Quick Review: Chime Sharp

Not your average music game, in that the music is more like garnish – but that’s okay if the idea is novel enough.

Squares! Ever-bigger squares!

Developed by Ste Curran and Twistplay, published by Chilled Mouse and released on July 19th, 2016, Chime Sharp is a game that’s like… er… no combination of existing titles does it justice. Let me try to explain it, as it’s a bit tricky to discuss even with screenshots on hand. In short, while the stage’s song plays, you set on a field of square a succession of pentominoes. (You know tetrominoes, the figures made of four squares, most famously used in Tetris? Same, but with five squares.) Each stage has its own set of pentominoes, and those available can differ from a stage to another. You have to place these pieces on the field and form "quads", squares with a minimum size of 3X3.

The pale blues are sections where a quad once stood.
Meanwhile, two quads still exist on the grid.

A square or rectangle created this way will fill up with a timer bar, and while it isn’t full, you can keep adding pentominoes to any side of it to increase the size and score value of the area you’ve made. With each successful size increase, the in-piece timer resets. But wait! What about the music? Well, here’s the interesting part. Once a successfully-created area’s timer has run out, it will stay in place. Meanwhile, as the music plays, a beat moves left to right across the playing field and deletes the finalized squares and rectangles, leaving empty squares of a new color in their place instead. You thus have access anew to that space to create new squares. Any bits from pieces placed that weren’t part of a square will stay there, becoming roadblocks in your attempts at placing new pentominoes to make more points. The game keeps track of the percentage of squares on the playing field whose color has changed, with a base goal of 60% necessary in each stage in order to unlock the following game mode. The BPM of a song playing in one stage influences the speed at which the beat/wave moves through, and the playing field can also be different at times, with spaces in which you cannot fit any pieces.

Music's pretty fine, at least.

The end result involves a lot of spatial puzzling, a lot of quick thinking, and pretty good reaction speed as well. Everything is done with the mouse; left-click to place a tile, the wheel to spin it around. Can you grow a square big enough for a major score, and keep it big before it vanishes? Can you actually fill up 60% or more of the grid?

Other modes further play around with the concept, upping the difficulty. As an example, the Sharp mode, unlocked after getting 60% coverage in a song’s Standard version, has the “beat” going left to right instantly deleting the squares created, rather than giving them time to solidify. And so on; to unlock a stage’s Strike Mode, you need to get 60% coverage on Sharp Mode, and for Challenge Mode, 60% coverage in Strike Mode. As for new songs and stages, those unlock the more you play.

As you can see, I haven't unlocked all of the
songs yet. Not sure I ever will, to be honest.
I still feel like I gave the game fair dues, overall.

I always get a little leery when discussing games that I don’t think are bad per se, just not to my interest. It happens! Decent game, and though it’s disappointing that it didn’t grab my attention more, I can at least recognize the effort. Maybe I’m lacking a little too much in musical theory to actually notice how the music changes to the squares you add to the playing field. Good concept, pretty fine execution and a lot of modes for each of the 15 stages… But that’s about it. The game notably doesn’t come with options regarding sound and volume, and you can’t add your own tracks for a customizable experience. That said, it’s perfectly fine for what it is and accomplishes what it wants to do. By all means, if it intrigues you, do check it out.

Chime Sharp is available on Steam for 9.99$ USD.