I looked forward to this game, and while I have to admit it's extremely cute, and the songs are catchy, the game feels inconsistent. Unlike in similar game like Rhythm Heaven, you can't "sight read" moves, you kind of have to learn when you're supposed to hit, instead of being able to clearly hear or see it.

The minigames are cute, the songs are nice or catchy, but I am not a fan of the way they set up the rhythm game itself. I might pick it up again later, but for now I am hopping off. Maybe I just need to not take it so seriously.

'Rhythm Heaven' for the mellow-minded. Soft swings to the ticking tempo of a metronome, Melatonin is a collection of highly polished rhythm minigames that seek to get your feet tapping to the beat. Each of the twelve minigames are vastly different with a unique mechanic, whether that be holding a button and releasing it to the right beat or quickly tapping in succession, and imbue the surrealism of our dreams. Dreaming about our past is represented by burning photographs, where each sized polaroid film indicates a different beat. Imagining about social media followers (because there are some bleak people out there who do...) gets you jumping between apps while you maintain the tempo.

They all fit this lo-fi aesthetic beautifully and really come together in the climactic chapter remix levels, constantly switching between the minigames you just played in one track. Hard mode really adds to that intensity! It's constantly fun despite how aggressively short it is (gimme more!) but the target of achieving perfect scores may entice you to become a rhythm master. You can also create your own levels with your own songs!

Energy Drink Companion

While the low fi beats to sleep to aesthetic of this represents as a decent introductory reference point for building confidence that rhythm games aren't that hard. It would be a tenuous one, since as Patricia covers it doesn't introduce the concept of sycopation at all, its just a 'clap along' game with several different inputs.

It's interesting to see that people are bringing up comparisons to rhythm heaven because in actual fact I think this game only 'works' if you dont know that game exists and dont get access to it. I might not ever beat rhythm heaven but even what I've played of it I know its way more engaging than this is. For instance in the first 3 levels of Rhythm Heaven you have tap, drag, hold input varience introduction. In Melatonin you dont have that level of varience introduced until 10 levels in. Melatonin wants to be easy in order to guide the player through its highly cultivated visual experience rather than test the player. Sure I got stumped in a few situations but only because it relies so heavily on visual clap along that are often unclear. It became at most a matter of resetting once or twice. Meanwhile in rhythm heaven you might get stuck on a level for a while and might even have to redo the ealier ones again.

So if it relies so heavily on its visual stimulus what is there to say about it? Well the funny thing about trying to write around visual art is that any reader could easily just look at it and decide for themselves which is why I tend not to focus on that too much in most of my write ups. Here though its worth stressing that when you actually are enveloped in this pastel wonderland and having to input in response to it, its appalling. There are a few cases where they remove the visual stimulus like for example in the Mind level where the character gets sleepy and you only see a fraction of the screen. It becomes more bearable to play in this condition. It's often better to input based on sound queues to instead of simple visual responses for a few of the levels as well

The symbolism itself is also both trite and exceptionally late capitalist in its blunt depiction of a dreamscape as economically fueled. There's no surrealism in this, this isn't utilizing the bizzare of dream logic or its distress in the way Un Chien Andalou or firths Sock series would, we aren't working with the dream brush of a Dali here. We aren't even working with a disneyesque one ala Alice and Wonderland (1951). It's a collagan mash of Late Burton and the weakest late 10's cartoon network animation (Bee and Puppycat and We Bare Bears).

If you can believe it theres also some frusterating UI choices to. If you beat the combination levels at the end of each night and press the button you are throw immediately into the 'hard mode' version, but you can bypass it by just going to the map. If you aren't playing the hard mode versions of the levels before, why would you want to now. If you want to go back to try levels from previous nights you would have to rifle through a bunch of menus to get there to even look at a section of them, rather than just have it be a simple overworld. Trying to make the overworld 'immersive' at the expense of actually being able to just discern which levels you've done is one element I complained about in my Pizza Tower diagnostic. I was being nice about it there but now I'm just enourmously frusterated in retrospect, if you are proud of your level design why stuff it away in a cupboard like that? A non-discerning eye might try to blame it on something like Mario Galaxy for introducing the idea of an immersive hubworld. I would actually say this is more the consequences of even earlier Mario games (World, 3, etc.) and its 'nostalgic' reintroduction recently with the 3D World titles. If I felt any softness for either of these two games, that it had a rare moment where I was enjoying it. Its been sullied by treating their own gamespace in such a segmented fashion. Even with the game as short as it is, there should be as little interrupting me from entering levels as possible. It's a design approach that puts the idea of difficulty scaling over any desire for mastery. What it ends up incentivizing is not a gratification of completing certain sections but instead, fully restarting from the beggining and going as perfect as you can through each.

What we have is a game too afraid to commit either to strange visual abudance or difficulty scaling. Trapped in a limbo of their own curation, your protagonist limbers in a wasteland of millenial tropes. Letting tindr and monster energy imprint into thier headspace while they continue the stereotypes of Avacado Toast consumption. While the stereotype never arises to a level of offensiveness that a racial one does, its nonetheless irritating and vacuous. If its a parody of that landscape, its too cheeky to stand for anything.

If anybody accuses you of not engaging with art outside your comfort zone, I give you permission to roll your eyes and throw something like this at them, ask if this is what they want you to try out instead. If it is, dont let them pester you. No need to have such a somambulant relationship with the world.

Melatonin is some of the most fun I've had with rhythm games in general. The relaxing low-fi aesthetic of the game is great and a fantastic way to end a day. Overall, the only complaints I really have are: the game doesn't have an auto-calibration for delay, meaning you have to manually try and figure out what works for you, which can be a bit annoying at the start of the game. The game also doesn't have online features that I'm aware of, so all you can do is edit the levels yourself and play the edited versions you made.

In the end, it was really fun getting all the perfect scores for all the levels, and all I would really want is for the game to be a little longer.