SIGNS OF THE SOJOURNER

Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Developer/publisher Echodog Games Origin US Release 2020

As it takes friction to polish a gemstone, so even the most seemingly perfectly formed games only come to be so through months and years of iteration. Their constituent parts abrade one another until eventually those coarse edges are worn down to fit smoothly together. Echodog Games’ debut is so holistic in its design, its mechanics and story so tightly intertwined, that it’s almost hard to imagine in its nascent form. But like every game, it started with a rough idea that only began to resemble its final shape after some time.

Designer founded the LA-based developer in 2018, before recruiting art director and technical lead Zach Vinless – with whom she’d worked at mobile game studio Nix Hydra – shortly afterward. While the team came together quickly, she admits her original pitch was rather vague: a card game where the deck is your character. “We spent six to nine months prototyping ideas, [asking] ‘What does that actually mean?’” Kattan-Wright says. But from the team’s very earliest conversations, the idea of a card game reflecting the idea of travelling and encountering new cultures – and experienced, when we were thinking about the different ways and reasons people travel and how that sort of intermingling of cultures impacts people, those were the kind of pillars we started building around.”