DISHARMONY Reviews

First of all: Music was super duper good 10/10 I bought this game out of curiosity coming from Youtube. As said, many reviewers say "rhythm" parts are way too hard. Same for me; way too precise and not forgiving single error. Played with cheat mode and felt some parts could be doable as "casual" gamer. You're also missing features with "cheat mode". Story was interesting enough and carried thru the game and attention to small details is intensive (maybe too much for single dev). While I appreciate them, many won't and I probably missed so many small things.. I'm not sure if I want to try get the true true ending as I got stuck.. Also be warned that you can make coins disappear in coin puzzle.

This game feels like someone really loved it. That said, it is very much an undertale inspired (perhaps too inspired without much driving plot as to why) game. Gameplay scratches a 'difficult rhythm game itch' despite the difficulty stemming from unresponsive and cramped controls, and no music sync. gameplay has little tutorial, tossing you into its awkward baseless puzzle solving and rhythm content that feels not very planned. all in all, feels a bit like a game jam game, and despite my claims, this is just my experience in the 45 minutes i played the game for. I would recommend it to anyone wanting a challenging rhythm game. it does have a lot of pointless dialouge though, and is not as humorous as undertale. cube game was fun though. mixed opinion on this game, im not sure how the creator claims it took them 7 years to not even particularly flesh out the core game..maybe its very long? not sure

Felt bad giving it a negative review when I played it because I did like some stuff in the game like the Metal Gear reference, some decent puzzles, and some unique visuals like that mushroom place. I finished with the opinion that this game is bad because its flaws outweighed what made it good. I can see the effort you put into it and look forward to anything you may do in the future but I think the execution was poor. The rhythm gameplay was why I purchased this in the first place but I remember it feeling quite poorly done. The timings weren't good for me and the mapping was uncomfortable compared to the stuff I've played in DJ Max Respect V, I do not remember there being an audio offset or other features like that that rhythm games have. May be subjective but I do remember being really disappointed in the music. Many of the tracks are fine with some even being good but I thought many just didn't sound good especially the guitar sounds and the tracks in some rhythm gameplay as some tracks sounded too repetitive to me and I was just waiting for it to end. I thought the story was bad with no reason for all the characters to even want to help near the end. It just came across as rushed without providing good reason and the end twist villain was predictable and the twists kind of came out of nowhere. I will admit the sequences in the twist were cool though and I could see the effort put into the end. If anyone reads this and wants to read a far better review there is one by datæ. I just wanted to put the thoughts I've yet to publicise out there even if they are a few months away from being a year old. I just cannot for the life of me recommend this game even thought I really wanted to like it. I know my review has provided poor feedback but I really wish you luck on whatever you create in the future. I may not have enjoyed this game for the most part but I believe you have the skills to create something great.

Overall, I really enjoyed this game. I love how it combines RPG and rhythm game aspects. The music, story, and gameplay were great and fun to experience. If you play rhythm games and like RPGs like Undertale or Oneshot, you should give this game a chance. [b] If you have not played many rhythm games before or struggle with puzzle games, you may not be able to fully enjoy this game. [/b] Even though I did not have any issues with difficulty, I know some people might. There isn't much difficulty customization, which could turn away people.

