(pls read my PS if you are a fellow trans person who is worried abt a scene another reviewer described as transphobic)
quite literally my most favorite game of all time. i think this games story genuinely has the power to change peoples outlook on life and their opinion of themselves for the better; and it is a story that needs to be told now more than ever. a powerful tale of friendship, hope, love, music, discovering your worth and the worth of even the smallest things, and why its worth it to keep trying and keep fighting for a better future and world even though its hard and feels damn near impossible. be prepared for some serious soul cleansing crying. if you are reading this, please play wandersong.
PS as a trans person, i personally did not interpret the scene another reviewer referred to as transphobic to be transphobic at all, i actually interpreted it the exact opposite way and was left very impressed with the trans representation in this game. however i can understand why people might be made uncomfortable by this scene. i think it is down to the individual as to whether or not this scene is bothers you.

It feels so criminal this game is overlooked so much.

Wandersong is a game where you use music to platform and solve puzzles that never manages to be unengaging even with its strange premise. You play as a bard, [INSERT NAME HERE], trying to save the universe from its oncoming death by collecting the pieces of the Earthsong. Along the way, you meet a cast of really quirky characters whose problems you try to fix with the power of SINGING!

It's a really charming game with a lot of narrative themes about the power of positivity and idealism while also being entirely unafraid to throw in deeper subject matter when it wants to like depression and inadequacy.

This game at its core is very charming and quirky with everywhere you go and everyone you meet being unique and distinctly memorable. There wasn't one character I saw later and didn't say, "Oh, I remember you!"

The game takes a lot of cues from Paper Mario in terms of art style, writing, and surprisingly enough platforming. If you like those games, you'll have no issues with Wandersong.

Well, I do have a few issues with Wandersong. While the song system is mostly integrated really well, it can make some sections really awkward like some moments that need quick reactions or precision. You're pretty much playing a twin stick while platforming and that's an inherently weird concept. Some of the puzzles can be a bit obtuse, but it's nothing I needed a guide on aside from the secret dance locations.

If there's any reason to buy this game, you can make your character do the Caramelldansen in the final boss fight. And that's amazing.

While Wandersong begins with pitch-perfect puzzles and story beats, its writing quickly becomes quite one-note, and the dragging coda will likely dissuade players from enjoying repeat performances.

Wandersong is the story of a young bard whose mission, in the face of a looming apocalypse, is to gather the pieces of the mythical Eversong, the united musical intonations of all the living, to repel disaster. The bard is joined by Miriam, a cynical but talented witch, and they visit a great many locales filled with unique denizens to seek out the keepers of the pieces of the Eversong, the Overseers.

Early on, it is established that the bard is not the hero of this tale—that would be The Hero, who wields a sword that shoots lightning and wishes to kill the Overseers to accelerate the end of the world and the creation of the next. The bard and Miriam pursue their mission peacefully, with the bard’s musical stylings the key to their success (reflecting the game itself, which with a couple notable exceptions, excels most in its choonz), whether it’s in convincing townspeople or animals to help them or by generating magical spells.

Thus, the game has a very simple subversion as the core of its gameplay and narrative. While the concept of the traditional video game hero as a raging murderous psychopath and the player’s insertion into an unbecoming, non-traditional hero isn’t new, the game uses it well enough for the opening hours. The bard and Miriam are likeable enough characters and play off each other well. You really get to share the bard’s stupid optimism and distrust of The Hero. And then it’s fun to suddenly find yourself playing as The Hero for a brief section, playing a serviceable action platformer.

As the bard, you will constantly be met with pastiche of different genres. While you’re basically always playing a puzzle platformer, some towns will have light life sim elements with day/night cycles or require small fetch quests or play more like a narrative-focused “walking sim” like Night in the Woods. The dungeons, if you can call them that, always have a new singing-controlled gimmick. Boss fights and Act-ending puzzles (used to actually learn the Earthsong) are varied enough to stay fresh, and when they work, they work well. The gameplay never gets particularly interesting, but the novelty is entertaining enough for a while.

