Chime Super Deluxe (PS3)
While it’s not too rare to find a game that donates some of its profits to charity, it is definitely hard to find a game produced by one. Game publisher OneBigGame is a non-profit that donates the profits from the games they publish to Save the Children and Starlight Children’s Foundation. Rather than finding games that fit their initiative or having the titles built around awareness for a charitable cause, OneBigGame picked what might be the wiser method for guaranteeing more sales and thus more support for those charities: just publish a really good game.
First released on PC and Xbox 360 as Chime, Chime Super Deluxe is an expanded edition for PlayStation 3, the game adding more content to a music-focused block placement puzzle game. During a round of Chime Super Deluxe, a large grid is built that the player needs to fill in by placing blocks wherever they might fit, the process involving the creation of quadrilaterals with the pieces provided. Once you have managed to make a four-sided object that is at least 3 blocks tall and 3 blocks wide, the box will count as filling in the region it covers on the grid, but if you are able to continue building off this shape before a small timer runs out, you can keep expanding it by adding more pieces to the side to increase its dimensions. Once you can’t build off it anymore and its timer runs out, the spaces beneath it are officially claimed and the blocks in that area disappear so you can start building again. The goal of a normal round is to do this enough that you eventually claim all of the grid, the player then moving onto the next level within the set assigned to the music playing.
Already Chime Super Deluxe has a lot of concepts working in its favor. Filling in a grid gradually is an easy way of visualizing progress and seeing the unfilled spaces shrink in number is simple yet satisfying. The game’s presentation is simple but effective, the player able to see clearly where pieces have been placed or which grid spots have been claimed, and there’s even an option to briefly turn the pieces clear so you can see if they’re on claimed or unclaimed grid squares. The color choices usually do a good job of having clear contrast between block colors, claimed squares, and unclaimed squares as well, so while its art direction is somewhat spartan, the level of clarity allows players to find a speedy rhythm and quickly make choices on the fly.
The way quads are assembled is key to the game’s enjoyment as well. Each piece you are given in Chime Super Deluxe fills five squares, but their exact shape varies based on the music stage as well as how many levels deep you are into that stage. You won’t get a new piece until you place the one you currently move around the grid meaning you control the pace and thus can choose where blocks go intelligently, but the shapes are often designed to not be so easily combined into rectangles. Your next piece might not fit together with the previous one in an obvious way, but levels do try to have complementary pieces come together frequently enough that you can build quads regularly or even achieve perfect quads if you can assemble a box without any extraneous pieces hanging off. All pieces can be rotated and some like a long straight line or a 2 by 2 box with a small extra block jutting out are frequent pieces that can be used for quick and easy quad building, but others like a cross shaped piece and a jagged staircase-like one keep things difficult or demand more creativity in how you place your blocks. A nice spread of strategies can develop in response to what a level’s giving you like trying to expand one large quad early on or making clean quads only so no piece pollution fills the grid, allowing for the process to feel involved and different every time you play a stage.
If you do mess up placing a piece or fill in the grid in a way that won’t form a quad due to gaps, eventually blocks do expire. This will hurt your score so you want to be both efficient and quick in filling in the grid, but so long as you can fill 50% of the grid you can at least unlock the next music stage. Speaking of the music, the game has an unfortunately small batch of ten stages based around music tracks, and while they have five levels each where the grid is shaped differently to increase the challenge factor, your time limit will determine if that’s feasible. Going in you have the option to pick stage sessions of 3, 6, and 9 minutes long, and while you can get time bonuses, getting all the way through the unique levels usually requires playing in Free Mode instead where the time limit is removed.