This game is oozing with vibe. There are amazing object interactions, easter eggs, stylized cutscenes sprinkled around the map and heartwarming CVs. The puzzles and platforming are a lot of fun. I love walking around and interacting with everyone and everything to uncover the crazy, silly and serious parts of the world the game is in. The game's style seems like a mix of Undertale and FNAF's Atari themed minigames. There is a colorful, fun vibe with a bit of darkness brewing under the surface. I found the writing, especially the characters and jokes funny and entertaining. I really dig it. My main criticism is the sink or swim approach to combat. It *feels* unfair. Attacking and defending against monsters is done in a rhythm game. Unfortunately, the difficulty of attacking is much higher than defending. The first enemy of the game, the Bad Apple/Jack O Lantern is shown in in the trailers. The attack sequence for the first enemy is not easy, so I couldn't kill it without going through multiple defense rounds. I simply didn't have the skill, and the game didn't give me an opportunity to learn outside of brute forcing or cheesing. Ideally, the rhythm games for both attacking and defending would be the same difficulty, as defending seems like it's in a good place regarding difficulty. I say that it feels unfair because the game doesn't start slowly, teach you skills and then test you with hard enemies. It skips straight ahead to hard encounters. There is more of a difficulty wall than a difficulty ramp up. The first enemies are much harder to attack than defend, the second and third enemies have twists (obscured notes, splitting the notes to both sides of the screen) and the third is a boss. The game doesn't introduce concepts like chords or split notes until you fight the boss. It was like playing Half Life, but if the first combat encounter was with a bunch of vorts and zombies instead of a simple headcrab. I could see the first encounters not being challenging to a rhythm game veteran, but I'm not one of them. I admit I have a skill issue. Moreover, the combat systems are introduced in a wall of text, not through gameplay itself. it would be nice if the game gave you a weak enemy to overkill, taught you a solo or asked you to use an item during order to teach those systems. Other than the combat (which looks fun if you're good at rhythm games) and interacting with the tape machine to save being a bit clunky (you have to stand on it on a certain spot and face a certain direction to save), the game is good. You can tell a lot of blood, sweat and tears went into it. The game and the creator's post-release youtube video is an inspiration to me as a budding game dev. Definitely check it out. PS: forgive me if my writing is rough, I wrote this at 5 am.

The game looks interesting, but it forgets your controller rebinds every time you close it. You should not have to reinput your controls every time you want to load a game.

Tentative recommendation. I really like the idea of a rhythm-based RPG battle system, and, for the most part, DISHARMONY executes it quite well. I found the battles challenging but fair, the music enjoyable (mostly because I'm fond of MIDI and sample tracker tunes), some of the visuals striking, and some of the narrative ideas quite compelling. I do, however, have a lot of complaints. I still ultimately recommend the game, but there are a lot of issues that hurt the experience. Most obviously, the pixel art isn't great. Visuals are low on my list of things to care about, but almost all of the art in the game is in this head-on perspective that makes everything feel flat and dimensionless, the lack of detail in the artwork made to stick out even more by the maps being unnecessarily large and spread out. Audio polish is rough for a rhythm game. There are no audio sliders, character dialogue noises are unpleasant and annoying, the volume of the music tracks feels inconsistent, and the overall volume of the game is much lower than everything else on my PC (which could have been remedied with a simple master volume slider). The narrative is, in my opinion, very sloppily executed. Like quite a lot of debut narrative indie games, the game attempts emotional moments too early with characters that are simply too underdeveloped to make the scenes work. The four girls you meet throughout the story are barely characters. Your sister disappears about a minute after you meet her for the first time, and the other three you meet, almost immediately do an activity for/with, dreamjack to help them cope with a childhood trauma, and move on. Unfortunately, neither the activities nor the trauma braindungeons really do much to develop their characters or endear them to the player, making them little more than quirky archetypes with (very cliched) dark pasts. To give an idea of the pacing and tonal whiplash, imagine if you entered Alphys' True Lab immediately after getting to Hotland for the first time, when you had only just found out she even existed. I honestly thought the game was setting up a reveal that [spoiler]the four girls were actually the same person, somehow fractured and experimented on with fake memories by the weird coloured text [strike]trolls[/strike] people that appeared at one point[/spoiler], but that turned out to not be the case. There are a lot of heartfelt exchanges and dark reveals and painfully saccharine exchanges of reaffirmed friendships and emotional support, but the characters are too flat to make it work. Also, whatever happened to all those plot threads? What happened to the [spoiler]coloured text people[/spoiler]? Where did the [spoiler]stranded whale[/spoiler] come from? What did [spoiler]Zephyr's message[/spoiler] mean? Was something meant to happen after finishing the [spoiler]Konami code trail, which you have to do in one go without saving, meaning restarting all over again after messing up a step or getting stuck on level geometry[/spoiler]? Maybe it's a Proton compatibility issue, but continuing the game after [i]that[/i] point does nothing except make the screen flash white once after a few seconds. I hope that's not intentional. Either way, both the regular and metanarrative elements have potential, but end up feeling either significantly underdeveloped or outright unfinished. Despite all of that, I can honestly say I enjoyed the game. I enjoyed getting good at it, I enjoyed the music, and I enjoyed some of its narrative twists. There's an awful lot of room to improve, though. Maybe next time.

