After somehow both teasing it a month ago and shadow-dropping it Monday alongside Annapurna Interactive’s 2025 showcase, Sayonara Wild Hearts is now available on PlayStation 5. Granted, you’ve been able to play the PlayStation 4 version on PS5 forever, but now you can play in 4k with 120 fps visuals and haptic feedback in the DualSense. All of which is to say: This is the best version of one of the best music games ever released.
To recap: Back in 2019, Sayonara Wild Hearts was Simogo’s attempt at pulling a 180 — the instinct and sensory overload counterpoint to notebook-required puzzle games like Year Walk and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. The pop album masquerading as a game is basically a series of simple commands requiring quick reflexes, played out as over-the-top music videos set to a soundtrack the Apple Music listing describes as “part dreamy synth-pop, part chase score, part atmospheric chill-out”. The company’s website has a great look back at the game’s development.
Apart from the technical improvements, the big new feature on PS5 is the Remix Arcade mode, which takes a bit of effort to unlock. While the game’s PS5 version is available as a free upgrade for anyone who owns the PS4 version, your progress doesn’t carry over. So if, like me, you’ve played the PS4 version many times over, you’ll still need to play through the game’s story — and then the Album Arcade mode — to unlock Remix Arcade.
That’ll take you a few hours, then once you get to Remix Arcade the experience gets flipped. Like Album Arcade, it’s a play on the idea of putting the game’s playlist of stages on shuffle, and playing them in a random order — but here instead of playing full levels, you’re playing short segments of those levels, each hovering at around 10 seconds. The pace feels similar to that of a WarioWare game.
The segments don’t start out especially challenging — some you can get through without touching your controller — but if you get hit once, it’s game over. After you clear 10 of these micro stages, the game speeds up the next 10, a process that seems to repeat every 10 stages (though I haven’t gotten far enough yet to know how that plays out as you progress further). The trailer promises the mode gets “progressively faster” and “increasingly devilish.”
I’ll have to play more to see how the mode progresses, but it’s already a great way to bounce between key moments in the game. And with the rest of the game already looking and playing better than ever, it’s easy to call it and say if you never played it the first time around, there’s no better time than now.
