Shanty town: Year Walk makers Simogo unveil The Sailor’s Dream

Seeking to find.

Simogo have revealed their next game: The Sailor’s Dream, a title that they see as completing a triptych of games alongside the critically acclaimed Year Walk and Device 6.

In a blog post today, Simogo’s Simon Flesser refers to The Sailor’s Dream as “a more philanthropic story” than the eerie Year Walk and the drolly self-referential Device 6. “Instead of creating a feeling of suspense,” he says, “we want to communicate something that feels warmer, yet melancholic.” To that end, The Sailor’s Dream has no puzzles, and Simogo calls it “challenge-free”. The story will be told from multiple perspectives, maybe like an interactive Rashomon.

Simogo have squared the modern artist’s circle: they have become commercially successful by making games with no obvious commercial appeal. The Sailor’s Dream sounds like their boldest stroke yet — go tell a game publisher that you’d like funding to make a “challenge-free” game and come back and describe their guffaws in detail.

We bestowed year-end awards on both Year Walk and Device 6 last year, so I’m clearly quite fond of Simogo. The game arrives on iOS in “late 2014″. Let’s see where this story takes us.

Watch the trailer after the jump.

I encourage you to click through to YouTube just to see how many Sailor Moon videos YouTube packs into the “recommended” column.