Wild Hearts Sometimes Die
Sometimes there’s no happy ending, Sleeper.
This article contains spoilers about Sayonara Wild Hearts and Citizen Sleeper. It also discusses topics such as depression and suicidal feelings.
Not long ago, in a town much like yours,
there was a young woman who was very happy,
until one day her heart broke so violently
that her sorrow echoed through space and time.
This is not the type of piece I normally write.
I normally make critical analysis, which is a fancy and pretentious way of saying I try to explain that “gun shoot good” with nicer words to justify why I like (or dislike) videogames I play. I’m… ok at it, I suppose, but my analysis is almost always limited to gameplay. Mechanics, level design, pacing, bla bla bla — these are the things I usually take a deeper look into in order to make a semi-convincing argument about the game. Again, I’m not awful at it, but it’s nothing particularly interesting to most people looking to make something more out of critical analysis as a field (shoutout to my colleagues at Frequenza Critica, who regularly dish out high quality and thought-provoking articles about videogames and the world surrounding them), so I mostly end up writing about games that I liked a lot and want to praise and nothing more.
The reason is quite simple: I’m not that kind of person. I don’t really have anything particularly interesting to say for the most part. I don’t necessarily consider myself an idiot (though I definitely used to), but I’m also far from being smart enough to put together a fully coherent analysis on, say, the political themes of Bioshock Infinite. I just play videogames, man.
But while I might not be the brighest, I am very emotional, and emotional pieces are hard to write. You have to open your heart to the reader, and it’s really difficult to do so as it’s easy to write something that just ends up being embarassing and, as the kids say, “cringe”. Combined with what was said above, this is an article I’ve avoided writing for more than a year now, as it is very personal and probably not very interesting. Unfortunately, as most of the people that will read this article already know, my rapidly deteriorating mental situation is forcing my hand and it is something that has been on my chest for quite a while, so without further ado, I present to you the first of the two stories of tonight. The story of a wild heart that learned to try again.
Like, I assume, most people that got into the game, I got interested in Sayonara Wild Hearts by listening to music that got randomly suggested by Youtube. In case you know nothing about it, fear not as it’s not particularly complicated. SWH is a stylish rythm game where you ride motorbikes to the beat of pop, vaguely synthwave tunes while beating the crap out of eccentric looking people.
That’s what the screenshots on the Steam page say, anyway, because the story is a bit more complicated than that. Our unnamed main character is a young woman who is presented as someone who went through a devastating heartbreak. Following this she’s transported into a fantastic, wild world where she faces against her personified heartbreaks and, well, beats the crap out of them — that part is accurate.
As a rythm game, I have very mixed feelings about SWH. It’s stylish, that’s for sure. It’s also borderline incomprehensible at times. Cool camera angles come at the price of visual clarity, resulting in levels ending up in irritating game overs more often than not, and even outside of that the hearts you need to collect to build score are hard to see and most levels will require multiple tries to get decent scores. It’s honestly not particularly fun, but I’m no rythm game aficionado, so I’ll leave the final word to people with more experience in the genre. That is, of course, not the reason I wanted to talk about this game.
That reason is the first level that presents a vocal track, Begin Again. As our heroine faces her first heartbreak in a race through a city that is cracking open at its core, the first (second, counting the menu) lyrics of the game accompany the ride, in a bittersweet song describing the end of a love story and trying to start over.
I can still recall
Trudging through the cold December snow
We didn’t knowThat it was the end
That the saddest story ever told
Would unfold…
As the level reaches its climax and you jump through the firey, devastated remains of the city’s streets in one last dramatic chase, the vocals finally find their way as the chorus slightly changes, finding the determination to move on:
’Cause it’s time to forget
All the pain and regret
It’s the last time…
It’s the last time tonight
As you hold me so close
In your arms I just know
It’s the last time…
And I’m strangely alright.
Those last words had to wait minutes before being heard from my headphones, as halfway through this final part I had to pause the game and put down the controller, sobbing uncontrollably and crying my eyes out for minutes and minutes.
At the time, I didn’t understand why that part got me so hard. As mentioned, I am a very emotional person, and I’m no stranger to crying while playing videogames. Straight up being unable to play due to it, however, was new, let alone for something I couldn’t figure out the reason of. I closed the game and came back to it the next day, curious to see what else was gonna happen.
