Even for the few tracks I liked less, I was still excited by how they were combined with everything happening on screen. Sometimes it sounds like music that could be played on the radio alongside today’s top hits, and other times it veers into the more niche synthwave genre, but I enjoyed all of it.

The soundtrack is full of catchy pop melodies with female vocals backed by chiptune rhythms. The music, animation, and art design all deserve special commendation. In a world where you can leap from the back of a galloping deer while shooting lasers at robot wolves, entering virtual reality to play an Atari-era inspired level where you slowly dodge bullets pulls down an otherwise well-paced experience. That last example is the one point where the mad sprint slows down unnecessarily.

“Even still, Sayonara is immediately entrancing from its opening moments and rarely slows as you pursue its masked villains in cars, through forests, on foot, and even through virtual reality. Bronze, silver, and gold tiers are earned for achieving varying high scores through greater precision, but outside of the reward of hearing Queen Latifah exclaim “Gold rank!” at the end of a level, I wasn’t compelled to chase those awards. I felt many things while playing Sayonara, but rarely fear of failure, which made the whole trip sometimes feel disappointingly passive. Even the occasional rhythm-game moments where you have to press a button with specific timing are incredibly forgiving and let me press the necessary input well after the window had seemingly closed.

No matter the scenario, movement is limited to the constraints of that level’s linear path, and while its simplicity let me focus on the wonderful art and sound, I rarely felt challenged in a meaningful way. The frequent setting changes always caught me off guard in the best way, and I had no idea what was coming next. Sometimes I was driving a high-speed motorcycle through a city, aiming for jumps and dodging dead ends, while other levels had me falling downward as though I was skydiving. The setting changes drastically level to level (and sometimes moment to moment), but that basic structure generally stays the same. You move your heroine left and right to grab hearts which boost your score, all while traveling at impossible speeds.

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