This video game came on my radar when the OSP youtube channel did a discussion on it. This is a musical, and the music’s composer is Austin Wintory, who is famous for writing the music in games like Journey, Abzu, The Banner Saga, The Pathless… you know, games famous for good music. I was intrigued enough to play it.
I loved my time playing this. This is a visual novel game about the Greek Gods, specifically the murder of the goddess Calliope the Muse of Music. The new Muse of Music must use her magical music powers to interrogate people and force them to confess their guilt/innocence. You know how TV shows sometimes have musical episodes, where character spontaneously start singing for the entire episode? This game is like that.
The gameplay takes two forms: outside of ‘combat,’ you speak with various gods like Athena and Aphrodite, trying to discover clues for the murderer. There is no singing outside of combat. Whereas ‘combat’ is musical sequences where you have to make quicktime decisions to curve the flow of the song to force the person you’re interrogating to confess different things. You can make different quicktime choices: aggressive (red), logical (blue), and empathetic (green). The actual combat takes the form of basically rap battles against one another, using different styles of song depending on the individual song in question.
If you sing aggressively, you’ll get a very in-your-face song, while if you sing empathetically you’ll a kind song. You can choose to mix these up, being aggressive for one verse and then clever for the next. As a result, each song has dozens if not hundreds of possible outcomes. The voice actors- and the voice actors are GOOD- recorded a ton of verses. There are HUNDREDS of substantially different songs. As a result, this game has strong replay potential.
If I were describe this game’s greatest weakness, some of the songs are worse than others. It feels like when the authors wrote this script, they wrote a five or six main versions of each song, and and structured the flowcharts of possible outcomes around those main songs. By and large mixing up the story works well, but sometimes it doesn’t. As a result, most of the songs are truly excellent, while others are merely good.
I really enjoyed the various character designs in this. Following in the tradition of Supergiant’s ‘Hades,’ all of the characters are hot. This game- and Persephone in particular- had big lesbian energy. The game played some cards straight: Athena is the classic Grecian Athena, while Hekate is the classic sorceress archetype. It adapts character designs in clever ways to this Urban Fantasy setting: Pan is a streetwise con artist; Persephone is a mob boss who runs the Underworld bar; Hermes is a Gen Z genderfluid bicycle messenger. And it takes designs in wild and exciting new ways: beach bum Apollo, eldritch supermodel Furies, softboi Cockney Minotaur.
As a final note in this game’s favor, it’s short. I completed my first playthrough in 6 hours of doing everything. If you skip some of the side dialogue, you can probably finish it in half that time. I view this as a good thing, games are getting long these days. But if you want more, this game has truly immense replayability if you like the whole choose-your-own-adventure aspect of designing and sculpting the music.
Seriously, check this out.
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