I saw this guy's youtube video about buying a stolen key from a third party seller so I decided to throw him 10 bucks because I felt bad. Then I played the game. The puzzles make no sense, the rhythm part is done pretty poorly and requires way too precise execution, and nothing is really done to make it better or help us in any way. I'm already so confused and while I can tell there was some real love thrown in here, I can't recommend this. Great idea, terrrrrrriible execution.

Game took five hours to beat with baby mode activated (please see the part about Gameplay). Apparently im an shole who never strayed from the given path, judging from the 7 achievements I'm missing related to supposed side content. Oops. Guess I accidentally DarkSydePhil'd my way through the game, but maybe it was for the better. Ack ack. [h2]Story[/h2] Bad monster kidnaps your sister. Go rescue sister and kill bad monster, who is making people have bad nightmares. Ok, run-of-the-mill. Boring. But it's the journey that matters, so what's it like? Enter forest zone. Meet girl (Ashe). Beat her at guitar and invade her head, killing her nightmares. Ashe is now at your service. Enter autumn zone. Meet girl (Amber). Find her pendant and invade her head, killing her nightmares. Amber is now at your service. Enter city zone. Barge into a vtuber's house, who gets flustered at your entrance and proceeds to introduce herself... Wait, what? Well, her name is Ellie, which happens to be the name of one of the developer's friends, who has also left a review on this game. Self-insert alert? Whatever. I'm not going to sugarcoat it, you basically go through the whole game just building a harem. They are also the only characters in the game, barring a demon guy who is definitely not the villain, and gimmick characters you talk to once before never seeing again. No one outside of these girls and the aforementioned demon guy have a dialogue portrait. Oh, the mayor does. I almost forgot about him! Actually, I've 'forgotten' all of the characters already. They are not memorable. First girl is in a band and was abused as a kid. The next one had her house burned down as a kid. The third is a vtuber, who is also mentally unstable but I couldn't understand why other than not sleeping or maybe being bullied in school, according to her nightmare's school setting. The demon guy is just... there. Guiding you to the next chick whose mind you can invade during their sleep so as to make them your companion. Stay classy! 'Ever since you entered Oakheart, whenever I look up at the sky, the only thing I can think about is you.' This is what Amber will say after all you've done is retrieve a pendant she lost, not even *after* destroying the nightmares plaguing her. You do that part after she falls asleep next to you. Each of these girls are all over you after 1 minor task and a nightmare sequence. You'd expect some kind of archetype, like the first one being a tsundere until the end, but alas. All of them will lick your boots in record time. The boots of some random underage boy. Uh... The interactions aren't organic. I'm not given a reason to like these characters, or hate them. They're not interesting design-wise or as characters. Go save a cat or something. Yes, I missed practically all side-content. If this is what the main game is like, I'm not interested. ...Welcome to the climax of the game! Please kill your sister to save the world. Buddy, she only got 10 minutes of screen time at the beginning before disappearing. This is not the hard-hitting choice you think it is. Also, I've got the Baby Stick, so we good. Huh? What Baby Stick? Nothing. Just keep reading, bro. [h2]Dialogue[/h2] 99% of dialogues consist of standing in one spot. Characters don't move about or play animations. There's an idle yawn animation, so why this principle wasn't applied to dialogues to make them more lively/enjoyable is beyond me. At SOME points you get to pick dialogue options. They suck and don't matter. [h2]Enemies[/h2] There were no random encounters. I counted 6 regular battles throughout the whole game. By regular battles, I mean there were 9 more which were bosses/special in some way. These are alarming numbers. The enemies look boring. However near the end there was a flower monster holding akimbo