The Cleanest High
Saturation levels beyond what seems possible on a handheld screen. The music is precise and demanding. You’re moving your hands in patterns that feel instinctive until the moment you think about them, then you miss the next beat. The game doesn’t pause. It doesn’t wait for you. It just keeps going, color into color into color, each transition timed to the drums.
Sayonara Wild Hearts is a rhythm action game, mostly. You’re following beats through neon worlds, racing on skateboards and motorcycles, dancing in battles. The Fool guides you through encounters with the Dancing Devils, the Howling Moons, the Stereo Lovers—anthropomorphic concepts with no backstory and no explanation of why they matter. Each level is tied to an electronic song written for the game. The tracks are good. The colors are overwhelming. The pacing is perfect.
People who played it kept using the same vocabulary: transcendent, psychedelic, consciousness-altering. They weren’t being hyperbolic. The game isn’t subtle about what it’s doing. It’s designed to strip away everything except the immediate sensory moment. Your brain gets no room to think about work or money or what you’re doing with your life. The rhythm is too loud, the movement too fast, the colors too much. You either keep up or you don’t, and while you’re keeping up, you don’t think.
I think a lot of games claim to be about flow states or immersion. This one actually achieves it. It’s not trying to tell you something or make you feel something complicated. It’s just asking you to move with the music for an hour. The Switch exclusive nature meant something at the time—portability added to the intimacy of it, the small screen somehow making the intensity feel more personal. Now it feels like an artifact of a specific moment in gaming.
There’s something satisfying about a piece of media that’s entirely what it intends to be, with nothing wasted. No story that doesn’t serve the aesthetic. No padding. No attempt at being something else. Just color and rhythm and the absolute focus required to keep moving. You finish the game and you come back to the normal world with your attention frayed in that specific way. You forget about it until the next time you see it, and then you want to feel that again.