MELANCHOLIC...
Sorry I meant Melatonin, is a relaxing rhythm heaven inspired game that has a very inspired gameplay but still needed the tweaking of making sure that the game felt fair with it's inputs.
I can't say there's a story other than it's more a message the developer is giving out, which is to stop stressing over things and try to live your life without the internal worries you might have. Try to balance out your day and try not to get sucked in a black hole of procrastination or addictiveness. Try to move forward with your live and stop comparing yourself to others and try to move forward with your day to day.
The game can absolutely come off as pretentious and to a certain extend condescending as there is no real story and the character you play as is just a representation of youth/modern adults today.
Since most of the activities within each level consists of things like:
- Worrying about social media
- Worrying about love in terms of dating apps/modern dating
- Getting addicted to video games
- Having too many desires
- Overstressing yourself
- Thinking about your Mind and it's overall health, the Time you have in life, the vastness of Space, and tranquility with Nature
- Staying Health in terms of physically while attempting to copy others in order to look good by constantly comparing yourself to others.
The character lives the day by day in a depressing state of never ending feeling of sadness and constant neutrality of just accepting whatever situation they're in. They literally think about the past and future, with the past minigame being represented as a hanger of photos with the character burning photos of their past, almost representing the natural or purposeful decay or forgetting of past memories. While the future... this one is dumb and has no meaning and is just the character in a space ship shooting aliens, unless it represents something about humans not being on planet Earth as our technology improves and our planet dies we conquer others maybe??? Idk the message here is tonally monotone.
The music for each individual minigame is nice with it's own gymic in terms of timing however most of the time whenever you mess up it's because the calibration was never precise and I found myself constantly switching between the game controllers (Regular pro controller and Gamecube Controller) I used because some minigames worked with the Pro better, and some with the Gamecube Controller better (though in the end I stuck with the Gamecube controller better). The calibration of the game just felt off even when you manually decide to delay or speed up the input via the options screen.
The game features 4 nights and a morning chapter where in each night there are 5 levels: 4 of which have a subtitle of what they represent, and the final being a mashup. The levels themselves all have nice music, but I swear the mashups in Nights 1 and 2 are straight up garbage in terms of their sound design. Nights 3 and 4, and morning mashups all sound great, not sure why the developers thought Nights 1 and 2's final levels have such garbage songs.
Nights 1-4 feature the 4 unique levels and 5th mashup levels, while Morning just features 1 level and it a general mashup off all the levels from the entire game as a final test.
The game features both a normal and hard mode for each level and even a editor mode in case you want to challenge yourself with a custom made level you yourself made... not sure if there is a way to download or get other people's remixes/edited levels but probably not.
I think a big issue with the game is that it uses a lofi tone which is relaxing but I think what made something like Rhythm heaven unique was is uniqueness of different styles and having a great payoff with all minigames coming together in the Remix levels.
Clearly this is an homage to Rhythm Heaven, but I feel like the subtle messaging the developers inserted, got in the way of actually making the game feel more memorable and as a worthy addition to Rhythm Heaven styled games.
I think a big issues is how unsatisfying the entire game feels with it's animation in terms of what the game is showing us with the hoodie wearing protagonist throughout his nights, living an overall sickening/pathetically melancholic live, and the final chapter Morning just gives a depressing undertone of "the Day has started a new, but next week will be a repeat of the same issues"
There is no real ending to this game in terms of the character just wakes up and sees that it's morning, it's very anticlimatic and unsatisfying.
Overall I can't say it's bad, since it's not. It's fine, it's meh, it's whatever it's relaxing, but has a pretentious undertone with a lofi twist. With an nonexistant story, and bad remixes for 2 of the nights. The gameplay is fun but can become annoying because of how unsure the developers were about how to exactly calibrate the game where inputs are specific to the controller or keyboard button being used. The game can be relaxing but also the perfectionist in me causes me to also despise aspects of where clearly the game messed up a correct input, where things like Pressing A in the exact Rhythm of a previous input of A, somehow results in a 1/3 chance of either being perfect, but mostly feels like you're going to mess up.
And while some people might say "that's why they added the calibration in the options" it still feels like it's never precise on inputs, maybe that part is on me, but legit it feels like the game is messing you up rather than the controllers you use are.
Idk, It's fine, but i'll forget it after 3 days.
What I won't forget is how depressing this game feels.
