[s0] Nientum – Op.ZERO

[chalcedony_starlings]

So I unexpectedly wound up poking my head into Steam Next Fest this year, and one of the demos I saw was for Nientum – Op.ZERO, which turned out to be good enough to be worth some writeup. This is a two-lane rhythm game that's merged into an auto-runner with a stage theater theme, and I actually really love that combination.

Broad structure: Since the demo consists primarily of the first chunk of the game, this part is not that clearly displayed, but it looks like the story will be organized around a series of chapters corresponding to stage musicals, each containing multiple consecutive, er, stages—the polysemy makes that confusing to write about, so I'm going to call them “levels” instead. The first chapter after the tutorial, which shows up in full in the demo, is based on The Wizard of Oz; after you complete it, the demo switches to giving you a menu with a few teaser selections from later chapters. The primary characters in the frame story are the player character, Aleph, and an NPC, Liara, both amnesiacs, who take roles based on ‘director’ and ‘actor’ respectively. Each level alternates between runner sections, in which the player character runs through an area hitting notes of the music with her light sword, and stage sections, in which the actor character performs a scene with sung vocals and rhythm-input phrases are much more sparsely used.

Charting: During the runner sections, the notes in each lane are color-coded to the lane, but spatially, the lanes are mapped to “ground” and “jump” displacements of your auto-running player character. This means that the time-to-space mapping is highly nonlinear: the position of the ground and jump notes will change a lot as your player character jumps and swings around the 2D paper-doll-like environment in ways that are tied into whichever play that's being put on. As a result, you can't consistently sight-read ahead on relative spatial cues, and while there's shrinking-target cues, those only show up closer to the target time and are harder to read. Fortunately, the charts track the instruments of the music pretty cleanly compared to most rhythm games I've played, and in practice it lends the whole thing a pleasant “requisitely performing partly from the score and partly from memory” feeling. I was also worried at first that this was going to be one of those rhythm games made uninteresting by a super-low skill ceiling, but I was pleasantly surprised by the Hard charts, where there's more meat to them; it may not get Up There by harder-core standards, but it doesn't need to.

Sound: The instrumentation and overall sound quality of the music is lovely and contextually appropriate. I wish it had maybe a touch more dynamic range? The vocals are more hit-or-miss for me just on a stylistic level, but they're not bad. In game terms, there are forced keysounds, but the game runs with quite low input-to-audio latency on my machine, so it's actually mostly okay; whatever they did with the engine worked great compared to e.g. vivid/stasis or Unbeatable where the keysounds have unusable amounts of latency for me. Lack of timing adjustment controls in the demo means that the non-player-triggered keysounds are actually further off from when I would expect them to occur relative to the music, which is really intriguing technically, since you'd expect those to be trivial to synchronize. I think what might also be happening is that an early section of tutorial chart in which there is some diegetic “calibration” going on is used to cover up actual timing calibration based on the player inputs in that section, which (if that's what's happening) is a neat way to do it (and I've honestly been wondering in the background when someone would go for that), though not being able to adjust later is still not ideal.

Story: I am not that convinced by the plot and characterization, which are on the twee side, but I can enjoy them in context. What I can see of the story reminds me somewhat of Arcaea, which is another rhythm game whose story I'm not that convinced by, but Nientum seems better executed than Arcaea. Notably, for the purposes of the demo, the English text is said to be machine translated, and this shows heavily: you will have a much easier time picking through the story text if you are fluent in—I want to say it's “English vocabulary molded into Japanese phrasing patterns”, both because it feels similar to that and because the lyrics are all sung in Japanese (with subtitles in the interface language), but the developers are actually based in Korea, so maybe it's from Korean? Whatever the case, I'm guessing that will get better in the full release since they specifically call it out as temporary.

So, this is definitely going on my wishlist. I hope the full release turns out as good as I anticipate it to be!