What’s really going to make or break the game for you is if you enjoy its writing. While, like all things in Wandersong, it starts off delightful, a nagging sensation begins to form as you get deeper into the story. The problem for me is this: every single character speaks in exactly the same voice. For a game like Wandersong, where a large part of the appeal is in charming dialogue and character writing, it’s a huge issue when everyone sounds like a standard online millennial. Every single character has the same obnoxious, vaguely sarcastic way of interacting with one another. When it comes time for a character’s arc to develop, no matter what the character’s troubles or ostensible personality traits, they become unbelievably emotionally intelligent and open. I can certainly understand and appreciate that the bard is a wonderful, charming force for good in the world, but these kinds of characters typically need foils, and even the gruffest and rudest denizens of one of the half dozen or so locales the player visits talks in the same, y’know, um… voice. I certainly would never ask a game with the charm and optimistic aim of Wandersong to create emotionally ambiguous resolutions for its characters, but having the characters be characters instead of vehicles for snappy dialogue and repetitive themes about accepting themselves would be greatly appreciated. While the character designs are lovely, and I admire the ambition of creating a great ensemble cast the player would become invested in for the grand resolution, simplifying the game to include fewer characters might have helped to add to the variety of proceedings and allowed some time for characters and their arcs to breathe. By the end of the game, I found myself completely disinterested in hearing the same fucking tone of voice from another town full of people and trying to keep it down when it was force-fed to me during required story interactions contained to the main few characters.

The gameplay similarly sees the wheels fly off by the end of the game. The challenge never develops at all, and instead puzzles just cycle through new gimmicks. This is perfectly fine, but just as a mechanic seems to feel like it’s working and producing some interesting gameplay, the game cuts it off. So you’re constantly teased with fun scenarios with new abilities, just to have them ripped away for an exhausting stretch of dialogue before you move on to the next puzzle gimmick that will be completely under-utilized for a good 75% of the time you’re using it. The ending stretch doesn’t even feature fun gimmicks to begin with and often feel like tedious, simplistic slogs. It’s in these moments, where you’re sitting there doing something stupidly simple, that the little quirks start to feel extremely irritating.

My performance in the game is not really impacted by my ability to keep up with a piece of music or gameplay (the worst penalty is moving back about twenty seconds in a boss encounter at absolute worst), but I’d like to hear this song properly or react to this boss quickly (mostly so I can get one of Wandersong’s horrible boss battles over with faster). Why, oh why, does Wandersong’s metronome feature for pointing out which direction to mash your right analog stick not function like any other rhythm game ever? And why did they put dead zones between the eight input directions of the controller when your stick is resting at center? I’m not playing this on the GameCube. I’m not gonna be able to switch from one side to another (through dead center, always, for boss battles) with pinpoint accuracy if you make the dead zones show up when they’re most cumbersome!

Honestly, if Wandersong were a bit tighter, trimming off some of the more redundant areas to make a solid, say, four-act story with varied and interesting characters, these gripes about the mechanics and dialogue would probably be much more minor. But subjecting myself to seven hours of this felt like complete misery by the end. And for those of you who have finished the game, I’ll just let you imagine how red my face was as I played through that endless, tuneless epilogue cutscene… twice…

The best way to describe Wandersong's gameplay is that it's like an RPG without battles. The obstacles that the player has to overcome mostly consist of figuring out how to progress, usually by talking to townspeople in order to trigger some sequence of events. Does this mean there's nothing to the gameplay? Pretty much. This isn't a dealbreaker, as there are some dialogue-focused games that I do enjoy, but Wandersong is not one of them. The reason for this is because the dialogue is not good. There's been a recent epidemic of certain indie games all having the same brand of terrible writing- every character speaks like a teenager on the Internet. You know exactly what I'm talking about- lowercase letters, being overly "wholesome," usage of quirky language like "heck." It's all lazy, and it's all in an effort to create artificial charm and likeability that isn't really there. It's bearable in something like A Short Hike because of the gameplay around it, but when there's nothing to distract from it, like in Wandersong, it just gets really, really grating. Couple it with a boring meta-focused plot that wasn't clever the first dozen times it was done and it's almost painful.

