Grade: A+
An absolute treat. If you’re going to play one game in the bundle, this should be towards the top of the list.
Signs of the Sojourner is utterly unique. You are a young caravanner taking over your mother’s business after she recently passed away. Your store is essential to your hometown, and if your local store goes under, the caravan might bypass the town, making your home a ghost town.
With your brother minding the store at home, this teen protagonist then sets off on their mission, and your goal is to negotiate your way through the region for trades, information, and items as you go. As you do, you uncover bits and pieces of your mother’s past and the region’s history. Your mother’s story and this world evolve through the adventure, and it becomes a fully fleshed-out living/breathing space.
A card game of emotional intelligence and personal growth
Mechanically, these social interactions play out via a card game where the outcome of each social interaction determines whether you’re moving ahead or falling back in your mission. Instead of the normal type of card game, though, you are building a deck of “social queues” that you strategically chain together to try and make these NPC interactions as positive as possible. It’s basically a game of emotional intelligence.
The further you go away from home, the more foreign the communication styles become, which you have to manage carefully by building your deck and preparing well in advance. The first trips out into these foreign lands when you have no experience are quite rough and difficult. But, as you get experience in the preferences of these other areas, you can accept cards from these other areas, and your communication styles evolve, which allows you to start connecting with characters from these other cultures.
You have to be careful because the longer the sojourn, the more your regular deck is replaced by fatigue cards. These fatigue cards don’t match with anything and generally stink. If you return home at the last possible minute and are full of fatigue, you are one grumpy person. You can’t get along well with anybody until you rest, which means your a jerk to everyone you know at home upon arriving.
Another really fascinating facet of the game is that as you pick up the communication queues from far and distant lands, it replaces the social cards you started with, and it makes it harder to connect with people close to home. This balancing act of foreign and local social queues to maintain in your deck becomes really engaging and interesting.
Just play the game
You can probably tell by this point in the review that I loved every aspect of this game. The concepts were unique and intriguing, the story was engaging and had depth, and I fully lost myself in this world that Echodog Games had created.
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