Steam Link Spotlight - Signs of the Sojourner

Steam Link Spotlight is a feature where we look at PC games that play exceptionally well using the Steam Link app. Our last entry was XCOM: Chimera Squad. Read about how it plays using Steam Link's new mouse and keyboard support over here.

For this entry, I took a look at a fascinating game about communication. Signs of the Sojourner by Echodog Games examines how traveling and connecting with other people can change you in the process. While this has been explored in plenty of other games and media before, what's remarkable about Signs of the Sojourner is how it translates this message so elegantly through simple card game mechanics.

The game itself is a narrative adventure game. You play as a young adult who has recently inherited their mother's shop after her death. To keep the shop running, you need to travel to diverse locations to find intriguing items to sell. Along the way, you chat up locals, learn more about the places they are from, and their experiences bind themselves to your character, changing them and they way they interact with other people.

This is all done by way of a card game where you match symbols that represent different kinds of speech. You start the game with a deck of cards entirely comprised of speech cards that match those of everyone in your home town, but as you try to talk to other people to acquire new items in new places, you are forced to switch out cards in your deck with ones that represent the speech of the people you're talking to. As your deck changes, your ability to connect with other people around you also shifts, as does your story. Your decisions about who you continue fostering connections can let you connect more deeply with specific people, but when you do this you are also making decisions to leave other people behind.

The elegance with which Signs of the Sojourner intertwines its mechanics and storytelling is masterful, making it an easy game to recommend. What's more is that the game plays extremely well using touch screen controls. Similar to other Steam Link Spotlight entires like Dicey Dungeons, Signs of the Sojourner uses simple click and drag commands for the entire game, making it feel like a natural fit for mobile play. The only mild annoyance in controlling the game is how you have to tap before dragging a card to simulate a click, but this becomes second nature quickly enough.

I would love to see Signs of the Sojourner come to mobile at some point, but there's practically no reason to wait for it. Grab it on Steam today and spend a weekend chatting people up and finding out how it will change you.