Wandersong
Play the heroic, er, bard in this noteworthy musical adventure
PC, Switch
When you want a player to feel like a big deal in a videogame, giving them a big sword to wave at their problems is usually a good call. In Wandersong, however, the first weapon our genderless hero finds is casually tossed aside, a ring made up of eight coloured sections appearing instead. Moving our cursor around it produces a merry series of musical notes, and our surroundings immediately begin to bob along to our song. It’s no blade, we suppose, but we suddenly feel pretty powerful nonetheless.
It wouldn’t make much sense to give a bard an instrument of death as opposed to, well, an actual instrument. The idea to cast a musician as the hero came from creator Greg Lobanov’s 5,000-mile bike trip across America. “The first games I was making about it were about biking, with people on bikes – really literal elements of it,” he tells us. “But it wasn’t the biking so much as the adventure. I was listening to music every day, and singing, and meeting different types of people.” Wandersong, then, sprang from the feeling Lobanov had when his bike w would break down at the side of the road, and a s stranger would pull up with the perfect tool to fix it. “It felt like the world was this big network networ of friendship.”
The erasure of Wandersong’s world is imminent, immin a goddess preparing to reset existence. existen The bard, however, is out to save the day using their talents to recover pieces of a ma magical melody, the Earthsong. Progress through throug this side-scrolling adventure is a matter of making musical connections between betwee people and puzzle elements. We mimic poltergeists’ melodies to exorcise them, matching the colours and sounds of thei their songs. In another section, plant platforms platfor can be coaxed into growing by crooning crooni in the direction we need to travel.
We even manage to befriend a disgruntled yeti, as you do, battling his roars by belting out harmonies in the opposing directions. It’s easy to see which way the wind is blowing and mitigate it – but even when we close our eyes, we’re able to hear the correct answer. “The game would probably be impossible if there weren’t all these different ways of getting information,” Lobanov says. “We try to do everything at once for everybody.”
In the spirit of accessibility, a bum note isn’t unduly punished: in fact, improvisation seems baked into the design. The encouragingly analogue song wheel means a slip-up during a stage performance turns into impromptu riffing. “Often, it’s not about putting stuff in, but stopping ourselves from taking away options,” Lobanov says. “You can make a song sound terrible, but who cares? The important thing is you can be expressive all the time.” Wandersong effectively reflects its free-wheeling development process. “We have a lot of days where we just hang out, and Em [Halberstadt, sound designer] will say, ‘Oh, what if this thing made this dumb sound?’ and I’ll be like ‘That’s awesome, I’ll make an animation for that’, and we’ll put something together in a day that’s now a huge section. And when we’re having fun, it always feels like the right thing to do.” The connection Lobanov and Halberstadt have built together has been invaluable: “It just feels like she knows the game better than I do, sometimes.”
There’s a sense that everyone in this particular adventuring party has found their place. In Wandersong, acting as a musical go-between for a friend and the ghost of their mother during a moving, wordless duet, we begin to understand what that feels like – although the bard’s story perhaps isn’t all sunshine and songbirds. “There’s this undercurrent about the roles people play, and who’s important, and what it means to be important,” Lobanov says. “The bard struggles with that as somebody who spends all their time answering to other people, and doesn’t get to have their own voice.”
A bum note isn’t unduly punished; in fact, improvisation seems baked into the design