Let's focus on the positives now- after all, that's what the game's main character would want. Although the puzzles are extremely easy, the way they're all integrated in with the singing mechanic in different ways is pretty well done. Likewise, certain wacky turns of events, like suddenly being in a non-linear platformer, or being trapped in a Majora's Mask-esque scenario, or sailing through the world map with a band of pirates, are pretty appealing and give you a reason to keep playing in spite of the dialogue. All in all, it should've fully been a rhythm game with some puzzle elements instead of just having occasional rhythm segments that are oddly impossible to fail.

Bounced off this pretty hard, abandoning it as Act 4 was about to begin. The biggest problem is the rpg sections take up a huge portion of the game-time despite being largely insipid. I'm given no reason to care about this quest beyond saving the world being a generically good thing to do, and no reason to care about these characters who are at best shallow and one-note (he's the happy one, she's the grumpy one, etc) and at worst have a habit of all blending together and sounding the same. I spent the majority of the rpg sections just bored.

The platforming and puzzle-solving sections are largely fine but rarely achieve much more than that, with the mechanics I saw varying from decent but underdeveloped, to pretty awkward. That said, I strongly disliked the song portions, which depending on which approach the game takes either lack a sense of rhythm or lack a sense of my actions actually mattering at all. Also encountered few small bugs, and the controls for the singing did not feel very smooth requiring you to be very specific with you control-stick movements.

Honestly talking myself down on this the more and more I type.

Uffa wuffa, a lo largo del juego podía sentir como subía y subía en mi top de juegos hasta quedarse como uno de mis favoritos. Es increible como logran sacar tantas cosas interesantes de una sola mecánica, y todas funcionan, y hacen de puzzles (la mayoría) interesantes.
Also, tiene al mejor protagonista de los videojuegos de todos los tiempos.
El guion es buenisimo, y explora una cantidad de tonos y emociones que se espera de un juego así.
Era casi imposible jugarlo sin una sonrisa en la cara, esperando que más iba a pasar en la historia, disfrutando de los diálogos entre los personajes, y divirtiéndose con las nuevas mecánicas que iban surgiendo.
No soy mucho de quedarme haciendo misiones secundarias, pero en este juego tenía que hablar con cada personaje, y explorar cada rama de diálogo, porque de verdad que está muy bien escrito.
Recomendadísimo, eso sí, se me hizo un poco más largo de lo esperado, pero no me quejo, disfruté cada momento del juego.

This game is pretty amazing and very underappreciated.

It's essentially a puzzle game with a large focus on narrative. The visuals are very cute, the controls are smooth enough and the audio is INCREDIBLE.

The narrative reminds me a lot of Undertale, where you travel through different locations meeting all kinds of people with different personalities and quirks, with an overall message of making friends.

The relationship of the two main characters is especially endearing and wholesome, especially since the player is watching it all blossom.

The game has a twist which is frankly genius and so well made.

My only complaint is with some puzzles which can get a little awkward with the singing controls and some sections which I think were a tad too long/slow-paced.

Overall, it's clear that this game had a LOT of heart and love poured into it by the developers. It's a very polished and thoughtful experience that will fill you with emotions.
Also, there is a DEDICATED DANCE BUTTON, with 7 DIFFERENT DANCES!!!

I expected Wandersong to be a simple light puzzle based platformer and that is just what I got. What I did not expect was the absolute heights the game would take me too emotionally. The game constantly innovates, lands the humour it attempts but most of all tells a compelling story with characters you can’t help but root for. I would go as far as to say the protagonist is the most likeable character I have ever played as. It’s use of music as a narrative tool is always enjoyable and the soundtrack is one that will stick with me for a long time. Wandersong is a beautiful and creative game that I could not recommend more highly.