Deemo (Switch)
When I play my Switch, I almost universally play it in docked mode. I respect the console/handheld hybrid design, but if I’m going somewhere and want a video game along with me I will bring my 3DS or some other more convenient to carry handheld system. However, the Switch’s touch screen does mean I have pulled it out of the dock before, but Deemo is an interesting case where it did offer the ability to play it docked with the controller… but it’s so much better if played as intended with the touch screen.
Deemo is a rhyhtm game that essentially asks you to play the piano without any concern for remembering the notes. On your Switch’s screen, notes will drift down from the top in a tilted perspective, the player needing to tap these notes as they come in contact with a bar at the bottom. While there are no piano keys involved, the player will need to ensure they’re tapping in the right place to get credit for playing the note, and while you can certainly play it without assuming the proper hand formation you would for the instrument, there are ways the game tries to make it feel a bit more like you’re playing a piano. At times, you will need to play two notes at once as they arrive to the line together, and if yellow notes come together in one big cluster, you’ll need to drag your finger across the screen appropriately as if you were gliding your hands across the keys of a piano.
This conversion to touch screen gaming works wonderfully, even the easier songs still requiring quick finger movement to score well in. This is perhaps why I feel the patched in controller option is inferior, but it feels like it wasn’t designed too well in the first place. To play songs with the controller buttons, you only need to identify if the notes are on the right or left and press the matching buttons, and playing the yellow notes instead requires holding down the shoulder buttons. It can still pose a decent challenge because of how many notes the game will send your way and the speed with which you need to address them, but Deemo is definitely intended to be played by touch and is much stronger for it, so I won’t fault it for a failed attempt to add more accessibility to the title.
The songs in Deemo can be set to different difficulty levels without any of them feeling too simple to enjoy. The harder settings definitely ask for some fast and limber fingers to keep up, but there is no true way to fail a song in Deemo, the game instead relying on a scoring system that will reflect any errors appropriately. A note can of course be missed, but it can also be deemed a hit if it’s close enough to the right timing. A Charming rating is given for perfect timing, the player getting more points for those and potentially earning an All Charming medal if they can pull off the difficult task of hitting every note perfectly. A more achievable medal exists in the Full Combo medal, your score multiplied by your longest sequence of successfully hit notes and the game rewarding you even more if you manage to hit every note in the song regardless of they were Charming or not. Even if your skill level is a better fit for higher difficulties, it can still be a good challenge to try and earn these two medals on the lower difficulties, All Charming especially requiring mastery of the touch screen without necessarily forcing familiarity with the song. You can adjust the speed at which notes drop down though, the song playing at the same tempo but the time you have to see where you need to press decreasing the higher you set the multiplier. Besides slowing it down if the game is too fast for you though, this feels either like a novelty or a way of showing off more than anything.
Deemo’s piano rhythm game is well designed on its own, a strong translation of the style to a video game format, but Deemo decides to add an emotional narrative to the game as well. Deemo is the name of a tall suited figure, this almost silhouette like man being the individual who plays the piano in the story’s context. One day, a young girl falls through a window in the ceiling, finding herself in Deemo’s strange surreal domain with no way back to the regular world. Deemo is unable to speak to her, but the little girl speaks to him and explores the area, finding new parts of his castle, new songs hidden all around, and making observations on the situation she finds herself in. There’s a lovely art style to these moments of simple exploration that helps when the game begins to tug at your heart strings with its central narrative. Things begin simple enough, with Deemo playing songs that will cause a tree to grow a certain amount based on how well your performed, but there is more to the tale than just helping this plant reach the window in the ceiling to get the girl home, and the story can fade into the background if you want to focus on just playing all the music on offer instead.
Speaking of the music, Deemo’s got an absurd amount for you to play. As you begin to play music, you’ll be constantly unlocking new collections of music, the player almost never having to replay a single song if they so wish. Certain songs are necessary to play to unlock others, but for the most part you can dive into any part of your constantly expanding collection and play whatever music you want to continue the plot. Even after its conclusion, the story will allow you to restart the plot and find new details and areas, and while it could have done with trimming familiar story beats, this is likely a remnant of the game’s origin as a mobile phone game as it tried to give the player more reasons to keep playing. The incredibly large selection of music also comes from the fact these were initially music packs sold to the player separately, but here you instead get bombarded with so many unlocks that anyone snagged by the rhythm game’s style will not only have plenty to play, but even those repeat runs through the story will take a long time before you have to revisit a single song, and even then you can play them on different difficulties to keep them fresh.
