Towards a perilous journey

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The Steam page for Towards a Perilous Journey claims that TAPJ is: "Situated midway between shoot'em up and musical game." At the end of my play session however, I found myself wondering where the musical game came in? https://youtu.be/Knxsd2KXl4A I'll jump right into the deep end... This is one of the larger contributors to my review as it feels deceptive to me. This is just a shoot em up. There is no music game. Since we're starting at the bottom and working up, there are also no sound effects. This may be an intentional decision to not interfere with the music, however there's an immersion breaking disconnect that forms when you do something that should cause a sound but it doesnt. IE, shooting a fully auto space shotgun causing alien ships to explode in your face... The UI could have been more intuitive in the ship and the HUD a bit more prominent in the levels. You really can't take your eyes off the action to look over at your energy gauge. It would be nicer if it was more visible or there were signals on your ships to indicate when abilities were ready so you didn't need to look at it. The in game menu wasn't the worst I've seen but it was far from the best. The difficulty curve ramps up at an odd pace. The first enemy you encounter does nothing but fly at your. The second enemy shoots a wall of projectiles at you and has a non-trivial time to kill. This feels like quite the jump in enemy challenge and seems like it might be better if there were some intermediary enemy to start you off with dodging projectiles before sending a whole wall at the player. But maybe I just need to git gud... Moving to the positives. The visuals were nice. A very simple mix of low poly and pixelated. So people will hate it. To me, consistency is more important than photo-realistic graphics. I think the visuals suite the game. The music, while not gameplay impacting, was decent. A bit on the loud side but definitely tracks that promote zoning out and blowing ♥♥♥♥ up. The controls were very simple to pick up. Move your hands and pull the triggers! The more dextrous you are the better off you're going to be. Some of the more advanced techniques like ship fusion or your other abilities are a bit hampered by the UI but are otherwise fairly straight forward to execute. I did like the variety of spectator cam options that were available however I didn't see any difference between 1 and 2. I would like more developers to start adding in headset previews of what those spectator modes will provide to your viewers without me having to remove my headset. I'm the minority in this I think as this doesn't impact the average player. At the end of the play session, as per usual, I ask myself if I had fun. Would I play this again? For Towards a Perilous Journey, the answer was a no. There's not enough game here to justify the $11.99 price tag and there were too many impediments to fun that I found myself focusing on.