Avicii Invector Encore Edition

The drops land, and that is the whole reason I keep reopening a rhythm game I supposedly finished years ago. You pilot a small craft down a corridor that twists and rolls as the song moves, tapping and holding notes across the faces of the track while the geometry rotates under you. The charting is the craft here. Notes are not sprinkled over the music as decoration, they are cut to it, so the build in a song becomes a tightening of the lane and the drop becomes a physical thing you have to hit. Clear a chorus cleanly on a higher difficulty and the game and the track finish the phrase together. That is a hard trick to pull off, and Hello There Games pull it off often enough that the whole thing works. The structure is modest and honest about it. Twenty-five songs, a campaign most people will see through in an evening or two, difficulty tiers that let you decide how much of your attention this gets, and leaderboards for anyone who wants to grind one track for a cleaner run. The short campaign tag on the store page is accurate and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I will defend is the pacing. A rhythm game living on a licensed soundtrack has exactly as much life as its song list, and padding it out with filler charts would only have made it worse. It knows what it has, it plays it well, and it stops. A few hours that respect your time beat forty that do not. The presentation is doing more work than it gets credit for. Everything sits in a clean neon register, corridors of light strung over deep space, colour shifting with the track, and the camera stays close enough that speed reads as speed rather than as a screensaver. It is atmospheric in the specific way good rhythm games are atmospheric: you stop seeing the visuals as scenery and start reading them as timing information. My one real gripe is readability. When a chorus hits and the effects layer up, the note lanes occasionally get lost in their own light show, and a miss you did not deserve is the worst thing a rhythm game can hand you. It handles the social side better than most single-player rhythm games bother to. There is split-screen head to head on one couch, which is the correct way to settle an argument about who actually has rhythm, and Remote Play Together stretches that to a friend who lives somewhere else. Steam Cloud, leaderboards, achievements and trading cards are all in. Controller support is listed as partial, so expect to reach for the mouse in menus, but a pad is unquestionably the right instrument for the flying. Keyboard works. It never feels like the game wants you there. Where it disappoints: the setlist is the ceiling. There is no chart editor and no importing your own music, so once you have wrung out those twenty-five tracks, what remains is score chasing and the pull of a favourite song. Veterans coming from the brutal end of the genre will find the top difficulty demanding rather than punishing. And if EDM does nothing for you, no amount of good design here will change that, because the music is the game. None of that is fatal. What lifts it is the thing you cannot patch in later. This arrived after Tim Bergling was gone, built from his songs by people who clearly cared about getting them right, and it plays like an act of attention rather than a licensing deal. Put it on a controller, turn the volume up further than is sensible, and let it have the evening.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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