Simogo Legacy Collection Review – Remember when mobile games were this great? | games

FFifteen years ago in Malmö, Sweden, animator Simon Fleisser and programmer Magnus “Gordon” Gardeback left their jobs at now-defunct game studio Southend Interactive to strike out on their own. Tired of the annoying nature of console development, the pair decided to lay claim to Apple’s App Store, which in 2010 was seen as one of the most exciting frontiers in gaming. By merging their names together to form a portmanteau combination, Flesser and Gardebäck became Simogo, and an impressive and ever-improving game studio was born.

The Simogo Legacy Collection represents the indie Swedish studio’s first seven games, released within its first five years. Originally released for the iPhone and iPad from 2010 to 2015, Apple’s ever-changing standards meant that Simogo, like all iOS developers, had to either regularly update their games to meet the latest specifications, or see their games become unplayable. The only solutions are to either release updates constantly, or find a way to bring the mobile gaming experience to other platforms.

Thank God Simogo decided on the latter. Like all of the studio’s work, this selection of games is cleverly designed, with its contents arranged on a home screen designed to look like a smartphone – except filled with great mini-games and not dreadful social media apps. Care has been taken to make sure you can play games no matter your setup – on a monitor with a controller, or on a PC with a mouse and keyboard, in portrait or landscape orientations. (I would have preferred to play on Switch, with the Joy-Cons removed to replicate the original mobile experience.)

And oh, these games are still great, all these years later. Things start off modestly with Kosmo Spin – a cute little arcade game where your only goal is to get a high score. But Simogo’s ambition immediately begins to take shape with its next game, Bumpy Road, another arcade-style game about an elderly couple on a road trip, but full of surprising whimsy and sadness, a simple love story for those looking for it. Then the studio is off to the races, in a dizzying line of games that extends to the present day – the devilish joy of Beat Sneak Bandit giving way to the bleak, eerie folklore of Year Walk and the masterful flair of the 6.

Simogo’s interests are wide-ranging and multidisciplinary. Flesser and Gardebäck have made a tradition of writing about the influences that influence each of their games, chronicling the origins of each project on their website. As a result, playing Simogo feels like receiving a letter from some of your eccentric friends, who, after spending a lot of thought on Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, the work of graphic designer Sam Suliman, and Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, can’t help but write you a prose riddle about all of these things using the typographical experience of House of Leaves.

Times have changed, and Simogo has expanded beyond Flesser and Gardebäck as their ambition has grown and brought them back into the world of console gaming – like the playable pop album Sayonara Wild Hearts, and their dark mystery work Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. The short but exciting days of the App Store’s glory are over; The world that allowed Simogo to flourish is now extinct. How fortunate it was that Simogo had the opportunity they did; That they’re still with us, able to put together this inspiring little collection that we can play forever. These games, in all their varied fun, are full of longing: for a lover, for meaning, for the chance to write your own ending. Play with it and dream of a world where things worked differently.