I’m still trying to wrap my head around the best way to play “Chime,” a recently released puzzle game on Xbox Live. Am I shooting for as high a score as possible, or just a pleasing, interactive musical experience? It’s an odd game that appeals to me on several levels.
For one, the concept is like “Tetris,” but with the end goal of filling an area rather than working to clear it. For another, it looks and feels like “Lumines” — it even borrows the interactive music element. However, blocks aren’t endlessly falling from the top of the screen and your goal isn’t to clear them from the field. Instead, you’re given a set time-limit and you must fill the field. It’s really not as easy as it sounds.
Imagine a horizontal, rectangular playfield with a grid. Imagine weird, mutated “Tetris” blocks that trigger musical passages depending on where you place them within that field. You can’t place blocks on top of each other, but you can place them anywhere you want within the gridded area. As mentioned earlier, the goal is to fill the field by placing blocks next to each other, forming tight areas of 3x3 or larger. Doing this creates a “quad” and progresses the fill percentage. These “quads” become inactive unless you keep building them, but once they do you score points. The fragments left behind increase your score, multiplying them by a factor of how many quads you’ve built. As each quad clears, the area left behind is a different color — representing the area you’ve filled — and you can, once again, place blocks on them. Eventually, the fragments fade away and you lose your multiplier, so it’s important to reuse these fragments to build new quads and keep the score climbing. And that’s it: just keep going until you hit 100 percent. Then do it again, and again. That’s “Chime.”
The dynamic music in “Chime” is quite wonderful. In fact, it’s one of the first interactive music games where I really felt like I was creating listenable music. Many games like “Rez” and “Lumines” have attempted to add ways of creating music based on gameplay and they’ve come off as flat and annoying. “Lumines,” for example, becomes an cacophony before long. Samples are triggered on every movement of the blocks, every press of a button. I love the game, but I really can’t stand the sound coming out of it. Meanwhile, “Rez” never gives me the sense that anything I’m doing is actually affecting the music. I hear different sounds and beats, but it never does anything for me. “Chime” does. And one of the reasons it works so well is because you aren’t just triggering random samples, you’re blending in different elements of existing songs by accomplished musicians such as Moby, Paul Hartnoll (of Orbital), Fred Deakin (Lemon Jelly), DJ Markus Schulz and Philip Glass. The end result is a pleasant re-imagining of the original work that comes out differently every time you play it.
While most puzzle games increase in intensity until you can no longer continue, “Chime” remains consistent throughout. It lends itself well to accomplishing a Zen-like hypnotic state, allowing the player to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” if I may use Timothy Leary’s famous phrase — albeit, minus the acid. The heavy emphasis on the music and eye-candy make it easy to relax and unwind. However, in the timed modes, you can find yourself racing out of control, trying to squeeze every last oddly-shaped block where it needs to be until either failing or accomplishing your goal. It gets to be a little too much like work. Thankfully, there is Free Mode, where scoring is nonexistent and time doesn’t matter. In the end, if you just play “Chime” the way that appeals to you most, you really can’t lose. I can’t recommend this game enough.
w
| Tweet | Follow @wkdr |
|
|
