Game Over Review

Game Over is an RPG musical adventure riffing on Guitar Hero style song challenges and set in a funky pixelated land of strange little instrument-people. Despite being the hero who has just defeated evil, saved a princess, and restored the town, you are once more saddled with a new quest—figuring out why the assets and environments of your world are suddenly glitching up.

Travelling through towns like Percusston and Brasshole you meet quirky variations of musical instruments who always have something going on and are constantly throwing out jokes. You encounter wind-instrument folk divided by their belief of a god, brass instruments working in the mines, and are stopped frequently by a pair of janked-up Mario-and-Luigi-looking bad guys whose pathetic attempts to foil you never pan out. You are given opportunities to be evil, good, and to take sides on local melodramas, but whether these choices matter (RPG in this case is Rhythm Playing Game) is unclear and purposefully so, emulating the feeling of choice from game inspirations like Undertale.

The cheeky music challenges are central to gameplay and are typically spurred by encountering foes in the wild, but these moments are flanked by a bunch of minigames. These vary wildly, some where you tune strings to match notes by moving rocks, adjust pinball platforms to play a melody, pit frog against slightly different frog in Pokémon-style battles, and even find yourself in a courtroom drama concerning the copyright of songs. In between are platforming mechanics that grow more complex as you learn new techniques. There’s a whole lot going on, which sometimes works as part of the frenetic nature of a failing world spitting out randomness, but mostly makes for a dizzying experience.

Game Over’s jams are bops and bloody hard

I first played the demo the same way many did when it was showcased at PAX AUS in 2024. There, the creator Jake Houston proudly drew in players who wanted to beat one of the final music challenges, which, like many of the songs, starts relaxed and then ramps up significantly, throwing in funny elements to distract you, obscure notes, and abrupt changes to the speed of the tempo. The excitement around the booth and the novelty of the music challenge urged me to add Game Over to the list of games I had to review.

The game is a tremendous feat for a first-time developer who had no previous game-making experience and spent six years, while working full-time, creating and releasing it by himself. Yet I can’t help but see this impressive backstory as part of the game’s main flaw, that maybe with some additional eyes or an earlier demo for play-testing feedback, the final version could have been mixed more carefully to let its more unique and engaging melodies take the lead.

There were a few chuckle-worthy moments, which notably did not come from the many lines of dialogue full of back-to-back jokes, but from subtler environmental cues, evil choices, and classic gags like emulating the ‘record-skip’ by pausing the music and animation suddenly just as a character realises they’ve messed up. Some phrasing in the dialogue could have landed for me if they hadn’t been nestled in a relentless stream of attempted jokes, but of course humour is subjective and this brand of it was enjoyed by others.

The overwhelming combination of the rapid-fire jokes, the many minigames, and the overarching meta-narrative made the game feel unconfident in its premise. Under these elements is a desire to keep the player entertained, even though I had already decided I like this world and that it was interesting enough to me to keep spending time in it. I suppose for a first game you would want to throw it all out there, which leaves me wondering if the point was to showcase the various skill sets put to work, to make a cohesive gameplay experience, or a hope to achieve all of this all at once.

You’ll encounter dozens of interesting folks in Game Over

I dug the music (especially the proggier song I was bopping to towards the end). It’s a good thing the music is well-made, because I spent most of my time watching and listening to the complicated note arrangements pass by me at rapid speed. Up until the songs became actually impossible, I was having a great time trying to nail them down. I felt myself getting better at it, and I felt incentivised to find musical notes throughout the world map to extend my life in-battle.

There was a distinct moment when I realised I was never going to beat a song and switched, for the first time, from Hard Mode to Less Hard mode, only to eventually switch again to the final Nigel Mode, where the song automatically plays without your input. I spent the rest of the game clunkily switching between these two modes, always checking to see if I could feasibly finish a song, followed by the sad realisation that I would just have to watch it being played for me.

These reflections are somewhat similar to my others about a recently solo-made Australian, pixel-art style RPG where meta elements land you in a glitching game world. When emulating such a hard hitter like Undertale, it’s difficult to strike the same balance of meaningful gameplay and the desire to mess with players and prompt them to question if their choices even matter.

Maybe it is possible to beat these songs, and I’m simply not skilled enough. If not, maybe I’m just being a big baby when, even despite getting the joke and how it connects to the overarching story, I’m still disappointed that I’m unable to play the most exciting part of the game. Earlier, when I could play a song through, and later when I simply watched them play, I was impressed by the songwriting and how the notes were mapped out so creatively. But mostly, I was less jazzed about entering battles and exploring the map for more musical-life-notes when they became arbitrary.

Where I felt challenged and at my most playful was when I was platforming. The platforming, which I wasn’t aware was part of the game, was actually kind of sick, and may be one of those products of a new game-maker coming in with no prior conception of what a typical and ancient game mechanic should be.

Considering that the game relies on a story premise and art-style surrounding jank, there was also no indication of actual jank to me, even in an environment where they could have gotten away with it. Everything just worked. No actual glitches, latency problems with the song challenges. My avatar never got stuck in a weird place. There were typos, yes, but this was the only lack of polish I saw within a fairly large game.

Final Thoughts

It’s possible the genius of the game isn’t revealed until after a couple of play-throughs, where maybe your choices could lead to deviations in the story. The meta-narrative that ties up the story towards the end would have worked better a few years back, but at this time feels staler with every game that attempts it, but maybe with better choices I would have had a completely different tale? Frankly, even if this were the case, I’m not so ready to give the game another spin just yet.

By all accounts, Jake Houston simply wanted to make a game and had the confidence to know that they could. They made a game with a lot of impressive notes, but buried amongst so many different rhythms, genres, and melodies, it comes close to becoming a cacophony. I would love to see these debut ideas refined in a future project, or even a newly remixed version of Game Over, where its hits have the space and breath to sing out.

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by Jake Houston

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