Nocturne: Prelude

I was just browsing for some smaller rhythm games out of boredom and I stumbled across Nocturne! I was immediately pulled in by the art style and, of course, its music. Thus far, I've completed the game once, wandering everywhere I could with the limited world available thus far, and it took me just under an hour and a half. The environmental experience overall is, for the most part, absolutely phenomenal. The music between fights and story-specific areas is delightful, and within the areas attempting to shift the tone to a more unsettling vibe, does so very well. I will say that there's a lot of empty space with little to do, though that's to be expected with what's more of a demo at the moment. It does get across the feeling of a desolate, practically apocalyptic world with this aspect, but the balance could be improved on, at least with more discoverables, some more things to interact with, just something to grant the player some kind of validation for crawling all over the place. The gameplay itself is well-handled in my opinion, and the range of difficulty has been finely tweaked. I'm not familiar with rhythm games at all (the most experience being Piano Tiles as an elementary-level kid, and then some limited-time events in Genshin Impact), but I have a high pride and set it to Normal rather than Easy. Through my experience, I can recommend setting it to Easy if you're far newer to rhythm games like I am. However, the difficulty level of Normal became familiar fairly quickly, with the only section I died at all on being the final boss at the end of this Prelude. I do wish there were options to rebind some of the controls, as I had a hard time adjusting to using the arrow keys rather than WASD, and being able to remap the DFJK keys of the rhythm bits would be very nice. As far as storytelling goes, its hard to fully criticize a game's story when you have less than an hour of content to play through, taking off time for aimlessly wandering and exploring the areas. The handful of characters are enjoyable, their designs are fun, and none of them were annoying in the slightest. There was a lot to be picked up world-building wise throughout the small chunk of game, and I'm excited to see the rest of it! I can say with confidence that I'll be following the progress of Nocturne and impatiently waiting (and hoping!) for the estimated release date next summer. If you're looking to pick up a short, sweet rhythm game and meander around some pretty landscapes, I recommend giving Nocturne a try :)