I am of an age where most of my school memories are a jumbled haze, except for the occasional trauma nugget that likes to surface at inopportune times. (Everyone has those, right? Right?) Anyway, one of the few concrete recollections I have is that of a music lesson on tone (or symphonic, for the big word fanciers) poems. The concept fascinated me, the idea of using music to not just set tone and mood, but to tell a story, to conjure specific images in the mind of the listener.
A Musical Story reviewPublisher: DigeratiDeveloper: Glee-Cheese StudioPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out March 2nd on PS4/5, 3rd on Switch, 4th on Xbox, PC, mobile.
Playing A Musical Story made me think of tone poems. One glance at any of the screenshots accompanying this review will make it obvious to all but the most unobservant that the game does have actual images alongside the music, but they’re intimately entwined. There’s no dialogue and the animated scenes lean on the side of being vignettes, so the music isn’t just background noise, it’s doing the heavy lifting.
A Musical Story | Release Date Trailer | PS5/PS4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, X/S, PC, IOS & Android Watch on YouTube
Thankfully, the soundtrack is more than up to the task. If I was going to pick any one part of the game to effusively gush over, it would be the music. Which is probably a good thing, for a rhythm game. It’s a sort of lo-fi electronic rendition of cool 70’s psychedelic rock that pushes words like “funky” and “groovy” to the forefront of my brain. I’ve actually been poking around to see if there was some way of just playing the soundtrack so I could have it on while writing this review, but it doesn’t seem to be a feature in the game itself and the soundtrack isn’t unlocked on Steam at the time of writing. Rest assured, I will be there as soon as it is, even if I have to buy it separately.
This music is ostensibly coming from a Hendrix-esque young man called Gabriel and his bandmates. The story is framed as a series of our protagonist’s memories being recalled as he lies in a critical condition in a hospital bed. We’re spun a tale of Gabe and chums ditching their dead-end jobs to take a road trip, their ultimate goal being to perform at a festival. While not quite as outstanding as the tunes it accompanies, A Musical Story’s animation is also lovely. Similarly lo-fi, it combines a couple of distinct artistic styles to great effect, especially in the later parts of the story.
The game is split into twenty-odd chapters, each chapter is a single track, which is further divided into sections of a few bars, about ten seconds or so of music. You listen to each section and then replicate it using two button controls that were clearly designed with a touch screen in mind. Succeed and proceed to the next section, another snatch of music, another few seconds of animation. Fail and you repeat the section. Over and over and over and over.