There seem to be nearly 300 songs in the package, some added in free updates after release which makes me reticent to commit to a number in case it increases yet again down the road. Perhaps more impressive than the abundance of them is the fact every song in the game has a unique piece of art associated with. Sure, the spartan, note-focused presentation of play is done to keep things clear and readable, but each song has cover art that shows Deemo and the little girl as well as other characters like a masked woman you meet and the plush doll you find laying around the castle. The art can range from somewhat realistic interactions between them to dreamlike fantasies to outright stories being told across various song cover arts, and more interestingly they can come in an incredible variety of styles. Bubbly sweet, harsh and dark, highly detailed, or looking like a child drew it. Painted, digital, and sliding from recreating the game’s art style to either so heavily stylizing it it looks like an entirely different work or pushing it towards realism in a beautiful or haunting manner. There is some wonderful artistry on show, and your personal connection with the characters makes it fun to see them in new scenarios.
Similarly, the game did not skimp out on the music tracks featured. Among its original pieces there are some evocative pieces that can inspire emotion without any other context, beautiful mixes of string, piano, and other soft instruments tied to story beats to great effect. The unlocked collections will sometimes pull from specific artists or other game soundtracks, and perhaps unsurprisingly the main focus is on piano heavy music. It will be augmented by things like lyrics, percussion, and synth, but a great bulk of the songs are foremost modern classical piano instrumentals. The game tries to continue to mix up the style of these all the same, the player able to find relaxing, epic, intense, and happy songs all throughout the track lists, but the game even takes this one step further in tossing in some token genre changes. The hip hop track Hey Boy doesn’t even feature any piano at all, instead being the game’s biggest user of the notes with white highlights that indicate you’re now playing different parts of the song beyond the piano. Metal has a few tracks, Electronic music is common with even some Dubstep featured, and there are songs that are borderline circus music. While it doesn’t try to hit every possible genre it can, it provides plenty of different tones, tempos, and backing instrumentals so that there is certainly a perceptible degree of variety even when you’re just scrolling the track previews in the menu. Deemo makes sure that the ones it more commonly features like modern classical include an incredible amount of diversity so you never feel like you’re repeating a performance.
THE VERDICT: An excellent translation of piano playing to touch screen gaming, Deemo’s incredible amount of content and heartfelt narrative make for a unique rhythm game package. The play style is easy to pick up but requires incredible skill to master while also never faulting a player who chooses to play it on its lowest difficulty settings, and while having to play through the story again and again to learn more about its characters isn’t the best design aspect, the game is packed to the brim with so many beautiful songs that you’ll want to play it more just for that reason. Add a touch of lovely and diverse art to the mix, and Deemo elevates itself beyond just a well done music game.
And so, I give Deemo for Nintendo Switch…
A GREAT rating. Deemo is so stuffed with content that it would be hard to ask for more, but I do think elements like the multiple story playthroughs to get the full scope of Deemo’s narrative could have been handled a bit better and exploring the castle at times can feel a little weak even though it allows for the emotional beats to hit harder in the cutscenes. What can’t be faulted in almost any way though is the commitment to providing the player with tons of music that is fun to play. The game is happy to let you progress on whatever difficulty suits you, you have so many songs to select from it’s hard to exhaust them all even across multiple sittings, and they come in such a great variety that there are bound to be plenty the player enjoys on top of enjoying the process of playing through them. Exploring to find some of them is a little bit of a shame since some songs can’t even be unlocked until your fourth playthrough of a barely shifting story, but the play never feels repetitive thanks to the different styles and tempos on offer. The art for the music alone could make for a beautiful gallery reinterpreting the same few characters, but then the music comes in strong with tracks packing personality, evoking emotion, and asking the player to be deft with their fingers in ways that continue to be interesting despite the relative simplicity of what can be asked of them.
Normally I would be the person who prefers to play a game with the controller, but if you pick up Deemo, do yourself a favor and only play it in its touchscreen mode. The gameplay will be so much more involved that way, and the challenge of Deemo manages to remain even as you grow accustomed to it due to the incredible diversity in song type and the ability to adjust difficulty as you please. Don’t let the excellence of Deemo be weakened by a controller, enjoy how this beautifully crafted rhythm games shines by getting your Switch out of the dock and touching this surreal world inside it.