Chime Super Deluxe Review

The great irony of the original Chime was that although it was published for a good cause (by Martin de Ronde’s charity OneBigGame), the game itself felt vaguely inconsequential. Chime favoured an open-ended play style over the terse and insistent rhythm of its clearest inspiration, the music-puzzler Lumines. If you wanted to rack up multipliers, that was fine. If you preferred not to bother with the score, focusing rather on the meditative act of pushing squares to pretty beats, then that was fine too. Chime was neither here nor there. It also came bundled with only five songs, which severely limited the game's reach.

Zoë Mode's reworked PlayStation Network edition, Chime Super Deluxe, doubles the tracklist and playing grids to ten. The look is much improved; the boards and blocks now have volume and float atop dynamically swirling backgrounds. Multiplayer makes a grand entrance. Those tempting-to-forgive but hard-to-overlook issues, however, remain. Chime is still a quite likable game with a deceptively simple premise. You are given Tetris-like blocks of varying shapes with which you attempt to fill the board, one by one. You can drop them anywhere, and earn "coverage" by assembling them into 'quads' of at least three by three squares. When a quad is formed, you have a chance to expand it by building on one of its edges before its meter fills. This garners more points. Meanwhile, a Lumines-style beatline advances left to right, removing filled quads and marking their coverage. Quads and dormant blocks also trigger keys, vocal snippets, and other sound effects when the beatline touches them; and here is where Chime attempts to integrate form with content.

Chime's soundtrack reflects its gameplay ethos. The compositions are bright, meandering by design and emotionally noncommittal. Philip Glass' resplendent, shimmering Brazil and Paul Hartnoll's tremulous For Silence are still highlights, while the cinematic Sympathy by Joe Hogan and Play With You by chiptune musician Sabrepulse are welcome additions to the menu. Though you can frame these songs in nine, six, or three-minute timed games—or in Free Play mode, without score or timer—they unfold at a fixed clip. Your blocks and quads sound differently depending on where they lay on the grid, and this basically accounts for your effect on the tunes. Whereas the tight interplay between sight and sound in Lumines turned you into a human metronome, Chime's looser grip demands that you find your own pace.

It's not that there aren't guidelines—the new 'perfect quad' rule, which offers a bonus for quads with clean sides, provides a carrot. And in theory the coverage mechanic is tailor-made for the finicky player who enjoys drawing Etrian Odyssey maps, the inventory screen minigame in Resident Evil 4, and packing for long trips. But you can always count on the leftover pieces of blocks from an imperfectly shaped quad to vanish over time, thus undoing your lesser moves and downplaying your better ones. The new Versus mode, which lets players undermine each others' coverage, brings a perhaps necessary friction to the game. Otherwise, Chime hits its sweet spot when the music lulls you into listlessness. The experience of having the board seemingly fill itself—when smaller problems are resolved in pursuit of a bigger picture, and all things are moving forward—feels uncannily like music making, and reflects a kernel of the creative process, at best.

At worst, the game's deliberate openness means theme and gameplay have a tenuous relationship. Your frantic twitches and clicks are merely filigree on Schlomo’s plodding, emotionally ambiguous The Looping Song. Chime Super Deluxe is a serviceable puzzle game that highlights the considerable challenges in interrelating creative media: it's well suited for those who enjoy music somewhat, or who have a passing interest in visual riddles; but is unlikely to fully satisfy either camp. When The Looping Song explodes into a double-time beatbox section, and overturns your sense of what you've been putting together all along—it's an all-too-rare glimpse of meaningful intersections left unexplored. [6]