Lost in Harmony

An intense, strange experience that is totally a hidden gem if you can get past the insane learning curve, occasionally broken game play and iffy graphics. You have two different methods of play- one involves dodging obstacles as the player runs toward the screen (Kinda like Crash Bandicoot) and the other quickly playing musical notes as they appear on the screen. The musical note part has no learning curve, the game basically throws it all at you immediately and expects you to win. It's very intense because you are constantly switching between dodging obstacles with one hand and then playing the musical notes on the other, occasionally being forced to manage both at the same time. It took me about two hours of building up the muscle memory in my left hand to play the keyboard parts - kinda like learning an instrument. You have to use all four fingers on the left hand to hit the notes and you can't remap the controls which is super annoying. On each stage there are three big orbs and you pretty much need to grab them to ensure you go over 50% completion to beat the stage. 50% completion sounds easy but on hard difficulty a few of the levels are near impossible because if you make one mistake as the game throws 100 notes and other obstacles like boulders and birds at you, it deducts so much that you are basically at 0%. You are given a ranking at the end of each stage from C-A and this doesn't seem to have any effect on anything. The game keeps track of the orbs and level completion so I suppose 100% completion simply involves beating all stages on normal and hard. There are two different campaigns and since you can beat them on normal and hard for a different experience it took me about 10 hours to 100% complete. It was based on a mobile game which maybe explains why the game is at times broken, expecting you to do superhuman things when on the mobile game you could simply tap the screen to dodge. With that said, the musical choices are somewhat odd but a lot of them are genius, especially the classical and rock tracks. Getting into the vibe of the music is really satisfying and this is a super underrated game that fans of "musical timing" games should definitely check out. Just keep in mind that the graphics are a bit iffy, some appearing to just be real images that were altered in photoshop to give the illusion that they are drawn.