Review | Game Over - A Musical RPG?? - An Interesting Band With A Sloppy Drummer
I like this trend — the “rhythm and something else” genre. I'm not sure where it started, maybe Crypt of the Necrodancer, but I'm hooked. Rhythm-dungeon crawler. Rhythm-shooter. Rhythm-action. And today, we’ve landed on rhythm-RPG. Except, not really.
Game Over - A Musical RPG?? compartmentalises the two modes of play hinted at by its mouthful of a title to mixed results. When it’s a rhythm game, it's Guitar Hero (or Rock Band, whichever you prefer) with some light twists thrown in. There's really not much else to say about it. Charts consist of lanes where coloured icons travel downward and into a well at the bottom of the screen. Press the button when the icon is in the well. Again, it's Guitar Hero. Thematically, Game Over ties its disparate genres together mostly through framing. The songs you're playing are actually battles, slotted into the game where you'd otherwise expect a more traditional RPG fight. Characters challenge you not to duels, but to duets. The charts themselves start off painfully easy, and though they do eventually rise in difficulty, it's never enough to offer too substantial a challenge for players with years of experience pressing buttons, whacking drums, or stepping on arrows in time with high-speed soundtracks.
Instead, Game Over keeps you awake with cute gimmicks. During the tutorial/final boss (more on that later) the lane itself starts to curve and bend, obscuring some visual information. Sometime later, you’ll be pressing the spacebar to answer phone calls — that is, get giant, obtrusive office phones off the screen so you can see the notes you're supposed to be hitting. It’s pretty funny, and the game gets more and more ridiculous with these gimmicks as it goes on. It even manages to wring some genuine drama out of these gimmicks as the plot progresses.
So what about the RPG side of this musical RPG? Game Over is going for a charm of the Earthbound variety, and aesthetically it accomplishes the mission flawlessly. Character designs are delightfully low in detail. Especially when compared to the relative complexity put into character portraits seen during dialogue, the overworld sprites grant the game’s cast the “silly little guys” status many other games try to achieve, and make hitting the mark look easy. That's nothing compared to the incredible choice to represent characters’ voices with different musical instruments, cheerfully bouncing between notes for each syllable. Not only do the instruments cleverly showcase the personalities of the voices they represent — a soft woodwind for someone refined, and punchy strings for a more boisterous character — but they’re even used to denote one’s tone, becoming louder as characters yell or quieter as they whisper. In short, it's fun stuff! It’s the kind of decision that gives the game its own flavour without ever becoming distracting.
On the other hand, some of Game Over’s writing leans a little too close to its contemporaries to feel fresh. There’s a sign just a few minutes into the game instructing the player that the nearest town is “to the right,” before adding, “your right, not mine.” Yes yes, this sign makes sense in a top-down video game but not in real life, very witty. It’s the kind of gag that would’ve gotten a laugh maybe a decade ago, but feels a little played out in the modern indie space. Then again, I’d be lying if I said the game didn’t draw more than a few smiles out of me, and even the most predictable non-sequiturs and meta moments never outright offended me. At its worst, it’s harmless, and at its best, it is, truth be told, actually pretty funny.
The ongoing joke that I never found to get old involves the protagonist himself. Visually, he absolutely no-sells all the wacky occurrences around him, which is always a great laugh in its own right. This is made funnier by the shocking amount of potential the games offers you for cruelty in the form of binary choices during dialogue. You can dismiss, bully, or outright terrorise the townsfolk in this game, and you'll seemingly never be meaningfully judged for it. The protagonist is a blank slate, moulded by however you're feeling at the moment, to such an extent that the game even asks for your permission before allowing the poor guy to hug his father. Whether you're a put-upon hero, a quiet sociopath, or somewhere in the middle, there's bound to be something here that teases a laugh out of you.
Game Over’s early stages come in the shape of a string of random gags, but there is a story here, and a pretty fun one. It opens with you defeating a dragon and saving a princess. The tutorial in this game is also seemingly the final boss of this particular tale, and the rest of the game happens in the wake of your victory.
Oooh, that’s why it’s called Game Over.
It’s a premise you might be familiar with, but it plays well here in conjunction with the game’s self-aware analysis of RPGs as a whole. You’re recognised by the owner of the weapons shop, but rather than hail you as a hero, she tells you her business is dead and it’s your fault. As it turns out, your quest was apparently the only quest in the land, and an economy built on the needs of heroes can’t sustain itself when you’ve just gone and Guitar Hero’d the sole villain in the world to death. What are all these people supposed to do now?
Elsewhere, characters will impose mind-numbingly dull tasks upon you. The game usually gives you the chance to back out, but it's hard to say no to these requests. You just slayed a dragon, right? Surely you can go get this guy’s watch and bring it back to him? I can’t stress enough just how much garbage (and make no mistake, it’s garbage) these characters ask you to do for them. As with any game that tries to bore you on purpose, Game Over treads some perilous ground, but it manages to stick the landing thanks to its always absurd humour. Like, fine, I’ll watch this couple’s sheep to make sure no one bullies it while they go get sandwich ingredients. The endless reminders that this is all expected of you, slayer of the tutorial dragon and saviour of the world, are the connective tissue for this long string of jokes.
When the larger narrative starts to kick in, it's standard for the genre. Travel to a new area, meet the locals, try to solve thei- Wait…oh, no. Did that sprite just turn into a glitchy mess of pixels while the game played a bit-crushed scare chord?
