People Of Note Review

While I have never been a die-hard musical theatre fan, I have always had a soft spot for musicals. Their energetic musical expression and compelling tales just seem to speak directly to your soul sometimes, and there’s a certain magic to their storytelling that is hard to capture in other, less exuberant media. When People of Note first came onto my radar, it was an instant must-play; combining turn-based combat with rhythm elements as part of a musical performance, it promised a brand new gaming experience infused with the charm and excitement of the stage.

People of Note follows Cadence, a young pop singer who is sick of the same sounds dominating the airwaves and who dreams of changing the status quo by making her own voice heard. The Noteworthy Song Contest is her ticket to making it big, but after a blunt rejection at her audition, she realises she might need something more to make the judges take notice. From her home of Chordia, she sets out to find the talented musicians with whom she can form a band to create the brand new sound that will get her up on stage.

What starts out as a classic rags-to-riches story of a scrappy artist with a vision quickly turns into something bigger when Cadence recruits her first band member. The Homestead, a faction of country musicians, are after the Keys of Note held by the top musicians in each of the world’s major regions, and they will seemingly stop at nothing to get them. What are the Keys of Note, you ask, and why are they after them? Beyond their symbolic value and some vague rumours of great power, nobody is really sure, but something doesn’t smell right, and nobody else is doing anything about it – so enter stage right, Cadence and crew.

Take down enemies with your musical might

Although I typically enjoy stories which don’t give you all the answers, the execution of this in People of Note unfortunately falls quite flat, with the characters’ sense of urgency simply not matched by any tangible stakes established by the narrative. It often broadly feels like you’re chasing after rumours simply because the vibes are off, and while the vibes are off, there’s never quite enough justification to get you to fully buy into the importance of this grand adventure. This significantly hollows out the intended emotional weight of the narrative, and it’s difficult to become meaningfully invested in the overarching story or its outcome as a result.

The journey is nevertheless a lively one, taking you across a land that has been so gorgeously crafted that you can feel the dedication that the developers have poured into it with every careful camera angle and scene. The environments each have a clear and distinct identity, helping to create an incredible sense of place as you move through the world, and the attention to detail throughout the experience is really next level. Fun musical wordplay is baked into everything from creatures such as Orcarinas and Weird Owls to environments like the Choral Reef, and while the puns, metaphors, and references can sometimes land like a bad dad joke, others are much subtler and are genuinely very clever, leading to layers of humour in the overall experience. Developer Iridium Studios has also knocked the character designs out of the park, standing out particularly with the dynamic 2D character portraits that convey an incredible amount of personality and emotion with every pose during the narrative sections of the game.

The character portraits just about leap off the screen

As with any good adventure, there’s plenty of conflict on your journey, and naturally these conflicts are resolved in People of Note through the power of song. Mechanically, the combat system is excellent, offering a lot of flexibility and customisation options to support a range of different strategies, and key mechanics such as the active style power boost encourage you to change up your approach from round to round rather than leaning on the same tactics every time. It takes some time to really learn the systems and how abilities work best together, but once you get into the flow, you can pull off some really powerful attacks. There are nevertheless some annoyances; the build menus leave something to be desired, and the inability to review a character’s abilities after taking their turn can be a bit of a hassle, especially in a couple of the bonus puzzle battles which require precise planning to clear. Due to the unique and slightly awkward build creation mechanics, there is also an issue where upgrading to new gear can mess up your ability customisations, so it’s important to review your abilities before heading into key fights to make sure you can still execute your favourite strategies as intended.

Despite the mechanical strengths in the combat system, however, there’s a surprising and very conspicuous lack of musicality in the gameplay itself, which feels like an especially odd choice given that combat is treated within the game as a powerful musical performance. While your main abilities are accompanied by short musical figures, there’s no integration of these into the background music, so they land as regular sound effects that are entirely separate from the main track. There’s a similar lack of musicality in the genre mashup attacks; the sound effects of these actions are more like garnishes rather than deep musical substance, and the lack of vocals makes them feel weirdly and markedly silent. The game’s ‘rhythm’ components further exacerbate the sense of musical disconnect, as while the speed of these QTEs is aligned with the tempo of the background music, the actual timing of the rhythm typically doesn’t sync with the background music at all.

Unique build mechanics allow for highly tailored strategy

With its interactive musical experiences being one of People of Note’s main selling points, the sheer lack of musicality and questionable rhythm components in combat are both a disappointment and a real surprise. It’s also seriously immersion-breaking, as characters constantly refer to your battles as these incredible, jaw-dropping performances when you know full well that they’re mostly just background music with disjointed sound effects on top. While in all fairness I don’t think anyone would expect chart-topping bangers as a result of turn-based gameplay, the discrepancy between your experience of play and how the narrative handles these ‘performances’ is really quite significant, and there is a lot of room to bring these two experiences closer together to make the contrast less jarring.

Despite the disconnect between your actions as the player and the music you are meant to be creating, however, the soundtrack itself is pretty solid. The background music for combat will have you bopping along with a couple of catchy tracks, and the style layering that happens in the background music after you activate a mashup adds important musical interest and depth. The game also has animated musical cutscenes that play at key narrative moments in the game, and while some of these songs are on the forgettable side, others are hits with some laugh-out-loud moments of lyrical brilliance that make the rest well worth it.

Proud of you, boys

In addition to the central focus on combat, there are also exploration and narrative sequences which serve to move you through the world, with a surprisingly major focus on environmental puzzles that get longer and more complicated as you progress. The early puzzles are very easy and a little bland, and while there’s a sweet spot where the puzzles feel really well thought out, there does come a point where the difficulty scales by just making things longer and more convoluted, which quickly sucks most of the fun out of it. It doesn’t help that the puzzles are quite slow to solve as a matter of course – you physically have to traipse back and forth between zones to try new solutions, but your avatar moves at the pace of a brisk powerwalk and often gets stuck on corners. You can also get softlocked in at least one puzzle area that I found, but thankfully the game keeps multiple autosaves from which you can manually restore if this happens to you. The puzzles can however be switched off in the settings which may save some tedium, especially if you need to revisit areas and don’t want to solve the same puzzles twice.

Final Thoughts

Despite failing to steal the show, People of Note offers a reasonable experience, with its strengths lying in the engaging and creative turn-based combat that constitutes much of your active gameplay. While the performance and rhythm aspects of the game are a real letdown, a clear love for music is baked deep into the fabric of the game, and the characters and environments help to create a memorable, musical world.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2 // Review code supplied by publisher

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