Circuits
Can you recreate a fragmented music piece from hearing?
When I saw that little game, I was really drawn by the idea - a puzzle, where you need to combine fragments of music for a full track? Sounds great (pun intended)! Each level, you are presented with places for “notes” (which are short sounds or sound fragments), which need to be placed properly in order to compose the given melody, which you need to listen to before, to know what’s the end goal. Those notes have different types, and each place have a defined type of note to put it into - so the possibilities are more limited. You can filter the whole piece by a specific note type, so you can listen to only one of those, which makes it so much easier to compose the final piece - which in turn is also adding some more melody and additional sounds, to tie it up together.
So it’s only placing notes in order, and that’s it? Well, it is starting easy. But along the way, there is a lot of stuff that changes. We have more sounds at once (although filtering to specific type negates that), the sounds are getting more complex, less different from each other and harder to memorize. It was actually funny how different techniques I tried using to memorize and compare the notes that I placed with the originals ;) There are also more direct mechanics - need to loop some sounds, or even groups of notes, choosing one of couple predefined notes instead of inserting one. But honestly - nothing super crazy, although changing it at least a bit. Throughout 25 levels though, I think I only started having real troubles in the last 2 - where you didn’t have ability to filter specific type of sounds, and you could only listen to the whole tune - those got pretty crazy, with even 4 sounds at once and pretty hard to discern from each other. I really needed hints there (for the first time), and some trial and error. I think it failed a bit with keeping things interesting and balancing.. but it was also quite short, so..
But there were some technical issues. Maybe I’m picky here, or it’s my personal feeling, but one thing about the game focusing on hearing - it touches the area of perfectionism, where small issues tend to be somewhat annoying. One of those are that it sometimes “crunched” and just froze for a little bit, which can really throw you off from the rhythm. Also, I had a feeling that some samples are slightly delayed and off the melody, while definitely many of them were not really balanced in terms of the volume and how they are “cut” - many of them are starting (or ending) very abruptly, which makes it less smooth. The music in general is ok, but it’s a really mixed batch, and I can’t say that I remember any particular tunes from it… and it was a music game.
I’m kind of disappointed to be honest. Circuits has a great idea for a game, but I’m not convinced with the execution. I can’t say it’s bad, or that something was really wrong - it’s just nothing substantial and I think it missed the potential. I was never amazed by the created music, and some pieces were just off for me. After a bit, it was just rather completing next puzzles, rather then being excited to recreate some great tune. What’s worth mentioning though, that there is a dedicated composer created for the game (although I didn’t test it) and full integration with Steam Workshop. So for people interested in the game, it might be that they are creating something great there. All in all, if you feel interested, I think it’s still worth checking, especially considering the low price.
My rating: 7/10
Playtime: 4h
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Circuits on Steam