Melatonin offers lofi beats to tap in rhythm to
It's out now
More than half the rhythm games I see on PC seem to feature courses that look like bullet hell levels, designed for players with the perseverance, patience and 12-fingered hands I lack. Melatonin looks more my pace, with pastel hand-drawn art, chill beats, and levels about dreams and reality merging together. It's out now.
Here's the release trailer:
There's seemingly some Rhythm Heaven* inspiration here, as each level depicts a scene and an activity that the player is tapping to make the characters perform. The trailer above shows levels in which you're controlling a claw machine, hitting a baseball, or playing a video game within the video game. Some of these activities are more dreamlike than others, though: you're hitting those baseballs in a Dalí-esque realm of melting clocks, for example, and another level has you leaping across enormous platform-like phone screens.
Melatonin's Steam page says that the game has 20 levels to play across five chapters, each with a new song. As you play, you'll "piece together elements about the main character's life" via your exploration of their dreams. It's also got a hard mode, a practice mode, "assist" features if you're finding it too difficult, and a Level Editor.
All of which sounds pretty appealing to me. Plus, the Steam page says that it's fully compatible with the Steam Deck and that it "includes a color mode calibrated for the Steam Deck's screen." Yeah, alright, I'm buying this right now. Melatonin costs £13/$15 and today is payday.
*Rhythm Heaven was called Rhythm Paradise in Europe, fact fans. No, I don't know why I always think of its US name.