Now, the rest of the (rather short, clocking in at around one hour) experience is very much open to interpretation as our heroine faces different heartbreaks. A better knowledge of tarot cards would probably make it easier to fully understand the plot, as each boss is tied to one. Music, on the other hand, is easier to understand, especially when reaching “The World We Knew”, a song that hits very close to home as the singer refuses to move forward with her life and hangs on to memories of what once was.
They say begin again
They say begin again
But I’ll take any fragments I can find…
(Fragments I can find…)They say begin again
They say begin again
But I’ll treasure any fragments left behind.
That is, at least, until we reach the climax of the game and we face the final boss, The Fool. Even with my limited knowledge of tarot cards, I know that the Fool usually represents the main character themselves, something the game makes no mystery of as the boss presents herself as an alter ego of our heroine. But here’s the twist: instead of kicking her butt as we’ve done with the previous boss fights, our heroine reaches in and gives her alter ego a kiss on the cheek. And, finally, Sayonara Wild Hearts makes sense to me.
There are many interpretations to the story of SWH — the most popular one, to my knowledge, being that it’s about a trans girl going through the difficult process of transitioning and coming to terms with herself. Regardless of whether that’s correct or not (and I believe it is), there’s a broader thematic of learning to love yourself again that a lot of people can relate to, as the final song, Wild Hearts Never Die, erupts in a chorus that screams the hymn of everyone whose soul has been wounded and got back up.
This is not how it ends, this is not goodbye
’Cause wild hearts never die
Wild hearts never die!
We’re just changing our shape like butterflies
’Cause wild hearts never die
Wild hearts never die!
And this is where the game finally connects back to me. The point where that first session that ended up in tears makes sense to the more logical part of my brain. I am, in fact, one of those “wild hearts”, as most of the people around me know. If you don’t know the details, here’s a quick rundown: I‘ve been struggling with depression for the last decade or so, ever since my mother died in a rather traumatic way. I’ve always had a poor image of myself: stupid, ugly, useless, unworthy of love. This got worse with my mother’s death, who was my primary source of love. As time went forward I tried to fill the hole in many ways. I lost weight because everyone told me to, and everyone was happy except me. I went to multiple therapists, all of them giving me advice that made me feel more and more misunderstood. I went travelling with friends only for me to stop halfway and thinking “What the hell am I doing here?”. I got recommended for three different jobs and none of them hired me. I tried becoming a competitive player in fighting games, my biggest passion, with results most people would consider impressive but always fell short of my insanely high desires.
The simple truth is, I hated myself. I hated myself for not being more. For not being special, for being a nuisance to everyone around me, for being me. And that’s why Sayonara Wild Hearts’ story hit so deeply, as it reminded me that it’s ok to love yourself for being you.
But I wasn’t ready to accept that message yet.
Despite a part of me clearly wanting to believe in the game’s message of self love, so many years of failed attempts at being “better” left me with bitter feelings towards myself. I just didn’t have any of that love left in me. Only regret, hatred and bitterness. And those feelings seeped out, turning me into what I can only define as a toxic piece of shit. I insulted people that didn’t deserve it just for being better than me at fighting games, as I tied my ego to this videogame genre that I poured all my passion in without getting the results I wanted. Because if I’m useless at the one thing I put my everything in, what’s the point of me existing?
Eventually depressive thoughts turned into suicidal ones. Every day I’d wake up and immediately regret it, cross the road hoping to randomly get hit by a truck because I didn’t have the guts to do it myself. And as I lost hope for myself I decided that people around me didn’t need to be subject to my bullshit. I burned bridges, cut more and more ties as I couldn’t keep my bruised ego in check and ended up hurting other people — even when they told me it was ok. And soon I ended up alone, but “That’s ok”, I said to myself, “Sooner or later I won’t be able to take it anymore and just take the plunge”. Suffice to say, since I’m writing this, I didn’t. I just lived in ever growing pain, without a path or a meaning to drive me forward.
And this is where the second story of tonight comes in. The story of a wild heart that remembered what it feels like to live.
Citizen Sleeper was recommended to me by the Frequenza Critica boys as one of the best games of 2022, and I decided to play it because it was on Game Pass and I had time to spare. I ended up finishing it in a single session, watching the credits roll as the sun started to rise.
