Wandersong (2018) is a game that hummed its tune a little bit longer than i wanted it to. from what i saw about this game before i played it (which was admittedly not a lot), i assumed this was going to be a relatively short 4-5 hour experience with nothing but quality segments. its construction paper art style blended with pretty color palettes seemed to scream “charming but short indie game for mae, play now!” in reality? this is a game that has some cool ideas, but gets a little too big for its bardly britches. my playthrough clocked in at approximately 11 hours, and at about the halfway point, i was starting to grow tired of its mimimimi’s and lalalala’s.

the game says: “ok dude you’re a little bard guy that’s kinda a cutie and basically? you’re fucking stupid go sing at some shit” and i said “ok, bet, i’ll be this little bard guy. how did you know i am stupid? and hell yeah, i’m gonna go sing at some shit”. you can move left and right (WHAAAAAT??) and jump (HUH???). it’s a platformer (oh). besides that, the thing that you use to interact with essentially EVERYTHING is singing. it’s an 8-directional input system, that for my controller playthrough, i used the right stick for. move the right stick? little colored arcs will appear around the world’s first :) lookin-ass playable bard-type individual, and depending on the arc you align with, that fucker is gonna start goin “aaaaa”. and for those at home wondering: yes, you will hear it through your audio listening device. wonderful!

when i say that you use singing for EVERYTHING, i mean EVERYTHING, and this is sometimes to the game’s detriment. picking dialogue options is done with singing, which is neat! you will do the first note of the answer, and then you can just freestyle the rest of the syllables across your 8 notes. neat! riding on some sort of creature and wanna tell it what direction to move in? sing that way, baby! picked up a throwable object? guess how you throw that shit. did you say “aaaaa”? if so, then, um… you coulda just said singing? that’d be way more clear, i don’t know why you’re making this so difficult. were you just trying to be cute or something? like “ohhh haha yeah it’s like im singing, maeam from backloggd dot com, isn’t that like such a silly little jest?” eh, i guess? hey, buddy, you’re a little too close, could you uh back up a little bit. ok ok ok i’m sorry i’m sorry!!! umm… security??!! coughs, sputters, dies

anyways, when singing is mapped to inputs in a “rhythm” game like section, it’s pretty alright! it’s never anything too difficult, but hey, fun doesn’t always require difficulty. the music is serviceable enough for those segments, and it’s a pretty alright aspect of the game. however! uh oh! trouble in lukewarm paradise??? sometimes (usually)… there’s segments that aren’t rhythm gamey/ music based. as a result, it’s the equivalent of just being like “oh i need to hold right on the stick because there’s an orange colored right directional cue in the environment” and the ‘dame gavelopers’ slapped a note onto that input. isn’t that just sooo fucked? in all seriousness, it’s not really all that egregious, but when you realize that the vast majority of the gameplay is just a platformer paired with using 8-directional inputs to do things where the fact that it’s “musical” is more aesthetic than mechanical, it takes a decent sized blow.

have you ever heard of that little formula Nintendo sometimes uses for Mario level design? you know, where you set up a new mechanic for the player in a simple way, then make it more complicated or difficult, then hit em with a TWIST, and finally top it off with a grand finale challenge to test the player’s mastery of the mechanic? Wandersong does not do this. while this is obviously not the only way to approach level design or game design in general, Wandersong leans too hard into the repeating part of mechanics and doesn’t do enough to iterate and refine its mechanics each time. you’ll get the hang of a new mechanic for an area, and it will be reasonably fun, for a while. it will increase in complexity, but then i often found it to stagnate sooner than i was hoping, and you will encounter what are essentially the exact same obstacles repeatedly. a great example of this can be seen in one of the final acts of the game. you will do the same type of action over and over and over and over and over ad nauseam (ad nausmaeam haha) and it completely takes the wind out of my sails. if the game was more focused on constantly thinking of what else they could do with their concepts and less so on using them to fill space, i could probably see this game ranking much higher for me. also, this is more anecdotal than anything, but sometimes the ground geometry completely fucks out on screen transitions, causing the player character to jitter wildly and proceed upwards to a better place until they pop out of the terrain. fucker almost got away, too. sigh

okay im going to talk about the basic premise and structure of the game now. if you look at the backloggd page you’ll know what i’m about to say anyways, but hey! maybe you don’t know how to read, so i’m giving you this warning here now :). i’m always gonna look out for you, okay? you can trust me. this is a safe space. image of a very friendly looking cat goes here ← that’s me.




uh oh! world ending haha let’s umm fucking sing about it?? we gotta go get the fuckin parts of the song to maybe make it like,, not do that?? oops! maybe there’s gonna be some twists here and there. anyways, you get to go to a few different locations and do some things, get the song part yippee wahoo yay, next act time. it’s a mostly comical game, and sometimes it’s laugh-out-loud humor, but for the most part, it mostly managed to just be “passable” on that front. there’s some interesting areas and concepts, but by and large, i think they are too drawn out for what they are. act five in particular is FAR too long for the ideas it has plot-wise, much like the game’s earlier issue with refining gameplay elements. it really is such a shame too, because i genuinely do enjoy some parts of the world here and would almost, almost put the general concepts for some of these acts on the same level as chapters from Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (2004), which is a game i absolutely adore the worlds in. yet, while TTYD knows when to chill and hold out (for the most part) on dragging things on unnecessarily, Bard Game for the Video Game System (Year) doesn’t. the final segment of this game felt like it would never end, and ultimately caused the ending to fall a little flat for me after that “long”-ass adventure Bard Bardly Barderton went through.

i like some of the characters, especially the two main characters, the Bard and Mariam. you actually get to choose the name of the bard character, but SOMEBODY at [insert Wandersong developer here] okay hold on, lemme google it, okay got it… maybe? fucking GREG developer said “no haha you can’t have a name that starts with M,” so my Bard boy did not get to be named mae and instead was named Lili, which i do think is still cute, so its okay. i forgive you, greg. sorry for yelling. Mariam in particular is pretty great, and while i don’t think the character arcs in this game are too crazy or unique, there’s definitely some cool moments here and there. the game did manage to squeak out a tear or two by the time of its conclusion via some heartwarming scenes, but i’m also an emotional girlie and i wasn’t full on sobbing like i normally would from emotional moments in games, so your maelage will vary. BUT GUESS WHAT?? YOU CAN PET THE CREATURES!!! GAME OF THE YEAARRR BABYY.

overall, Wandersong is a videogame that i have played and enjoyed sometimes. i like what they went for, and though they may have missed the mark for mae at times, they occasionally landed among the cars, and got run over by excessive amounts of motor traffic in a horribly gruesome display. but then they also landed among the stars too, so there’s that. it’s clear that a lot of heart was put into this game, and i think that the game mostly just struggles with restraint and getting too brought down in unnecessary tedium. i don’t think it’s a case of trying to pad runtime, but i think they just had a lot of love and energy that could have been compacted into a more polished gem. video game over. i will now serenade you with a song that i wrote about my journey with this game:


aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa i;m siiingninggg about wandersogngg for the vidoe game ssyiosmtem!!! wahowahowhaohw mimimimi laalalallal ok im done bye