The music does have an impact on the gameplay of chime Super Deluxe, but not to such a degree that it feels like it qualifies as a rhythm game. Instead, a long bar sweeps over the grid at a set speed. This marker’s sweeps are what will clear out blocks after they’ve been in the play field too long, but it also uses the different blocks in play as a reference for which sounds to play for the current song. A grid lousy with blocks can reveal the calm, trance like music you’ve been listening to has lyrics, and the more of the grid you fill in, the more depth and texture the song has as it plays both normally and when the line activates blocks. Chime Super Deluxe’s big additions came in the form of extra music stages, and it seems like all 10 songs were included free of charge to help with the charitable cause. Only the composer of “Brazil”, Phillip Glass, sounds familiar to me, but other contributors include the likes of Moby, Markus Schutlz, Plaid, and Saberpulse. Most of the songs do a fine job of working as unobtrusive background tracks, some like “Sympathy” by Joe Hogan quite beautiful while “The Looping Song” by Shlomo can be a bit distracting since it’s composed entirely of beatboxing that usually passes for instruments well but stands out when it’s more clearly mouth noises. The gradual buildup to a more full-bodied song adds a small sense of discovery to play, so while the track list is small, they do all have a built-in swell as your play influences how much the music plays.
Already a good fit for casual but addictive play and objective focused sessions as you try to fill the grids completely and get through each song’s five levels, Chime Super Deluxe also throws in a multiplayer mode to offset its otherwise small amount of content. Playing the music stages together can be done either cooperatively or competitively. Working together just means each player has a piece active in play and you work on filling in the grid together, able to build off each other’s quads in the expected manner. The competitive version changes it so that it is no longer a battle to fill the entire grid but to fill as much as you can personally. Each player is given a color and when they have a quad claim spots on the grid, it is claimed in their hue. Players compete for the largest percentage of the grid they can grab, able to steal spots by building quads on claimed spots or even swooping in to build off a box another player was working on to make it their own and steal the upcoming claims. While playing alone has that simple addictive quality block dropping puzzlers thrive on, these extra conditions add an extra dash of excitement to play without upsetting the satisfying grid claiming formula.
THE VERDICT: Chime Super Deluxe’s selection of unique grids may be a touch small, but the process of claiming them is immensely addictive and engrossing for quite a few reasons. The visualized progress, the music growing in prominence as you fill in the grid more, and the degree of forward planning required to build the best quads come together into something that keeps the player involved and thinking without being too overwhelming. The music choices are a nice fit for this puzzler’s action, and since you dictate the pace and can pick from some decent timer options, you can adjust things so you can either focus on high scores or making deeper progress into each music track’s associated set of levels.
And so, I give Chime Super Deluxe for PlayStation 3…
A GOOD rating. While it is a bit strange the developers didn’t build more grids since their shapes can be varied so easily, Chime Super Deluxe does still build up a good batch to play through. The backing music tracks give the game more energy to offset its simplistic visuals but everything is easily discernible so you can start building quads quickly and without fear of unintentional slip-ups. You may need to make a rough choice and block off some quad building in an area since a piece has nowhere else to go, but the garbage clearing eventually will ensure that getting to 100% completion is possible so long as you try to play smart. Playing smart isn’t just about building perfect squares either, as you can try and build a huge box early on and then work on the leftover spots knowing that the garbage will eventually be swept away. That might be less preferable for a player who doesn’t want to miss out on the points multiplier earned through constant safe quadrilateral construction but it does benefit a player eager to dive deeper into the level set, and a game that encourages different types of play while making both approaches potentially beneficial to the other style certainly has its concept down tight. With more content it could certainly prove to be a game you’d return to again and again, but even after seeing all there was on offer, I do sometimes still get an itch to go back and try to fill out more of the grids than I did during my last Timed Mode attempt.
Chime Super Deluxe could get an easy recommendation off the back of its quality puzzle game concept, the fact it was made to benefit charitable causes in no way influencing its construction or messaging. It’s a well put together experience even if its content offerings are a little lean, but if you like the kind of addictive block dropping puzzlers, Chime Super Deluxe not only brings a fresh approach to them to the table, but it comes with the idea that you’re helping children by purchasing it. Raising awareness towards people who need help is definitely commendable and shouldn’t be discouraged at all, but by just having a really good game happen to send its profits off to children’s charities, Chime Super Deluxe is able to be an enjoyable piece of media and one that doesn’t just hope for people’s generosity to lead them to donating. Much like with Fractured Minds I knew none of this game’s special production story when I sat down to play it, but it was nice to find out Chime Super Deluxe is a game where a good cause and good fun line up so cleanly.