As it starts, Citizen Sleeper is best described as a “thriller time-management game”. You play the role of a Sleeper, a human mind stuck inside a robotic body and forced to be controlled by a corporation. Our Sleeper decides to escape, ending up on a space station called the Eye. Turns out, slave-breeding corporations aren’t happy with fugitives, and there’s multiple things our hero will have to deal with as they fight for survival, between having to fix the built-in decay of their body and the bounty hunters coming to get them — look, you’ve seen Blade Runner, you know how the story goes.
Gameplay-wise the game is divided in days, with a number of dice assigned at the start of each one. Said dice can be used to perform various actions, limiting the daily actions to the number of dice available (the quality of which determines the outcome of said action — the higher the dice, the better the result). This is a problem, as we have multiple problems to solve: we have to get rid of the tracker the corporation is using to track us, we need to find a way to fix our body before it decays into destruction, and the people who are willing to help us also need help of their own. The result is an exciting thriller where the clock is ticking down and every decision matters.
Or, at least, that’s what it looks like.
You see, Citizen Sleeper is a pretty clever game. The whole thriller-Blade Runner wannabe angle? It’s a trick. A façade. Halfway through the game, all the main plot points get resolved. You get rid of the tracker and the bounty hunters, you solve the main plotlines, you get a nice, comfy house and enough materials to sustain yourself for the rest of your foreseeable life. So what’s left?
Well, to live your life, obviously.
Citizen Sleeper is not a game about surviving, but rather about learning how to live again. You get to know the people on the Eye, witnessing stories of all kind, from amusing guests during an evening shift at the bar to the tragic conclusion of the hunt of a mercenary that was probably hoping for a different ending to her story. The Eye becomes your home, and you get to meet all kinds of people that make the world feel alive and beautiful.
Eventually, the game offers multiple endings, most of which involve leaving the Eye. The last ending I faced was leaving with Lem and Mina, a single father and his young daughter, working hard at the shipyard to get the chance to leave the Eye with the colony ship they’re helping to build. After working hard to get everyone a chance to get aboard the ship we’re finally about to board and leave the Eye behind. But it just doesn’t feel right. I stare at the choice for minutes until, in the end, I decide to turn around and go back, much to the surprise of Lem. After watching the ship depart, another character asks me why I decided to turn back. “This is my home”, I reply. Something I’d already decided during another ending.
During one of the later parts of the game you get to work on the botanics garden, where you find an AI that has evolved past its original purpose, now protecting the Greenway and sustaining it. When interfacing with it, it offers us a choice: sever the connection to our body and join them in the Data Cloud, along with all the other entities that inhabit the digital part of the Greenway. A world free of the pain of being human, but also without its beauty. And that’s why I refused.
You don’t look back at Gardener. You don’t dare risk it. Instead you follow the thread, delicately, carefully, like a diver following their lifeline back to the surface.
The river whirls around you, but it doesn’t pull, it isn’t jealous. Neither does it understand. It is, after all, just a river. It isn’t a person, a flesh and blood person, with wants, with desires, with the capacity for love and hate.
It doesn’t understand you, and you don’t understand it.
So you don’t focus on it, you don’t think about it, on what feels like such a long journey back through the dark. You set your mind on eyes instead. On hands. Things you can focus on, hold onto.
And then, after an age of crossing, you are there, settling back into the chair, into a body in a chair, and the overwhelming sensations that come with being a living thing with a rich and detailed sensorium.
For a moment you feel like you have made a terrible mistake. Who would choose this weight? This anxiety? This deep well at the center of existence.
But then you feel it. Riko’s hand, gripped hard around yours, trembling a little, sweating a little. Riko’s hand with its brittle bones and crumpled skin. Riko’s hand.
And in that moment you understand why you made this choice. And then you squeeze Riko’s hand, and you wake up.
Citizen Sleeper is the game that put my suicidal thoughts to rest. Because yes, life sucks, but it’s also beautiful. And what makes it beautiful is that it’s not just us, the ego. The connections we make are what creates our own little world. It might be small, irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but it’s ours, beautiful in all its imperfections, and worth keeping intact because just like we love it, it also loves us back.
