Over the past few years we’ve seen a slew of companies releasing compilations of their most famous series. Mega Man, Mortal Kombat, Atari’s entire company history and a handful of Capcom fighting collections make it possible to experience hundreds of games in a streamlined, modern form. Given the legacies of these well known franchises and their parent companies, it is no wonder that they serve as an easy way of making old intellectual property relevant and accessible again. On the occasion that more independent games have been included in collections, it has been in a more documentary form, such as the Making of Karataka or Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter story. So it’s been more than just refreshing to play the Simogo Legacy Collection over the last few weeks; it’s a door showing a path forward for smaller studios to highlight their lost or overlooked titles while presenting them with the necessary context to keep them relevant. This legacy collection isn’t a simple cash-grab it is an indie studio pioneering a new format. Even more stunning? Simogo makes it look almost effortless.

Simogo is the Swedish indie studio that is best known for Sayonara Wild Hearts and last year’s Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. Yet the studio has been making games since 2010. This collection chronicles all their games, except for the aforementioned pair. There are seven games included here, each with a wildly different style and gameplay approach. Titles like Kosmo Spin and Bumpy Road were clearly designed to take advantage of the features of smartphones, back during the first wave of indie games released for these platforms. With clever touch mechanics, they are score chasers with a unique look and feel to them. Beat Sneak Bandit is a full-on rhythm game that could’ve been a minigame in something like Rhythm Heaven, where you need to tap in the rhythm but explicitly so as to not get caught by security guards while robbing manors. SPL-T is perhaps one of the most addicting puzzle games, where the goal is to make horizontal and vertical splits on the screen to increase your score. But where you make the splits is essential in order to make sure that you do not run out of space. Blocks disappear only after enough splits have been made and will be filled by blocks of the same shape stacked on top.

Then there are the narrative experiences. If you’ve loved the ambiguous nature of something like Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, you’ll immediately recognize the writing style in DEVICE 6 or the atmosphere in Year Walk. These games are wonderful stories that also play with the way you interact with your device. DEVICE 6 especially had me hooked. Twisting and turning the screen in order to follow the text and find solutions to the puzzles. Year Walk is a bit more straightforward, but if you have not played it before it comes highly recommended. It is a suspenseful narrative horror game based on Swedish folklore with an absolutely gorgeous artstyle. Finally I’d be remiss to not mention A Sailor’s Dream. I wasn’t aware of this particular game and it was a delight. With a story told over the course of multiple days as well as specific radio broadcasts every hour, it made for a game I kept returning to over and over. Perhaps not every game in this collection will keep your undivided attention, and their mobile roots can still be felt occasionally, but given that over a decade has passed for most of these games, they are still in remarkably great shape.

And I think that staying power is emblematic of what Simogo has been able to pull off here. All these games were designed for a wide variety of devices. Most of their early games aren’t even available anymore on smartphones. But this collection of games gives you so many options to play and control them. Two sticks on controllers can simulate multi-touch for games like A Sailor’s Dream, where you can control two cursors individually. You can adjust the speed and size of each individual cursor. Is playing in docked mode not your style? Touch screen, motion controls and (for Switch 2) mouse controls are all available and work exceptionally well. Given that a lot of the games are designed to play in short sessions, I had a lot of fun picking them up whenever I had a short break. The wide range of options lowers the barrier of entry significantly.

It all comes together in this wonderfully designed interface that is made to resemble an app store. Every game has a little text blurb explaining the story, but also when it was made and what features have been adjusted to make it as authentic to the original release as possible. There are little achievements and challenges, such as getting a high score in Kosmo Spin or getting all the clocks in Beat Sneak Bandit. But I was also happy to see a few prototypes and other extras included, which is still such a rarity in the games industry. To see cancelled ideas and prototypes here in playable form gives some great insight into how Simogo approaches game design. It’s the cherry on top of this already clean and expansive collection.

I am almost sure that there is a game for everyone in this collection. Whether you’ve been following Simogo since their mobile games, or only played Sayonara Wild Hearts, each of the titles on display is such a great encapsulation of what has made this studio so unique. It’s not just a documentary showcasing the history of the studio, but this is Simogo pioneering a way forward: presenting a path for the preservation and (re)appreciation of games made for mobile devices. These types of games, more than any other, are so quickly lost to the annals of history. But they are important in their own right and collections like these give them the respect they deserve. I simply had a fantastic time with the Simogo Legacy Collection. It is everything one can expect from a collection celebrating a legacy. My hope is that other studios are taking notes and can learn from what Simogo has achieved here.