When I was a kid, I had two best friends, Devin and Bill. I saw them almost every day at school, and hung out with them as often as my parents let me. I thought we would be friends forever. That didn’t happen, obviously. I suspect most of you have people you were sure you would be able to talk to for the rest of your life, who is… not really a stranger, now, but certainly someone you can’t quite talk to anymore. How does that happen? Signs of the Sojourner seeks to explore that question with a narrative deckbuilding game about communication.
“What are you even fighting about?”
Your mother was a trader. She owned a small shop in a miniscule down, but most of her job was traveling with a caravan of merchants from town to town, seeking out items to bring back to Bartow and sell. Now that she’s dead, it’s your job to keep her store alive.
Unfortunately, you learn that the caravan is being pressured to drop Bartow from their route. If they do so, Bartow will effectively become a ghost town. Your mother’s shop will shut down. Slowly but surely, everyone will leave the town.
Who put pressure on the caravan? What did your mother know about the wealthy industrialist who ruled nearby city Marae? What is ‘the Circle’ and how was your mother involved? And can you keep your store afloat in increasingly uncertain times? These are some of the core questions at the heart of Signs of the Sojourner.
“It’s okay to not always understand each other.”
Deckbuilding games typically have a single progression mechanic: You have a deck of cards, and as you play, you are adding to and removing from that deck. In Signs of the Sojourner, those cards represent styles of communication. So, for instance, a circle means a more empathetic, observational style. A square is blunter, more forceful. A diamond is creative and curious. Fatigue, gained from being on the road for too long, has no symbols. Nothing matches with it.
Your goal is to have a smooth conversation. To do this, you want to match the way the other person is talking, and then respond with something they can match. So, if the right-hand side of their card is a triangle, you want the left hand side of your response to be a triangle. And if the person you’re talking to doesn’t have any diamond cards and the right side of your card is a diamond, they’ll have trouble responding. Essentially, all you need to do is match symbols.
The catch of the game is, you only have twelve cards. Every time you talk to someone, you gain one of their cards. You can’t not pick something up from the people with whom you speak. But when you do, you ‘forget’ an old card, permanently losing access to it. In the small town you start in, everyone speaks in just two symbols: Circle and triangle. Communicating and making matches, then, is easy. But if you want to trade with wealthier, bigger cities, you’ll need to learn diamonds and squares. Balancing the cards (and special effects on them) across your trade route is a difficult skill, but an essential one to learn to master the game.
“One miscommunication doesn’t have to end a friendship.”
Initially, the game seemed incredibly simple. I play two circles. Elias responds with two circles. Easy. Honestly, too easy. The game’s first conversations are a tutorial of sorts, but they require no real thought or engagement. Because of that, you run the risk of getting bored with what appears to be a too-simple system before the meat of the game begins. It isn’t until you start wandering farther afield that you realize what the game is doing.
You play a small town kid with a small town best friend. How does exposure to the wider world change you? To fit in with bigger cities, you need to relearn how to talk. You change the way you speak. Then you come home.
It might not happen the first time, but as you push yourself to take longer trips and rack up fatigue, it will. You can’t relate to your friends and neighbors anymore. It’s not that you’re angry with them, or they hate you. You aren’t fighting, really. You just… don’t understand one another anymore.
Signs of the Sojourner is the best kind of deckbuilder: The mechanics are simple, but the interactions are deep and have narrative ramifications. You have to make real choices in your gameplay. What is important to you? You have a lot of opportunities in this game. You can’t take them all. Even if you found a way to manage the fatigue of spending that much time on the road, the code switching required would be beyond your abilities. This is a game about choosing who you want to be and growing to become that person.
Intriguingly, Signs of the Sojourner is a short game with high replay value. You cannot do everything in one playthrough. Instead, each ‘run’, I gravitated towards different storylines. In one, I ended up failing Bartow. I watched the town shut down. But I forged strong relationships in a nearby town, so I was invited to open up a shop there. In the next, I barely touched Pachenco’s subplots (about my mom’s history) and focused instead on Anka and the Desert Oasis, helping the people of an up-and-coming community and building relationships.
“Let me help you figure this out.”
There’s a downside to this model, however. The game is short, but it’s not roguelike-run short. Each run takes around 4-5 hours, I think. If you fuck up on a storyline you’re working towards, it’s not a thirty-minute run down the drain; it’s a considerable chunk of time. Add randomization to the mix, and you can do everything right and still be unable to progress the storyline you’re interested in. There’s verisimilitude to that choice, but there’s plenty of frustration to it as well.
In the end, I still enjoyed Signs of the Sojourner, despite that sizable flaw. But I had to learn to love it on its own terms. I tend to be goal oriented in games. When I find something I like, I prefer to explore every nook and cranny. I couldn’t do that with Signs of the Sojourner.
Instead, I had to grow to enjoy the process. I liked being on the road. Talking to strangers and building rapport was engaging enough on its own merits. I was able to find enough to grapple with in the way the game’s mechanics reflect real world social phenomena like code switching or the way moving from a small town to a big city can change a person. While the game has a number of narrative hooks, their uncertainty means that your character’s inner journey becomes the main story. The game gives you plot threads, but you find your own story among them.
That’s going to frustrate some people. Hell, it frustrated me sometimes. But that didn’t stop me from playing through the game repeatedly. Signs of the Sojourner has its problems, but its craft and charm more than overcame those issues for me. Indeed, because I felt like I made my own story, it almost became more memorable, more personal, than the plot that was written out for me. If finding your own personal story appeals to you, this might be the game for you.