Signs of the Sojourner (Xbox One)
Signs of the Sojourner is fairly ambitious in its attempt to adapt cross-cultural barriers into a card game. As a caravan traveler seeking goods in a post-apocalyptic world, you’ll be interacting with many small towns who don’t have much contact with each other beyond goods traders, meaning they would logically have their own societal norms that could potential lead to a misunderstanding. Taking time to get to know people there would logically help you overcome this cultural hurdle, but the exact ways this is represented by the card game at Signs of the Sojourner’s core are dubiously effective and perhaps require too much thematic accommodation from the player to even work conceptually.
In Signs of the Sojourner, conversations with the people you encounter on your travels involve you and the other person playing a brief cooperative card game. Each player holds five cards from their own personal deck of ten, although yours can be expanded in a purely negative fashion by the fatigue system that will be covered later. During these conversations, each card has a symbol on its left side and its right side, the goal being to match the symbols to adjacent cards in a chain. So, if the other person plays a card with a square on the right side, you place a card beside it with a square on its left side to ensure the conversation goes well. Depending on who you’re speaking to, you’ll need to form enough of these card chains successfully to have an amicable and productive conversation where you befriend the person you’re speaking to, are able to get information from them, or manage to make the kind of trade necessary for your merchant caravan.
The first issue with the system is actually the way it tries to contextualize these symbols. The game describes each shape as having a different conversational purpose like one being logical or another being emotional, but this doesn’t actually impact the substance of the chat and for the most part it is represented entirely by the cards. If you manage a successful chain they’ll briefly say something that shows you’re winning them over and if the chain is broken then they’ll get snippy with you, often blaming you for the breakdown in conversation no matter how well you’ve got along. Only after the card game section is complete will you get real meaningful conversations, but the game does emphasize that you aren’t meant to get along with everyone so some thematic accommodation makes sense there. The symbols actually representing different styles of talking has one area it works well in too, the game having an event that shakes up many people’s lives and so even decks that normally contain only two symbols can have a pink symbol thrown in to represent the confusion and grief experienced afterwards, it intentionally disruptive and a nice way of actually linking people’s emotional state to the card game.
Where things get a little unsteady is the way you even build up your deck of cards. When Signs of the Sojourner begins you’ll mostly encounter people with similar cards to you, and this makes some narrative sense since you’ll be heading out to areas near your hometown where the culture is fairly similar. As your caravan reaches new locations, you’ll notice people starting to speak in new symbols, and if you want to start to earn the cards needed to speak with them, you need to, essentially, antagonize a few people with inevitable failed conversations. Your deck won’t have the kind of flexible cards needed to complete these exchanges successfully, but after every conversation, you’ll get to pick a card from your opponent’s deck to replace one of the cards in your own. Thus, if you want to better interact with people abroad, you’ll need to find the appropriate conversational partners, harass them until you have a deck with the right cards, and then you can start actually engaging with whatever personal narratives or trade goods they can offer. There are only four symbols besides that pink spiral to worry about, but different regions will take more effort to reach and then have the cultural barrier of symbols you might not have had time to accumulate yet.
If Signs of the Sojourner was open-ended then the gradual deck-building could be done when you decide you want to focus on a specific region or try and complete the narratives unique to certain characters and regions. However, the plot of this card game is pretty restrictive. As a merchant named Rhea who steps forward to run the family shop after their mother’s passing, you only get five full caravan trips before the game’s plot wraps up and you’re made to start over from the beginning. To ensure your shop’s survival you will need to acquire goods along the way, meaning that ignoring some people to try and dodge their polluting symbols is harder to justify, but perhaps a bigger roadblock to trying to interact with people in far off cities is the fatigue system. Every few days you’re traveling out on the road, a fatigue card is added to your deck. The fatigue card has no positive function, it prevents you from drawing a useful card, playing it will lead to an immediate breakdown in communication not once but twice since the last card of a chain is always used to start the next one, and even reaching some far off towns to have a chance at speaking with them will necessitate having a few fatigue cards in your deck. You can only get rid of fatigue cards by random events that might appear along the trip and if you draw one during a conversation it’s essentially one less card to work with, so even if you put in all the work to get the right symbols to try and see a narrative to its end, you might get to that pivotal conversation and find yourself with nothing but fatigue cards.
One way to potentially lessen fatigue card acquisition is learning about trade routes. Just like potentially getting goods from a positive interaction, you can also learn of a certain path to another town, there being some hidden areas as well as more expedient paths that take less time to travel. You can be out on the road for almost two months per trip if you’re trying to push along character plots and do your duty to your store though, so you can end up with almost as many fatigue cards as normal cards if you’re trying to seed possible plot progression for your next trip out. Signs of the Sojourner wants you to replay it though, there being multiple endings as well as some plot threads that can only reasonably be seen to their conclusion by ignoring others. However, there is little accommodation to this play style. Your trade routes are all forgotten when you restart the game and you’re back to the default deck, so you’ll need to redo many interactions just to even get to areas where you might want to pursue their stories and again and thus you can’t start to earn the cards with the right symbols for certain areas until you’ve actually put in the conversational work opening paths to them. Again, the system meant to represent cultural barriers is undermined by the execution of it, the player having to treat people as commodities where they can acquire the right cards and route info while snubbing people who don’t suit their needs. While perhaps a commentary on the harsh business focused mind of a merchant, it doesn’t feel like it lines up sociologically with how one would make connections or ingratiate themselves into a new group.