It certainly is MELANCHOLIC, I mean Melatonin
Sorry I meant Melatonin, is a relaxing rhythm heaven inspired game that has a very inspired gameplay but still needed the tweaking of making sure that the game felt fair with it's inputs.
I can't say there's a story other than it's more a message the developer is giving out, which is to stop stressing over things and try to live your life without the internal worries you might have. Try to balance out your day and try not to get sucked in a black hole of procrastination or addictiveness. Try to move forward with your live and stop comparing yourself to others and try to move forward with your day to day.
The game can absolutely come off as pretentious and to a certain extend condescending as there is no real story and the character you play as is just a representation of youth/modern adults today.
Since most of the activities within each level consists of things like:
- Worrying about social media
- Worrying about love in terms of dating apps/modern dating
- Getting addicted to video games
- Having too many desires
- Overstressing yourself
- Thinking about your Mind and it's overall health, the Time you have in life, the vastness of Space, and tranquility with Nature
- Staying Health in terms of physically while attempting to copy others in order to look good by constantly comparing yourself to others.
The character lives the day by day in a depressing state of never ending feeling of sadness and constant neutrality of just accepting whatever situation they're in. They literally think about the past and future, with the past minigame being represented as a hanger of photos with the character burning photos of their past, almost representing the natural or purposeful decay or forgetting of past memories. While the future... this one is dumb and has no meaning and is just the character in a space ship shooting aliens, unless it represents something about humans not being on planet Earth as our technology improves and our planet dies we conquer others maybe??? Idk the message here is tonally monotone.
The music for each individual minigame is nice with it's own gymic in terms of timing however most of the time whenever you mess up it's because the calibration was never precise and I found myself constantly switching between the game controllers (Regular pro controller and Gamecube Controller) I used because some minigames worked with the Pro better, and some with the Gamecube Controller better (though in the end I stuck with the Gamecube controller better). The calibration of the game just felt off even when you manually decide to delay or speed up the input via the options screen.
The game features 4 nights and a morning chapter where in each night there are 5 levels: 4 of which have a subtitle of what they represent, and the final being a mashup. The levels themselves all have nice music, but I swear the mashups in Nights 1 and 2 are straight up garbage in terms of their sound design. Nights 3 and 4, and morning mashups all sound great, not sure why the developers thought Nights 1 and 2's final levels have such garbage songs.
Nights 1-4 feature the 4 unique levels and 5th mashup levels, while Morning just features 1 level and it a general mashup off all the levels from the entire game as a final test.
The game features both a normal and hard mode for each level and even a editor mode in case you want to challenge yourself with a custom made level you yourself made... not sure if there is a way to download or get other people's remixes/edited levels but probably not.
I think a big issue with the game is that it uses a lofi tone which is relaxing but I think what made something like Rhythm heaven unique was is uniqueness of different styles and having a great payoff with all minigames coming together in the Remix levels.
Clearly this is an homage to Rhythm Heaven, but I feel like the subtle messaging the developers inserted, got in the way of actually making the game feel more memorable and as a worthy addition to Rhythm Heaven styled games.
I think a big issues is how unsatisfying the entire game feels with it's animation in terms of what the game is showing us with the hoodie wearing protagonist throughout his nights, living an overall sickening/pathetically melancholic live, and the final chapter Morning just gives a depressing undertone of "the Day has started a new, but next week will be a repeat of the same issues"
There is no real ending to this game in terms of the character just wakes up and sees that it's morning, it's very anticlimatic and unsatisfying.
Overall I can't say it's bad, since it's not. It's fine, it's meh, it's whatever it's relaxing, but has a pretentious undertone with a lofi twist. With an nonexistant story, and bad remixes for 2 of the nights. The gameplay is fun but can become annoying because of how unsure the developers were about how to exactly calibrate the game where inputs are specific to the controller or keyboard button being used. The game can be relaxing but also the perfectionist in me causes me to also despise aspects of where clearly the game messed up a correct input, where things like Pressing A in the exact Rhythm of a previous input of A, somehow results in a 1/3 chance of either being perfect, but mostly feels like you're going to mess up.
And while some people might say "that's why they added the calibration in the options" it still feels like it's never precise on inputs, maybe that part is on me, but legit it feels like the game is messing you up rather than the controllers you use are.
Idk, It's fine, but i'll forget it after 3 days.
What I won't forget is how depressing this game feels.
It certainly is MELANCHOLIC, I mean Melatonin