Wandersong

Wandersong is an incredibly sweet and charming title that deserves far more attention by the gaming community. The more I play the more enchanted I am by it, and it helps me calm down after a rough day through its charming chracters, amazing soundtrack and fun storyline. A must have in every gamer's library.

Wandersong is a delightful game that provides a refreshing dose of positivity and charm. Despite not having a depth of gameplay, the core directional singing mechanic is well developed throughout the game and is cleverly used to reinforce the themes of the story.

I'm not quite sure how to classify this other than Adventure, but traversing the world is not unlike a Paper Mario. There is no real combat, but you can sing; choosing a direction chooses both the note and the color. You'll occasionally get little prompts with colors or directions (often both), and if you sing those notes in that order, a thing will happen. You travel the world, singing to solve puzzles, mostly, but also to stop the world from ending. Each chapter has the same basic groundwork, but also new mechanics and dressing, so it keeps things interesting, but consistent. Some of the puzzles are a little obtuse, but it's neat that it doesn't just bog you down with unnecessarily detailed explanations of obvious things, so the tradeoff isn't so bad. It's definitely not a hard game; something you play more for the experience than anything. And what an experience! I'll be up front: there's a lot of "magic of love and friendship" stuff going on, so it's a little hokey at times, but if you can swallow a bit of wholesome sugar, you'll find some genuinely great moments. This is the story of a legendary hero chosen by the goddess, Eya... and it's not you; that is made readily apparent from the very beginning. It's kind of funny that only the hero gets the achievements, too; you have nothing to do with them, because it isn't your story. All the same, no matter what kinds of adventures make you tick, you're likely to find something to enjoy here; my favorite was Act 3, but each act is unique enough with its gimmick. The game is unique with its visuals, too; the colors are bright and bold, making beautiful, borderline-surreal landscapes that I just couldn't get enough of seeing. There is a small, distinct rhythm game at the end of each act, which takes place in a not-so-borderline-surreal scene that I really liked, too. Most of all, despite its starry-eyed delivery, the actual message of the overall experience is a very good one.

So good I actually felt bad about buying this on sale and bought both soundtrack volumes to make up for it.

This was a great and fun adventure game, with fantastic music, lovely characters and turned out longer than I expected (Took me about 12 hours to beat). The game has nice stylized paper-esque graphics, a good use of colours and lots of well designed people. The whole game retains a good-natured vibe throughout most of it, with just enough distress and misery for narrative purposes, and to give all the singing and dancing something to contrast, and all the small side-quests with their often unique gimmicks help a LOT to keep the game fresh, and the same goes for the various gimmicks of areas and chapters as a whole. The main singing mechanic is great but not amazing, as many of the minigames depending on it don't 100% work, mostly showing it's weakest parts when music pacing is involved. However the game is very forgiving and I only had to re-do a failed singing minigame twice. I would actually say the game might be too easy, but due to the other qualities I could easily overlook that. Puzzles are almost never difficult to figure out, the challange is in executing them, and they are rarely super hard. Another few vert small issues with the singing are: I never found a reason to use quiet-singing in the whole game, and that the tones don't often blend well with one another and even with themselves, meaning that after singing one note and moving onto another, the note transition feels a bit stark. Additionaly, since each note has different vowels of singing it that are alternated for veriety purposes, even singing the same note several times in a row can feel a bit like they don't fit it. However, thats pretty trivial in the long run. Those are pretty much all the problems I had with the game. In every other part it was fantastic. I loved the music, the dancing, the characters, all the small details such as flowers changing colour depending on what note you sing or the beds creaking when you jump on them, and all the endearing grumpy people.