I'll start this off by saying, this game is an awkward mess...
....But DAT CONCEPT?! MMMM!
Kane was sifting thru his stuff one day, when he found his old adorable green dragon plushie, the sight of which brought back some bad memories from a particularly lousy day in his childhood...
The story is themed around coping with a past trauma...but doesn't really do it well.
Kane walks thru his old memories, which for some reason aren't in sequence? You go back and forth thru points in the event and I don't get why...and the story doesn't actually explain what happened...dad just flipped out...there isn't context for why, or what happened after. Did they get divorced? Did he get violent? Why even is the dragon plushie associated with this? I have no idea.
As for the gameplay, the way you move around the house is WEIRD. You walk around in a track around the walls using A and D to move, and S to select doors/monsters. When you select a monster,the rhythm game starts.
There are 4 monsters to defeat, they spit sootballs at you, and you pop em to the beat...kinda...
Each monster introduces a new mechanic:
#1: Don't pop the Red sootballs, or they jam that note track for several seconds.
#2: Dusty sootballs bounce up after you hit them, hit them again when they come back down.
#3: Purple sootballs have to be hit twice fast.
#4: uses all of the above at once.
#1 and #2 are easy, but with #3 you notice that something's off...I'm not sure if it's a timing thing, or if the hit-detection isn't very responsive, but it's harder than it needs to be....and #4 is ROUGH, the music is distorted, and I was too busy fighting for my life to tell if it was even synced....it's the final boss,so maybe it being messy was intentional?
I liked the monster designs, they were simple, but I felt they were decent visualizations of inner issues. I especially liked the long train-ish one in the credits.
As for the music, it's just soft backbeats, Didn't stand out, but I guess that's the point of Lo-Fi.
I played thru the game 3 times to see if maybe I was doing something wrong with the story, as defeating the final shadow just takes you to the credits...there's no closure...weird for a game about coping with trauma.
I thought maybe if I perfected all the monsters I'd get a real ending, but I can't manage it.
...so why am I recommending this if the gameplay was wonky, and the story was incomplete?
It's a Rhythm game, where you MINDFULLY MEDITATE LO-FI BEATS, TO BLAST INNER DEMONS WITH...That is PHENOMENAL. Even if the end result is clunky as heck, the idea alone is worth playing it for.
Even with the difficult last boss, the game can be won in 10ish minutes.
It may be a mess, but I feel it's worth checking out.
