Note: I received this for free through Steam Curator. Since it was pre-release, I don’t know what the price will be and can’t make any value judgment on that. There is very little content in the initial Early Access, but that could be fine depending on what it goes for.
Yumegirl is describes itself as a love letter and a music video before it mentions being a game, which I think is accurate. You’re getting more of an interactive album and a short story than you are a typical rhythm. It reminds me of something like Moonless Moon in that you really have a background game to go with some music rather than BGM for a game. There is some rhythm gameplay, but it’s very basic and didn’t seem to have a failure state or to demand much of your attention. You’re basically just pressing buttons indicated by different parts of the background when they light up. It didn’t seem like order mattered and the timing is certainly extremely forgiving, but there wasn’t a tutorial, so there could be a deeper system that I just didn’t notice. Every now and then there are indicators that require you to repeatedly press a button, and you get some kind of basic message that pops up over the center of the screen when you succeed. It seems like it’s just something to occupy your hands while you look at the pretty backgrounds and listen to the music. I don’t think anyone is going to be chasing high scores in this game. That said, I did notice a couple of times when the prompts highlighted objects that the song had just mentioned, so that was a nice touch.
I am not a music reviewer and the music is not really my genre, so I won’t try to judge how good it is. You can test that for yourself in the trailers, and in general the game’s art sets the right expectation for what kind of music you’re going to get. It’s the sort of indie music I’d expect to hear in a game like Life is Strange or in a trendy coffee shop.
As for the story, it’s good so far. I’ve only seen the two segments included in early access, but they were well-written and had me interested in where the rest of it will go. You get a note after each song that is essentially a diary entry on a relationship and is generally connected to the lyrics. The idea of a game as a relationship journal has certainly been done before in games like Florence, but this one works better than most. It’s written in a very personal way that makes it feel believable that this could be someone’s real look back on an important part of their life. There’s nothing groundbreaking so far, but I think that’s for the best. It’s very relatable content rather than trying to concoct a dramatic story.
All that said, the big caveat is that it’s only launching with two of the 10 songs available. It seems like the music is all finished, so there’s probably not a huge risk of the game not releasing as promised. As it stands, though, I only got about 15 minutes of gameplay, and I don’t see any reason to replay the levels. The gameplay is just too basic to care about my score. Assuming the full game maintains the same quality of writing and music and is reasonably cheap, I don’t have an issue with it likely only being an hour long. That’s normal for an album, after all. But, as with all Early Access games, there’s no way to know whether EA will actually take two weeks like the disclosure suggests or how good the remaining content will be. Given how little of the game is currently available to try, that warrants some caution. This would be hard to justify spending more than a couple of dollars on with what is currently available. If the soundtrack is included with the base purchase, that would help greatly.
I’m not doing my usual rating since the EA period is expected to be so brief. I’ll post an updated review with all the usual details when the full game is out, but I wanted to make sure I had something available at release. The game’s Steam page is here.
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