One A Day, Day 43: Synaesthetic

Played a bit of Chime tonight. This is a game I picked up from XBLA a little while back but it got sort of lost in the midst of Mass Effect 2’s marvellousness. I took the time to go back and play through the other levels in it tonight and wouldn’t you know it? It’s great.

If you’re not familiar with Chime, it’s “that charity game”, where 60% of the game’s royalties go to the OneBigGame cause, who in turn pass it on to Save the Children and the Children’s Starlight Foundation. And it’s only 400 points, which is not bad at all, especially considering it’s actually a good game, too.

It’s a puzzle game that initially appears to be very much like Lumines. You have a grid with a beat bar moving across it, there’s various shapes of increasing awkwardness thrust into your hands along with a hypnotic, minimalist, reactive soundtrack. It’s there the similarities end, though, as in Chime you’re not dropping things in a Tetris style, rather you’re sticking them wherever you like on the grid in an attempt to produce “quads” – rectangles and squares of at least 3×3 in size. When you create a quad, it gradually fills with colour and while it’s doing this, you can stick further shapes to it to make it bigger. Once it’s full, it becomes locked in place and will only disappear once the beat bar passes over it. When it disappears, it leaves a mark on the grid, and it’s your eventual aim to cover as much of the grid as possible in this manner.

That’s it. As all good puzzle games should be, it’s simple but addictive. Where Chime really shines, though, is in how the gameplay shapes the music. Where you put the shapes on the grid, coupled with how large the quads you produce are, affects the music. As time progresses, the basic backing of the music goes through its structure, but various melodic passages, stings and samples are triggered by the things you have stuck to the grid. All of it is completely seamless, too, meaning that there’s none of the “forced” sound that Lumines sometimes has.

One of the nicest things about Chime is that you can just use it as a musical toy, too. The game’s “Free” mode allows you to simply place shapes and create quads without a time limit pressuring you to cover as much as possible, and the game’s six tracks are all very different from one another, ranging from the artsy end of things with a Philip Glass track, through Moby, one of the guys from Orbital and one of the guys from Lemon Jelly, among others. Six tracks may not sound like much, but the replay value offered by the different “mixes” that your gameplay will produce makes them more than enough. Plus, for 400 points you really can’t complain too much.

I’ve been fascinated by synaesthetic (if that’s even a word) games ever since I first played Rez on the Dreamcast, and Chime is a more than worthy addition to that canon.