Other games have incorporated music into their designs before, but they're usually concerned more with some aspect of content generation through custom music as in Symphony or Sound Shapes. Enemies may spawn faster, for instance, or a level's contours may grow more jagged. Beatbuddy takes a more ambitious approach. Everything, friend or foe, dances to the same tune, bringing its own unique timbre to the surrounding symphony and hinting at a profound message concerning the interdependency of all life.
It’s the characters on screen that actually make the music, in other words, rather than being affected by it--and this difference is enough that you might find yourself heading back to a particular spot to enjoy a catchy groove one last time. Almost all of the gameplay involves some sort of puzzle-solving in tandem with their actions--drag a hidden key to this slot, activate the power for that door, figure out how to knock a wall down to progress—and the focus on rhythm asserts itself even when you punch and use a submersible’s machine gun to shoot through obstacles.
Fortunately, the narrative makes up in character what it lacks in depth. When characters speak, they do so through beatboxing--sometimes a little excessively--and when you step away from the keyboard and leave Beat to his own devices, he bobs his head to the music as though he were in an iPod ad and not struggling to save the land of Symphonia from crappy music. Elements of the world pulse with the rhythms; for instance, you find sea anemones waving their tentacles with all the fervor of dancers at a rave.
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