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!
