomplete story. It is difficult, likely intentionally and dreamlike, to link each of these together, though they seem to be in a lineage if not a line. Most involve a lust for the sea, many involve mysterious women or captive hopefuls, some seem to want to describe the space you are standing in but for whatever reason cannot.

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The Sailor's Dream is basically a bedtime story in video game form. It is more ideal to play as a nightcap under the sheets than something to kill time on commutes. The Sailor's Dream doesn't want to kill your time, it rather sucks it up.

Much of its content will be missed by the impatient, not only the actual hidden bits of narrative, but small toys and noise makers that can be discovered by hanging around levels. Some of the voyage literally cannot be seen in the same trip: dreamy shanties found in a bottle can only be seen one at a time, depending on what day of the week it is.

The final encounter will be the one to let you know if you're ready to wake up from this dream. It can be frustrating that a conclusion is locked behind a door whose keys are obtuse, abstract and contextual, but remembering how incredibly satisfying the hidden ending to Year Walk, an otherwise okay game, was, is the carrot hanging from my masthead.

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But ramming my head against the last gate also feels like a punishment in itself, clenching my fist that I don't get to end the dream and move on is probably missing the point of why you're playing such a sensory experience in the first place.

You're supposed to relax, take it in. I live in a landlocked city, I should appreciate floating in the ocean water without having to travel miles or get my nostrils full of salt smell. And if my own dreams are any experience, just setting goals is a good way to feel miserable when you inevitably and prematurely awaken.