Chime on, you crazy diamond.

 

Chime is a recently released music game available on steam for five dollars.

I’m going to make myself as clear as possible.

IF YOU HAVE FIVE BUCKS TO SPARE, GET THIS DAMN GAME.
Provided you’re musically inclined, of course.

Chime’s a wonderfully creative and slightly whimsical neon puzzle-music game. Though calling it that seems like an understatement.

The first thing I noticed off the bat is that Chime doesn’t seem to want you to lose. In fact, I don’t think it’s possible to NOT win, unless you quit midway through.

A level starts out simple, placing pentahedrons on a grid (That’s fancy talk for 5-block shapes) in a slightly tetris-esque fashion. The music plays and when the wave that passes regularly over your grid hits a block you’ve placed, you get an “event” which plays a sample from the song, in time with the music. However, you quickly start to slam blocks down in an effort to get larger “Quads” (Quads are four-sided shapes bigger than 3×3, and placing them adds more music and points) and to build on them before they run out and are added to your score (Think like chaining tetrises together and you start to picture it)

Before you know it, you’ve reached 95% coverage of the grid and you’re scrambling to fill your last quad while the Philip Glass Orchestra plays symphonic techno. The mechanics of the game click quickly and you feel like you’ve mastered them until it comes down to your last 30 seconds of music or so. Then you can see all the holes you’ve left in your grid.

It all comes together frantically beautiful, and filling a grid gets you a remix of the song you just beat, which sets off alarms of glee in my head when I start to work on the bonus level.

With a soundtrack consisting of Philip Glass, Moby, Orbital and more, this is a game that grows on you every 9-minute session.

It’s as addicting as tetris and will keep you entertained for hours with the volume cranked and your hand moving a mile a minute.

There’s almost all good things to say about this game. (Other than the fact that it can drive you insane the same way a long game of tetris can)

My only gripe is a purely arbitrary one. The steam page gave the impression that you could load your own music up, like Audiosurf, or Beat Hazard. But oh well. The music they have is fantastic enough to push that aside.

God I love steam’s Games under 5 Dollars.