Gaming & Culture —

Review: Sound Shapes makes beautiful music, platforming

Abstract art style, driving rhythms combine for a mesmerizing experience.

Just another day in the pixel mines.
Just another day in the pixel mines.
Queasy Games
Music games can generally be divided into two broad categories: games that ask you to take part in making the music, and games where the music drives the gameplay. Sound Shapes straddles the line between those two types of games while layering an incredibly satisfying, abstract take on 2D platform games on top as well.

As you know if you've read our previous coverage, Sound Shapes turns you into nothing more than a small, sticky circle, caught in a world full of simple, abstract shapes rendered primarily in stark, solid colors. The goal is to roll and hop around to collect floating coins dotted around the game's rooms while avoiding enemies and their attacks, which are helpfully highlighted in a deadly red.

It sounds simple, and it is, as far as the gameplay is concerned (though the designers do a good job of stretching the simple concept as far as it can go, with levels that force you to make smart use of the jumping and sticking mechanics). But what makes the game really stand out is the way that each coin you collect activates a note that gets layered into a constantly evolving, mesmerizing backbeat that follows you from room to room.

The position of each coin corresponds to the pitch and beat of the note, turning each room into a sort of visual representation of the beats you're building. The enemies make noise and fire projectiles in time with the music too, helping you time some tricky jumps and making each room feel like it's pulsating to the beat. It's a mesmerizing effect that has a way of making the world around you seem to fade away, especially if you play with a good set of headphones.

The general concept is done a great service by the visual artists and experienced music makers who have bent that concept to their will, making each built-in stage in the game into a work of art. I was especially impressed with the levels from Canadian singer-songwriter Jim Guthrie and Sword and Sworcery creators Superbrothers, who created a playable world of corporate drudgery and automation run amok. Other levels manage to convey a sense of unsettling urban alienation or twisted gaming nostalgia just as well, with the help of musical artists like Beck and Deadmau5.

The game is littered with frequent checkpoints, and there's no set number of lives, a forgiving design that makes it pretty easy to blaze through each multi-room stage in turn. You'll likely come back, though, as an excuse to see and hear those rhythms again, and to perfect your speed runs for the leaderboards. For those seeking more of a challenge, a series of unlockable, single room "death mode" coin-collecting tasks will keep you struggling to their hypnotic beat for hours.

Sound Shapes launch trailer

Sound Shapes isn't all about consuming these platforming works of art, though. The game integrates a wonderfully intuitive level editor that makes great use of the Vita's touchscreen and rear panel for easy positioning, scaling, and rotation of a great variety of platforms, springboards, hazards, and enemies (editing levels using the PS3 controller is functional, but much less intuitive). The editor is also, by necessity, a pretty decent music sequencer, allowing for some incredibly complex, layered soundscapes. Even musical novices (like myself) can create backgrounds that don't sound half bad within minutes.

The real proof of the level editor's success is in the wide variety of inspired user-created levels that are already populating the game's servers (In fact, one of the reasons this review is coming so long after the game came out is because I wanted to see how this developed). Alongside the obvious entries of simple, off-key versions of the Mario or Zelda themes are a surprising number of multi-room creations that show some real ingenuity in both platforming and musical design.

The creators at Queasy Games are also continuing to throw together and add some free levels of their own to the community showcase, which is a welcome development in a world dominated by overpriced DLC level packs. This kind of continuing community support is what has me most excited about coming back to Sound Shapes, hopefully for a long time to come.

My only real problems with the game were technical snafus. There's a handy cloud sync feature that is supposed to let you transfer your progress between the PS3 and Vita versions of the game (and back again), but I wasn't able to get it to work despite multiple tries over many days. I also had periodic problems signing in to the Sound Shapes servers to compete with the leaderboards or to download user-created levels.

If those back-end problems get solved, it's going to be hard for me to point to a single thing I don't love about Sound Shapes. The more original, inventive, and just plain engrossing indie experiences Sony can attract to their systems, the better off they'll be.

(Reviewer's note: This review is based on time spent playing both the PS3 and Vita versions of Sound Shapes. The gameplay experience is largely identical, with the only major difference coming in the level editor. Buying the game once gives users access to both versions of the game through a feature known as cross-play.)

Verdict: Buy It

You must to comment.

Channel Ars Technica