As we were wrapping up Sayonara Wild Hearts, there were two outstanding things to finish. We had started prototyping a WarioWare and Rhythm Tengoku inspired mode, in which players were faced with small portions from levels, with increasingly faster pace. At the time we called it “Infinite Shuffle Mix”. We couldn’t get the loading times as fast as we wanted them between the portions, and so we decided to instead use the remaining time to add another level to the Stereo Lovers section, which at the time only had two levels. This resulted in the level “Parallel Universes”.

In 2024 after we finished the production of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, we found ourselves with time to take on some smaller projects while figuring out what was next for Simogo. We were asked if we were interested in bringing Sayonara Wild Hearts to PlayStation 5, but didn’t see any obvious advantages besides fidelity related benefits (which frankly didn’t excite us particularly), as the PlayStation 4 game was already playable on the device. We thought about the hardware and what type of experience that would only be possible on it and remembered that PlayStation 5 has a very fast SSD, which would allow for the type of quick loading we needed for our long lost Infinite Shuffle mode.

As we had only made tests for the mode in 2019 there was not much design done for scoring or difficulty ramping. We also had to make quite a bit of new art and sound assets, along with a random element that would sometimes mirror the level visually to keep players on their toes. We renamed the mode “Remix Arcade”. It was fun to revisit Sayonara Wild Hearts after all those years.