pistols, which looked badass. For some reason, the game introduces long/held notes as a battle mechanic only at the very end of the game. Why? [h2]Gameplay[/h2] Scroll up. See that gif with the pumpkin? That's the very first enemy you encounter in the game. By that I mean it's the tutorial enemy you face after reading 4 books laid on the ground that teach you how combat works. Look at all those notes! It's turn based, so you do a rhythm game to accumulate damage, and then another to dodge. On your turn, each notes you hit increases the damage you'll deal, each notes you miss and misinputs decreases that damage. To put it simply, miss a sequence of notes you aren't PRO enough to land, you will lose all the damage you've accrued. If, somehow, you aren't a beast at the game by the first enemy, every fight from then on will be a long and arduous grind as you try to kill your targets with chip damage. I am brave, so I got through the two tutorial enemies the game throws at you (by the skin of my teeth), only to promptly get slammed by a boss... that comes right after. Now, I don't mind being humbled 20 minutes into a game by the very first enemies. What I do mind is that your only option in terms of difficulty settings is either a hidden default of Hard, or being granted a literal baby stick that gives you 9999 ATK and 9999 HP in the accessibility setting. ...Where on God's green Earth are the difficulty settings? This isn't Dark Souls where strategy applies, it's a rhythm game, and unlike the developer, I did not have the luxury of spending 7 years to become a god at it. There is no difficulty curve, as the first enemy was comparable to the last in terms of difficulty (I am not exaggerating). Wait, WHERE IS the difficulty curve? Baby Stick prevents you from enjoying the game because, well, you miss out on the combat. Each enemy SEEMS to have unique visuals for their dodge minigame, but I wouldn't know, as I was relegated to Baby Stick mode near instantly. Someone said the rhythm game was iffy, but I wouldn't know, as I was deemed a cripple in need of cheats by the game's tutorial zone. Difficulty settings would go a long way. Or, you know, not having the first enemies hulk-smash players. As of writing this, 17.1% of people have the True Ending achievement. 4.5% have the basic ending. I'm assuming you need to fail the finale for the latter, which you can't if you have Baby Stick on. Basically, everyone had Baby Stick on. The finale is a 10 minutes rhythm game marathon, if you managed to beat that without cheating please touch grass. [h2]Puzzles[/h2] The game has several puzzles. They're ok. I won't elaborate because I'd have to describe them all and that's boring. They're serviceable. That's all. Shout-out to my friend for bailing me out on the snake one as I got the star placement wrong. [h2]Fourth Wall Breaks[/h2] At the start, the game asks for your name. This is great for when you plan to break the fourth wall later. It's also a great way to announce to the player that you are going to be breaking the fourth wall later. I don't know if the creator gave up, but near the end of the game, well... LOL, everything is breaking down! The code is going cuuhhhraazyyy, look at all the glitches! Oops, your game closed. Again. And again. Funnily, this part of the game seems to have had the most effort put into it, despite (imo) being the weakest part. At one point you're put through a series of spoofs of other games that I'd much rather play. Don't do this 'It's All A Game' schtick halfway into your story. Do it at the beginning, or you might as well be throwing everything you've written out the window (not that it was amazing to begin with). Please do not enter a naughty word in the name box. It is funny, and fun will not be tolerated. [h3]"That's a lot of words, so... should I play this game?"[/h3] No. After beating the True Ending, the game blurted out a tldr .txt in my appdata hinting at a TRUE True Ending where I have to go in some guy's barn or something. I'm not doing that.

Not an actual review of the game. But Youtube recommended me "I bought my own game from a reseller - Here's what happened" and i feel the dev deserve some extra positive reviews. Also he is a fan of Sonata Artica. My favorite band ever, waiting for Clear Cold Beyond.