Distortions

I'll be honest: I went into Distortions half-expecting a walking simulator dressed up with music mechanics, and what I got was something more tangled and more earnest than that. Among Giants spent nearly a decade building this thing, and that weight of intention is visible in every handcrafted environment. The Girl wakes in an imaginary valley where her past has taken physical form, memory rendered as mountain, grief rendered as creature. Her only tool is a journal full of riddles and, eventually, a violin. Every melody she learns is a new power: creating bridges, moving boulders, generating a field of silence to slip past blind creatures who track her by sound, or simply speaking to the valley itself in a free-play mode where the world listens and responds. The developers cited Shadow of the Colossus, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Silent Hill 2 as reference points, and you feel all three in the tonal mix, melancholy scale, surrealist logic, creature-sized tension. The soundtrack is the clearest success here, full stop. It layers licensed post-rock tracks alongside original compositions, weaving guitar, violin, and ambient environmental noise into something that genuinely follows you out of the session. There is a mechanic where taking damage corrupts the music into static and dissonance, a small, precise touch that makes danger feel wrong in exactly the right way. The visual world holds up too: vast open valleys of mountains and rivers coexist with a spare, white-walled modern flat occupied by an astral narrator figure, and the contrast feels deliberately designed rather than incidental. Character and creature designs carry a Ghibli-adjacent strangeness that rewards close attention. Where Distortions strains is in its mechanical execution, and the gap between its ambition and its output is real enough to matter. Controls are stiff and slow to respond, animations lag behind input, and loading times cut into the dreamy atmosphere the game works so hard to build. The camera drifts rather than tracks, leaving you to fight it during creature encounters. The violin rhythm sections, inspired openly by Ocarina of Time and Guitar Hero mechanics, work solidly on their own terms, but the overworld traversal and the enemy design feel underbaked by comparison. Blind creatures that should react to your music instead simply respond to proximity, which is a genuinely missed opportunity in a game built around sound. The journal, which holds your map and all your song data, scrolls at a pace that tests patience. A late-game raft sequence compounds most of these issues simultaneously. The question of whether all of this is worth sitting with depends almost entirely on your tolerance for rough edges around sincere craft. The narrative structure, deliberately vague character names like the Girl, the Monster, the Shades, invites you to project your own emotional history onto the story, which either lands as resonant or feels thin depending on where you are in life right now. Steam user reception sits at mixed across roughly 150 reviews, and a Metacritic score of 60 reflects the same split: people who clicked with the mood found something affecting, people who tripped over the controls bounced hard. This is undeniably a flawed game. It is also one of the few music-driven indie adventures that commits entirely to its central idea rather than using music as a surface aesthetic.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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