A little while back I reviewed a game called Iconoclasts that had good music, beautiful and intricate pixel art, and flawless gameplay that just… didn’t quite do it for me due to an overabundance of stilted dialogue. In the end I gave it a moderately good review, because it was an objectively good game and just because it didn’t do it for me doesn’t preclude it from doing it for someone else. I am now faced with reviewing Wandersong, a game with clunky platforming, not-so-great music (but more on that later), and an overabundance of dialogue that did it for me so much that I am sad to have finished it. It’s fitting that towards the end of Wandersong you have a conversation with a dog-fairy who barks at you and explains that “the separation of all things is an illusion! We are all part of the same whole!!!” because Wandersong is so much more than the sum of its parts.
In Wandersong there are no weapons, no health bars, and no stats. This might suggest that it’s some kind of point and click adventure minus the pointing and clicking, and while that genre’s pixel hunting is an occasional touchstone, Wandersong is something entirely different. The main gameplay mechanics are jumping, singing via a musical wheel that you control with the right stick of your controller, and talking. There is more talking per hour in Wandersong than in any pretentious JRPG I’ve ever played, so if talking doesn’t do it for you, you might as well exit stage left. Luckily, if talking does do it for you, the dialogue is wonderful. You play as a bard who I will heretofore refer to as Enid*. After a visit from the rainbow-haired Eyala, an emissary from the world’s creator, it is clear that you are not the great hero the world needs because you cannot wield a sword to save your life, nevermind the world. But hold on, maybe you can help out anyway by finding a bunch of God-monster-animal things that represent concepts like dreams and chaos and the sun and learning songs from them!
From that moment on, a magical, musical, colourful adventure unfolds. This game really is colourful. Every landscape has its own palate, from a bright set of islands to a cool, muted snowy city to a neon nightmare at the end of the world. Enid’s musical wheel also changes from landscape to landscape in order to better reflect the world around the bard. The colours aren’t the only things that change on your musical wheel. The wheel changes musical modes as well, from ionian to mixolydian to lydian and to others in-between as the music in the background changes.
Is this constantly changing music any good, though? Not exactly. A large part of the design philosophy behind Wandersong sprouts from the idea that everything needs to be easy and that failure should be rare and less likely than success, so the actual music-game aspects of this music game sound… awful. The lines you play are simple, but controlling the music wheel with the left stick is awfully inaccurate and you will find yourself playing glissandos through sections that shouldn’t have glissandos and accidentally throwing your joy con’s stick towards an empty space between notes. But is this really such a bad thing? The twin ideas of fun and no wrong notes are baked deeply into the story and mood of Wandersong. It features as its protagonist a bard incapable of holding a sword who wanders the world telling folks that anyone can sing, even when they can’t, and so it feels right that you aren’t actually the world’s greatest singer.
The story is beautiful and poignant if more than a little candy-sweet and naive. It’s a great game for kids and adults alike (provided they like reading a lot of text) and the characters each have interesting arcs and motivations. Enid’s friend Miriam, a grumpy witch who misses her Grandma Saphy, is my favourite. It will surprise no one that while she remains her grumpy self throughout the game, she learns all about the meaning of friendship and gets a little bit better at expressing her feelings by the end. There are pirates and mermaids and people with animal familiars and frog fairies and musicians of all shapes and sizes to jam with in Wandersong. There’s even an actual sword-wielding hero who is kind of a dick!
And now, the bad. The platforming in Wandersong is clunky to the point that in the small handful of sections that do not feature extremely forgiving platforming, you might want to scream at the television and drown out whatever pleasant harmonies are being sung on your screen. But there isn’t very much difficult platforming in Wandersong, and it bucks the trend in indie games towards absurd, neo-arcade levels of difficulty. As weird as it sounds, this isn’t a game about the controls. It’s a game about mood and it is designed to bring a smile to your face. It certainly brought one to mine.
I am terrible about finishing the games I play, although I’m trying to be better about it for the sake of this blog. I finished Wandersong in a couple of days and about ten hours of in-game time, and genuinely wished that it could last forever. It’s the kind of game designed for a person like me who likes to mosey around and talk to every NPC until I exhaust their dialogue tree just to hear what they have to say. So much time and care and thought was put into the dialogue in this game. At one point you run into a town historian who gives you the backstory of every single character and place in the town. He says that there is always more backstory, but after 10+ minutes (!!!) of repeatedly asking for it he finally tells you that he’s run out. Sure, Wandersong is janky in parts and lacks the polish of a number of other games of its ilk, but it is eminently playable. As Enid says at one point in the game, “Even if it’s not okay, it will be okay.” And Wandersong is much better than okay.
*You can name the bard whatever you want, but Enid is obviously the best name for this particular bard