… I love this.
It is about broken hearts, in its own way, but it elevates it into a sort of astral trip with a tarot theme, and manages to do that with its pop aesthetic without getting cheesy, and the framing and the very stylized-reality-based environment gracefully stop it from being pretentious or overly mystical either. The whole arc is incredibly satisfying.
Some people have been describing this as a rhythm game, but this is really much more a music-oriented arcade game, with a mix of mechanics which center around “scrolling collectathon” taken up to hyper levels. (Update: I just described it to someone as “more of an interactive feature-length music video” and that seems about right too.) The main focus is (or should be, I think, if you want to get the most out of it) the experience coming at you very rapidly to the beat, and then there's a secondary focus on steering your character to avoid crashing into obstacles and to collect score tokens. Interspersed with this are a few bits which have a rhythm aspect, visually similar to Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan or Project Diva with incoming circles that you have to match with a button press, but they're basically beat-timed QTEs in context, and they are very forgiving.
Camera switches come quickly and are well-choreographed. Nonetheless, it's to the level that it counts as an accessibility note: this game is all about rapid motion and quick response times, and it's very essential to the piece (“album”, I want to say, and I think the game might agree (Update: and it even calls itself that in the extended Steam description which I didn't see before)), so if you can't handle that, then unfortunately it's not going to be for you.
Striking bits include:
- The choreography in general, and the sync-up with the beat-heavy electropop soundtrack.
- Queen Latifah as the narrator. She's only heard a few times, but she really sets the mood with her voice and inflection.
- If you fail (generally by crashing into an obstacle), you get instantly reset to the last checkpoint, usually a few seconds before. The music pitch-drops out and returns seamlessly in the process, making failure and recovery feel like part of the action.
- If you fail a few times in a row in the same spot, the game will pause, and the narrator will ask if you want to skip this section. This happened to me once, and I declined; it seems like after it's happened at least once, you can also turn it off entirely.
- There's some little vinyl-record references in the UI, which complement the way some failure and risk states involve record-like manipulations of the music in-game. The “Zodiac Puzzles” listing (see below) has a B-side, for instance.
Recommended setup: full screen, no distractions. Consider darkening the room if the contrast won't bother you (I didn't, but I feel like I should have). Play through the whole set in one go; it's about an hour and a half long. Use a gamepad; I haven't tried mouse/keyboard controls and don't know whether they work, but in some sections I have trouble imagining them working well. And leave some time to come down from it afterwards…
There's a “Zodiac Puzzles” listing in the main menu which leads to what I'm pretty sure are achievements (two per zodiac sign), with the requirements for them expressed as little riddles. I haven't tried going for any of these yet.
Strongly recommended to most, but especially to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neonneptunian (“this is an Ellu game”, Teneb commented while I was playing) and baxil (primarily for the way it handles the “where the astral meets the mundane” aspect, but also for the rhythm). (Maybe to indicoyote too, come to think of it?)
I might write a spoiler-ier post pointing out some more specific stuff soon.
Thanks to jacel for giving us this copy. ❤
Mmmnnh.