Alright, yeah, cat's out of the bag. Remember when I said this game is going for the Earthbound charm? A lot of games go for the Earthbound charm. And some of them (a lot of them) (okay, pretty much all of them) dip their toes, at varying lengths, into a sort of meta-horror characterised by…Actually, let's just cut to the chase. Yes, Game Over is another Earthbound-type game that puts a red filter over the screen and starts letting dialogue run past its text boxes. Ever since Doki Doki Literature Club asked players to go check up on the girl next door, it seems the indie scene can’t escape its obsession with disarmingly cute games disguising loud and shocking horror, and it’s in the particular subgenre of those quirky “Earthbound-em-ups” that we’ve seen this at its most prevalent.
To its credit, Game Over takes the twist (if we can even call it one at this point) in an interesting direction. Rather than save the scares for the end of the game, or tease them slowly before a big reveal, this game rips the Band-Aid right off within two or three hours. Go do some silly quests, meet some NPCs, watch a few cutscenes, and then, bam, glitchy floor tiles, characters disappearing when you walk up to them, reversed music, the works. It’s refreshing to see a game respect players' intelligence enough to just get to the point, rather than endlessly threaten them with a shoe that takes too long to drop. That’s not the interesting part, though. No, what fascinates me is that the game goes in a decidedly not psychological angle for its psychological horror. It’s not a Lynchian hellscape you’ve been transported to, a secret root-of-all-evil, or the self-inflicted mental torture of a guilt-ridden protagonist. Instead, it’s just, to put it simply, something that’s happening. The other characters are just as involved in it as you are, and their reactions don't depict terror so much as general annoyance. You go find your dad (humorously calm as his own sprite glitches in and out of existence) and he tasks you with solving the problem afflicting your town. So, you leave on your adventure, and, in a wonderful surprise, the game just sort of chills out. Things go back to normal. Turns out the entire world isn’t experiencing this nightmare, just your town. The game winds up a bit unwieldy in tone as a result of this, but, again, it’s an Earthbound-inspired indie game. What were you expecting?
Where the recurring glitchy-hell-world segments finally threatened to win me over was when the game started to reveal to me what exactly was on its mind. To say too much would spoil what would probably be for many people their favourite element of the game, but what I can say is that this is a game that feels terrified of mortality, and through its horror elements it explores that theme competently enough for me. In the end, it still wasn't enough to excite me, but I can at least appreciate Game Over’s unique riff on familiar tropes.
What I can’t appreciate is when the spooky glitchy stuff starts to overstay its welcome. Actually, just about everything in Game Over manages to overstay its welcome, with the exception of the rhythm game it claims itself to be. It’s never as bad as it is during the opening hours, where the game tutorialises you on how to press buttons in time to music, and then proceeds to be three hours of walking, talking, side-questing, dialogue-choicing, and getting startled by bit-crushed scare chords. Only after you leave the first town does Game Over - A Musical RPG?? remember that it's a musical RPG. It’s as if the question marks in the title are coming from the game itself, surprised as it recalls that there's supposed to be a rhythm game somewhere in this rhythm game.
It’s hard to overstate just how much I was begging to see some colourful icons synced up to music during those first few hours. The “RPG” holding up the other end of the subtitle isn’t one of much gameplay substance, with no exciting stat management or careful character building, and featuring player choices rivalled in rarity only by their inconsequentiality. In practice, Game Over is more of a puzzle/adventure game with occasional dips into rhythm game territory. At first I was offended, like I’d been bamboozled into playing something I didn’t sign up for. It was never as brutal as it was during the game’s long introductory sequence, but it's hard to say when looking back if Game Over eventually found its footing, or if I simply recalibrated my expectations. With a change in mindset, I was able to come to peace with the game's approach. The writing here cuts it very close, but it manages to be just funny and good-natured enough for me to forgive the pacing issues most of the time. Personality can go a long way.
But then Game Over broke my heart.
I won't waste your time preening myself over my ability to press buttons in time with music, but I can assure you I've chased full combos and conquered expert modes across enough rhythm games for you to trust that it isn't "just a me thing" when I say: some of these charts are just off. They’re out of sync. The songs do not match up with the charts 100% of the time. Rhythmically perfect — it's the one thing a rhythm game has to be, always has to be, and Game Over unfortunately isn’t. It’s not common, mind you. By no means is every track in the game broken. But still, some of them are, and that’s just not something that I can offer any leeway on. Imagine, for a moment, a game where pressing the A Button only caused Mario to jump most of the time. It’ll be infrequent, but our beloved boy, our reliable hero, will always run the risk of, just maybe, ignoring his instructions to jump and keeping his feet planted on the ground. That feeling, that sense of betrayal, is what it's like to play a rhythm game that sometimes goes out of sync.
This isn't a sweeping admonishment of Game Over. I wouldn't be so cruel as that. But still, it's a critical issue — a lethal issue — that leaves me unable to call the game anything but unfinished. Thankfully, that's all it is. It may seem unfair to recommend a hypothetical future version of a game, but we live in an era of updates and patches, and this game, though undeniably in need of some maintenance, shouldn't be written for an error so easy to fix. There is a very cool game trapped beneath this damning flaw, and I look forward to getting to experience it later down the line. So, sorry to the developer, but you've got some more work to do. Turns out, this game is very much not over.
