Fugue Reviews

Nice game. Cool idea.

I really can't recommend this game, it's entirely math-focused which detracts from any potential it had to reinforce musical concepts and improve sight reading (if that's what you're expecting). Game takes FOREVER to load too. Side note, it was missing files when I purchased it, so the dev had to be contacted before it would even launch. Just not a good all-around experience.

Really enjoyed this. Really liked being able to relax and play around with my understanding of note intervals. Loved the minimalist aesthetic, and all the cool monochromatic bird effects. I wish the game incorporated a bass section as well.

A rather short puzzle game (~2 hours to complete all 60 screens for me) themed around manipulating musical notes (depicted as birds on a power line); upon hitting the 'play' icon, a pointer (another bird with a number attached) flits across the screen playing the notes, with the notes/birds altering the number. If the bird or birds hit the right-hand side of the screen with the correct total, you win. I was very underwhelmed. The 'correct' way to think about this game is to treat the notes as mathematical operators and the solutions are just equivalent to elementary high school algebra, albeit rather finicky. Despite the short playing time, the puzzle progression feels pretty slow (there are maybe four or five new ideas introduced over the course of the game and even then it feels very short) and I found myself thinking 'When does the good stuff start?' It feels like there are a number of more interesting directions this could have gone in; introducing more music theory - with the multiple birds, you could have gone with counterpoint or tried to build chords rather than dischords, or going with the title and creating canons/fugues and the rest. Or the puzzles could have been set up so that the solutions forced pleasing melodies. The basic mechanics for a game of that sort are mostly there, but it's fallen short. I'm hoping that for this to exist, the devs actually attemped something like that, but they couldn't make it work as a game, and just released the parts that did more or less work instead. The alternative suggests a lack of imagination. Oh well. I wanted to like this, but sadly, I don't.