Fifteen years ago in Malmö, Sweden, animator Simon Flesser and programmer Magnus “Gordon” Gardebäck left their jobs at the now-defunct games studio Southend Interactive to strike out on their own. Tired of the fussy nature of console development, the pair would stake their claim on Apple’s App Store, which in 2010 was regarded as one of the most exciting frontiers in games. Mashing their names together to form a portmanteau, Flesser and Gardebäck became Simogo, and a consistently wonderful and forward-thinking games studios was born.
Simogo Legacy Collection represents the Swedish indie studio’s first seven games, released across its first five years. Originally released for iPhone and iPad from 2010 to 2015, Apple’s constantly changing standards meant that Simogo, like all iOS developers, had to either regularly update their games to comply with the latest specifications, or see their games rendered unplayable. The only solutions are either to perpetually issue updates, or find a way to bring the mobile game experience to other platforms.
Thank goodness Simogo decided on the latter. Like all of the studio’s work, this anthology of games is smartly designed, its contents arranged on a homescreen made to look like a smartphone’s – except, you know, full of wonderful little games and not horrid social media apps. Care has been taken to make sure you can play the games no matter your setup – on a screen with a controller, at a PC with mouse and keyboard, in portrait or landscape orientations. (My preference was to play on a Switch, with the Joy-Cons removed to replicate the original mobile phone experience.)
And oh, these games remain remarkable, all these years later. Things begin humbly with Kosmo Spin – a cute little arcade diversion, your only goal a high score. But Simogo’s ambition immediately begins to take shape with its next game, Bumpy Road, another arcade-style game about an old couple on a road trip, but infused with surprising whimsy and melancholy, a minimalist love story there for those who look for it. After this, the studio is off to the races, on an incredible streak of games that extends to this day – the devilish glee of Beat Sneak Bandit giving way to the melancholic, frightening folklore of Year Walk and the slick flair of Device 6.
Simogo’s interests are wide-ranging and interdisciplinary. Flesser and Gardebäck have made a tradition of writing about the influences that inform each of their games, chronicling every project’s origin on their website. As a result, playing a Simogo game feels like getting a letter from some of your most eccentric friends, who, after spending a lot of time thinking about Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, the work of graphic designer Sam Suliman, and Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, can’t help but write to you with a prose puzzle riffing on all these things using the typographic experimentation of House of Leaves.
Times have changed, and Simogo has expanded beyond Flesser and Gardebäck as their ambition has grown and brought them back to the realm of console games – such as the playable pop album Sayonara Wild Hearts, and their puzzle-mystery magnum opus Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. The brief, heady days of App Store brilliance are over; the world that allowed Simogo to flourish is now extinct. How fortunate it was that Simogo got the chance they did; that they’re still with us, and able to assemble this inspiring little collection we can play in perpetuity. These games, in all their varied playfulness, are full of longing: for a lover, for meaning, for a chance to write your own ending. Play them and dream about a world where it all went differently.