That was my issue for most of the last decade. Through the hatred I felt for myself, I kept isolating more and more because I just didn’t feel worthy. I felt like a nuisance at best, and a terrible person that made everyone’s life miserable at worst. I burnt bridges, I got angry, people got sick of me and cut me off, I got angrier, anger turned to sadness, sadness turned to wanting to die. But the people close to me kept trying to tell me that this was all in my head — this paranoia that was ruining my life was defined by specific events that my mind hyperfocused on, ignoring the big picture. And so, in a talk with the person I once would’ve called my best friend, I bursted out crying for the first time since I played SWH, and decided for the first time in the last five years or so that I actually wanted to get better. I was tired of being depressed. I was tired of being sick. I wanted to feel loved and appreciated. I wanted to finally embrace my little world, instead of fearing it’d be destroyed the moment I did.
And, for a moment, I truly felt a change. I can’t understate how big that felt — I felt a change for the first time in a decade. More than any therapist had accomplished, more than any “just go to the gym” had done for me. I rebuilt the burned bridges, people told me I had a different aura, and I was smiling. Genuinely smiling. Genuinely laughing. For a brief, wonderful moment, I actually felt better. And the results are still there: I don’t hate myself anymore, my approach to fighting games is a lot healthier and, in some ways, I can still feel my general approach to life being better than before.
But with challenging my paranoia, things I took for granted turned into paralyizing fears. What if I’m too much? What if they secretely can’t stand me anymore? Questions like these sent me into full blown panic attacks where I’d struggle to breathe. One of my two best friends (we’ll call him Jack) insisted that I needed therapy, and I insisted that I didn’t need therapy, I needed my friends to have my back because this is the moment I needed it the most. Was I right? I think so, but it’s not my right to decide what other people do, of course. And eventually, my little world crumbled. Jack blocked me, while the other friend from before (we’ll call her Tina) reached the point where she couldn’t bear to take my emotional weight and now our friendship is a sad, hollow shade of what it once was. All my fears turned to reality, and now I’m more alone than I’ve ever been.
When I started writing this article, it was supposed to be motivating. For over a year now, I tried to make “Wild hearts never die” my motto. I wanted to believe in my own self-worth, and in everything people told me I was. But said people turned their back on me when the moment to prove it came, and now I feel empty and hollow. The smartest person I know told me, at the start of all this, “Once you let your emotions out you can’t bottle them back in”. She was right, of course, but I believed it was either this or nothing. I think I was right, but this ended up backfiring, and now I’m here. Writing this sad, self-apologetic article that was once supposed to be motivating, for myself and for other broken wild hearts trying to heal. But at this point I just don’t believe there’s a place for me in this world.
I’m not special. People keep telling me that. My therapist (yes, I started another therapy, and no, it’s not working, despite the amount of pills I take every day) told me “A lot of people feel like this”. I spent most of the last ten years trying to prove myself I’m special in some way, and I really though that “feeling special in my own little world” was the solution I’d been ignoring all this time. And maybe it was, but that little world rejected me and now I’m back at square one. Earlier this year I played Ghost of Tsushima, and while I enjoyed the game (more than I expected, honestly) it was also the first time I actually played a game for escapism. Playing for hours, doing every sidequest and travelling around, because it’s easier being Jin Sakai than me. And even just typing that makes me feel sad.
There’s no point to this article. It’s a rant. It was supposed to be something more. Something with meaning. But just like everything else in my life it ended up being a disappointment — or rather, the fitting result of a decade of disappointments. I don’t want to live. Not because I want to die, but because there’s nothing left in my life that makes me want to stay alive. This April I was on the balcony, crying my eyes out and about to finally take the plunge, and no one was there. Jack wasn’t there. Tina wasn’t there. The only reason I didn’t take the plunge was desperately calling another friend (the only one who never left me behind). I regret not jumping to this day. I don’t have a solution, and I’m too much of a coward to end my life, so I just… keep going. Hoping one day my wild heart will find someone to heal it. Until then I’ll keep going to bed early, unable to think straight, Aki’s words still echoing in my mind as I’m unable to let go and hang on to those few, beautiful memories of the very few moments of genuine happiness I felt at the beginning of this year, probably the last I’ll feel for a long time.
“Hold onto your memories, but not too tightly.
Sadness will not sustain you.”