There are some extra elements to the card system that can ease some of the tedium in trying to get conversations to work. If you reset the game during a chat you can attempt a conversation from the start even if you failed it, although the card draw will be identical every time so you can’t hope for less fatigue cards or more matches with your conversational partner. Some cards can have extra symbols on their sides or special effects like copying the previous card, and one way to avoid conversations breaking down too often are Accords. If you and the other speaker have the same symbol appear four times in a row with your cards, a shield appears that will protect you from one poorly placed card. The cards after this shield will disappear after a mismatch with only the latest played one still remaining in play, meaning you can sometimes survive not having the right symbol, although the fatigue card will still lead to a loss since it remains in play after breaking the Accord shield. Accords are a nice cushion though and you can strategize by picking accommodating cards to earn these often, including cards with special abilities. The Accommodate card duplicates the previous card in the chain, making for more common Accords if you can get enough of them, but other effects can be applied to regular symbol cards. You can play cards that let you see the opponent’s hand (although the way they hold it blocks a lot of information), Clarify will let you place your card anywhere in a chain if it matches instead of just the end, and Reconsider will shuffle your cards after being played. There are a few unique effects that can help you a bit if you manage to get your hands on these special cards, and Accommodate can help briefly bridge a language gap, but they aren’t disruptive enough to overcome some of the inherent flaws in the system since Fatigue cards will still be too prevalent and some people will force you to have matching symbols if you want to interact no matter what special effects you try to bring to bear.
As for the actual narratives you can uncover on the road, they range in their quality and thus sometimes you can put a good degree of effort into trying to see one to its end only to discover its one of the more underwhelming ones. Rhea’s personal history has a few things to explore like learning about their mother’s apparently quite adventurous life, you’ll be trying to impress a caravan train so that it doesn’t remove your hometown from its route, and you can make some friendships that can end in a few different ways. However, the more effective narratives tend to involve a good deal of work, things like assisting with some societal change for downtrodden people definitely rubbing up against the Fatigue system and need to treat people like card sources if you want to see the finale. Even on a less effective trip though you can still make small connections that do feel like they’re somewhat meaningful. There is some emotional impact to returning to a town you’ve dropped by again and again to find it suddenly underwent some major shift, or maybe someone you were speaking with just the other day is gone or in jail. These people can travel about as well and unfortunately shift their symbol language so sometimes you end up stonewalled while trying to see a character narrative through if you lack foreknowledge on that shift, but there are some moments of humanity that offset some of the frustrations with the unfeeling card game mechanics governing everything. There can be that aching feeling of finding someone you know you can’t help opining on their situation, or you can offer someone some comfort in this harsh world. There is definitely room for heartfelt and memorable exchanges, but with many other unexceptional or plain ones potentially leading your deck building astray, it feels like many of the paths you may set your character on will either bear weak fruit or not really be worth the effort despite that flicker of impactful interaction that really did just boil down to not failing card draws rather than making meaningful choices or truly interacting with that person you’re speaking with.
THE VERDICT: Contextualizing conversations and cultural barriers through a card game sends Signs of the Sojourner down an unfortunate road. Rather than feeling like an excellent execution of its premise, concepts like the Fatigue cards and the odd way you acquire new cards turn conversations less into meaningful interactions and more into resource management where if you want a complete and heartfelt narrative you’ll likely do so by ignoring people because they have different symbols than the ones you need. A somewhat harsh unintended message in the mechanics notwithstanding, there are interesting moments of humanity to be found, but the card system and limits on how many times you can even travel out to try and make connections make it feel like you’re squeezing the game hard to get very little in return.
And so, I give Signs of the Sojourner for Xbox One…
A BAD rating. Signs of the Sojourner can be a heartfelt, humorous, and stylish experience at times, but it is fraught with far too many negative experiences that emerge purely from its ambitious card game system to really latch onto those positive elements. It’s hard to laugh when you barely pushed through a conversation with a rough draw and then you learn they didn’t have useful information and the card you’re forced to take from their deck might not benefit you. It can be disheartening to put in the work needed to try and complete a plot only for things to crumble due to the fatigue system, and while special cards and Accords can sometimes offset the likelihood of this happening, it still feels less like communication is truly breaking down when the mismatches occur and more you’re being punished for mechanics outside your control. If you couldn’t get along with everyone you met that would be one thing, but the extra effort needed to make some relationships work only for certain punishing systems to still deny it shows a hostile system that doesn’t care much for feeding you the breadcrumbs that it purports as more meaningful because you had to slog through its system to read sometimes underwhelming interactions. Fatigue as a system is an unusually disruptive part of this affair that does the experience no favors when already you have the day limits set per trip and so few cards in your deck and hand to work with, it either needing to be reduced in its impact or perhaps even wiped out entirely since accumulating the right cards and trade routes to even see some plots unfold is work enough already and full of the negative interactions the developers apparently value.
Perhaps more importantly, deckbuilding in Signs of the Sojourner does feel in general a discordant part of the system, its intended message of needing to interact with certain people more to understand them but in turn losing connection and commonality with those you left behind leading to the player sometimes deliberately segregating certain people because they don’t suit their needs. If there was more flexibility in the card system then perhaps this could be made less of a necessity for certain endings and interactions, and there doesn’t seem to be too much subtlety in the nature of interactions either, people unusually hostile during mismatches that the game conveniently excuses itself from needing to justify by saying you just had the wrong cards. People who are incredibly friendly and getting along with you in every interaction can suddenly treat you like a hated stranger if you simply didn’t have the right cards, something that feels less like a cultural misunderstanding or social flub and more the game not wanting to give the interactions the texture that makes getting to know a character and advancing your relationships with them fulfilling. If you do forgive the game its many thematic missteps and fill in many of the large blanks then perhaps its easier to push through the clunky card game mechanics to get to those sometimes well-written and emotional moments that do tap into its themes and setting fairly well, but too much work and uncertainty surround it to make it worth the effort more often than not.